Duping again

A man wanted to see what effect each leg of a grasshopper had on the length of its jump.  He measured the jump with all four legs and wrote down: grasshopper with 4 legs jumps 1 foot.  Then, he cut off a front leg and measured the jump.  He wrote: grasshopper with 3 legs jumps 10 inches.  He removed the other front leg and measured.  He wrote: grasshopper with no front legs jumps 8 inches.  He cut off a hind leg.  He commanded the grasshopper to jump.  Then he recorded: grasshopper with only 1 leg jumps 4 inches.  Finally, he cut off the last of the grasshopper's legs.  He told the grasshopper to jump.  The grasshopper didn't move.  The man shouted, "Jump!"  But the grasshopper still didn't move.  He thought he would yell one last time, "Jump!"  "Jump!" he yelled.  The grasshopper didn't move.  So, the man recorded,: grasshopper with no legs is deaf.

Last night I heard a portion of an interview with the director of an institute for national policy on education  in Dallas.  It reminded me of the grasshopper joke I had heard in a statistics class many years ago when the professor was cautioning against jumping to conclusions without measuring something properly and against using the wrong choice of statistical method for the situation.  I heard a woman in an important position spouting information that reflected both old research and age-old notions, not modern research.  In her position, one would expect different, and better.

One of the things she said was that boys in elementary school develop in language more slowly than girls do.  I heard that in the 1980s also.  But there has been a great deal of research in both developmental language and language of the sexes.  One of the first pieces of information from the 80s spawning the notion was that the corpus collasum of women's brains contained more nerve endings than men's.  One of the theories was that the thickness accounted for the verbal prowess of women over men because of the popular idea that men spoke more often and with greater eloquence than men.  That theory has disappeared with the great amount of research that has ensued.

The idea that boys have fewer language skills in childhood than girls is a pedogogical observation that also has been scrutinized and has disappeared. Boys' language and girls' language are merely different in style and topic, not development.  Boys who have men teachers don't lag behind girls in language use or development because male teachers realize that topics are different as is choice of words.  But developmentally behind boys are not!  Boys with women teachers seem to run into problems if female teachers don't care for the boys' topics or restrict the topics boys can write or speak about or the types of verbs they can use.  (Oh, the grasshopper must be deaf! Seriously!)

And one last piece of research from the field of sociolinguistics addresses the idea of covert solidarity.  It happens between men and women, and between generations.  Boys and girls would not be exempt from the influence of covert solidarity.  But teachers are not made aware of this phenomenon, so they don't address language development against that context - to the detriment of the children's development in language use.

The good director in the position of having anything  to do with educational policy, much less on a national scale, should be guided by more current research, at least within the last 20 years, and less by outdated observations before she makes decisions, and absolutely before she grants an interview to be aired to the public.  Ditzes like her don't add beauty to the educational landscape.