What I learned in my teacher inservice today

I had a teacher inservice today and the presenter was actually not too bad for most of the time. He was engaging, interesting and attempted to keep us awake by asking questions and encouraging us to ask him questions and then the last ten minutes of the presentation happened. He ended with some thoughts on boys. Ok so boys in education, I am a male and I know that the pendulum in education has swung toward the idea that males are not ready for schooling or some other such bullshit. Males are 1.5 years behind neurologically and so we are still developing and not ready for schooling. Anyway... so I learned other things today. All of this is either in the handout he gave us or he told this to it. He did emphasize that this is all on average and that no one single boy or girl should be used as an example. I am not making any of it up.

- Boys are not able to multitask.
- It can take up to 7 hours for a boy to process emotions, which really means that boys are not able to process emotions because hell we can't multitask so while we are supposed to be multitasking on emotions and something else of course the emotional processing gets lost.
- When trying to talk to boys about feelings, keep it short and simple.
- Boys have more cerebrospinal fluid, which is because "boys hit their heads more and like a football helmet evolution provided boys with extra cushioning."

Now I have no issues with looking at the differences between boys and girls and learning styles. There does seem to be some credible research that says that boys and girls learn differently. Boys tend to be more spatial and math oriented (although not this boy) and girls tend to be more language oriented. There is also research that suggests that boys tend to need more movement and tend to be tactile-kinesthetic learners. So ok to looking at the differences, but I draw the line at things that I see as blatantly stupid or wrong and that set back gender relations.

The whole boys cannot process emotion sounds like it was created by a man as an excuse as to why men have to be macho all of the time and can't show their emotions. Boys are not able to understand emotions so why bother with it. If they want to hit someone, don't even try talking to them about how that might make the other person feel, boys are too emotionally stupid to understand this. And if you absolutely, positively have to talk to a boy about feelings or emotions keep it simple. Don't overburden them with such girly things such as their emotions and feelings. Oh and boys can't multitask so don't bother asking them to be able to focus on more than one thing at a time. And neither the lack of the ability to multitask or the lack of the ability to understand feelings are their fault, they are made this way, so don't bother trying to fight evolution or God or whatever made them the way that they are. And evolution also provided men with more brain fluid as they are prone to banging their head on things and their brains need cushioning. WTF!?!

When I hear this shit about how boys can't learn, about how boys and men can't become emotionally aware and then bullshit like evolution provides a brain cushion for men because we like to bang our heads into things, I get annoyed. I waited several hours before I put up this post because I knew I needed to calm down a bit so that I could be at least somewhat coherent. But really people, What the Fuck?!? This whole ending on the bullshit about boys made me reconsider everything else this man said and I had to find some of the statistics that he quoted about other things. Such as the fact that apparently for every hour of Baby Einstein that a child watches they develop 6-8 less words. (If you do not know what Baby Einstein is then consider yourself lucky as I will not link to such an evil and horrible product.) I had to look up this fact and according to this article in Time magazine, this is in fact true, but really I didn't want to have to look up other facts when I got home but this fucking idiot had to make me do it when he starts talking total shit about head banging boys without providing a shred of evidence or research.