Academic Selves

So Pipher starts out by saying that schools treat boys differently then girls. I think that this is true to an extent. Like sometimes the jocks would get it easier in the classes with a male teacher who liked sports or they would talk about cars but usually I thought the teachers viewed them as being lazy and coming to class late or not raising their hand because they were tired. But Pipher starts out saying that boys get all of the attention and I disagree with this. “In classes, boys are twice as likely to be seen as role models, five times as likely to receive teachers’ attention and twelve times as likely to speak up in class.” I really want to know where she go these numbers from because this isn’t what I have seen during my educational experience. Maybe the boys receive more attention because they need more help with the material. I think that Pipher needs some sociological imagination. She needs to step back and look at the big picture of things. She should ask herself what in the big picture of things could cause teachers to do this. Maybe the boys need help catching up because they got behind because of sports and other extra activities. She said that the message that girls get is “Perhaps you’re just not good at this. You’ve followed the rules and haven’t succeeded.” That I don’t agree with at all. I don’t see where she is coming from when she says this. It says that girls lose interest but I think this is because society has always told us that the girls are supposed to get married and have children and stay home with the children. This has been our mindset for so long so of coarse girls are going to lose interest. I think that society is starting to change its view because girls and now staying interested and realizing that we can do what we want just as well as men do their jobs. I also disagree when she said that girls think they are bad at math because math has always been my strong subject and one of my friends (who is female) is going to be an engineer and that involves tons of math. She is just displaying incorrigible proposition when she says girls aren’t as good in math because it has been proven that girls are just as good but society as this strong belief that they aren’t really as good. I also disagree with her because in high school the top three GPAs were all girls. The valedictorian that spoke at my graduation, with much pride in being smart, was a girl (the top GPA in our class).