Excitable Ed: A Story About A Child Whose Teacher Wants Him on Ritalin

In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I tell a very short story about Excitable Ed. It raises questions about what to do when a teacher suggests a child has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD.)

Male Bashing's All-Time Low: "Boys Are Stupid. Throw Rocks at Them"

One of America's leading independent book publishers, Workman, has published a book called Boys are Stupid. Throw Rocks at Them.

Five of its eight chapters are aimed at children, three, on dating, at teens.

The book has spawned a line of tee shirts, bumper stickers, posters, coffee mugs, key chain, calendars, even a board game, all of which are available on Amazon and at other retailers. There's even a Yelp listing called, "Boys are Stupid. Throw Rocks at Them!!! Throwing More Rocks Every Day."

The author defended the book as being just for fun. Yet if the book made fun of girls, let alone of Blacks, would that book have been published by a major publisher, let alone spawned a panoply of products produced by other companies, let alone not excoriated by the media? A Google search reveals not one negative reviews of the book or outcry against the swag by any major media entity.

Indeed, MSNBC's liberal Dylan Ratigan opened his interview with the author of Boys are Stupid; Throw Rocks at Them and an opponent by asking, "What's the issue? They're having a good time, here." Ratigan closed the interview by telling the author, "Congratulations on the success of your business."

Earlier today, I had posted the entire text but I realize that might violate copyright law so I've deleted all but three chapters and include none of the copious illustrations. You'll nonetheless get a sense of the book.

Chapter 6: Boyfriends are Stupid

If you absolutely have to have a boyfriend, don't panic. Your life isn't completely over.

Why waste money on a cab? There's always public transportation. (Adjacent is a photo of a girl sitting on a boy's head, dangling a piece of pizza ahead of him so he keeps moving forward.)

What not to expect from a boy on a date: 1. hold your door open. 2. pay for dinner. 3. eat with utensils. 4. not farting or belching the entire time. 5. kiss you goodnight--this is a good thing--trust me! 6. call you again.

Phone rules: Do not wait by the phone for him to call. Most likely he doesn't even know how to use a phone.

Be afraid if your boyfriend: a. has more shoes than you, b: has bathroom products more expensive than yours, c: is on a fad diet, d: knows what kind of jeans you're wearing. And be super-duper afraid if you catch him wearing your panties.

Boy decoder: "It's not you it's me. I love you but I'm not in love with you. You deserve better. I need some space. I don't wanna ruin our friendship." They all mean the same thing but I'm too chicken to tell you:" I don't like you any more and I want to date your friend with big boobs."

What kind of girlfriend are you? Take this quiz: Let's say your boyfriend tried to kiss your best friend. Would you: a) blame yourself. b) make him cry. c) kiss his best friend. If you answered "a", close this book and hit yourself in the head with it.

Chapter 7: Break-Up Fun

The best way to break up with a boy is to pretend you don't know him.

Sometimes a boy won't accept that it's over. Be more direct: throw a rock. (Adjacent is a picture of him unconscious, frothing, with three rocks next to him.)

Maybe he says, "Don't leave me or I'll die." That's when a girl must do the meanest, cruelest, most awful things a girl can do. Make him someone else's problem: 1. Find a really dumb blond girl. 2. Introduce her to your boyfriend. 3. Run away.

Chapter 8: Training a Boyfriend

If for some stupid reason, you decide to keep a boyfriend, it's your job to train him.

Etiquette: a fork is to be used for eating food. Hint: Boys, the pointy pronglike utensil on the left side of the plate is a fork. (The left side is that-a-way<--)

A fork is not to be used for: 1. stabbing bugs. 2. sword-fighting with other stupid boys. 3. sticking up nose for booger excavation. 4. scratching butts.

Just a friendly reminder: boys aren't housebroken. Don't let them sit on your couch unless the plastic cover is on!

Boys can't accessorize: "Like that bag was so last year!"

Always check a boy before he leaves the house: 1. Make sure he zips his fly. 2 make sure his socks match. 3. Make sure he has on clean underwear. 4. Make sure his shoes are on the correct feet. 5. Make sure he's wearing pants!

And make sure under no circumstances whatsoever that a boy does laundry.

A boyfriend is not allows to spit, fart in the car, belch in front of your parents, follow you into the bathroom, make you pull his finger, put you in a headlock, put empty containers back in the fridge, dress himself, cut his own hair, give you a nickname, watch more than four hours of football in a day, and last but not least, act like he knows you in public!

Major rule: When you're telling him a problem, a boyfriend is not allowed to interrupt and tell you his opinion before you have even told him what the problem is! New Rule Rule: New rules may be invented on the spot and be retroactive.

And if he breaks the rules, just remember that for every stupid, smelly, cootie-ridden boy, there is a rock.

Today's Anti-Boy Schools Are Unfair Even to Gifted Kids

Here's a report from Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute on how boys are being manipulated out of programs for the gifted.

Boys Need Help

As I've written so often in this blog, while endless programs continue to focus on helping girls and women, boys and men are in far greater trouble. 

A number of men have written excellent books on the topic, for example, Michael Gurian's The Minds of Boys and Michael Thompson's Raising Cain but they received only modest attention. 

Finally a woman, Peg Tyre, has written about the problem, and lo and behold, the media is showing her the love. And so her book, indeed a fine one, The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems in School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do sits near the top of the Amazon.com bestseller list.

Here's a good blog post that she's written on the topic.

Not Just the U.S. is Unfriendly to White Boys

According to new UK government research, white teenage boys are less likely to pursue a university education than young men of Asian or African descent. The report found, for example, that white working-class men were 8.5 times(!) less likely to go to college than black and Asian middle-class women.

Horrendously Biased Anti-Boy Study, of course, widely and uncritically reported

Articles in the Washington Post (front page) and New York Times report uncritically, a horribly biased study, which will kill the deserved concern for boys' badly lagging girls in school and being Ritalinized en masse.

The media should have gotten the first clue of its being biased when they noticed who funded it: the American Association of University Women. If a study on smoking was funded by the tobacco industry, would you give it much credibility? At minimum, wouldn't you vet it carefully?

Yet regarding gender issues, the media has a double standard for how it vets and reports pro woman/minority research vs pro male (let alone, pro-white) research findings : It censors the latter and reports the former uncritically and as thought it were fact, to wit, the title of the article, "No Crisis For Boys In Schools, Study Says."

Here are the problems with the AAUW study:

1. It says, deceptively, that both boys and girls scores have increased. Why did the study (or at least the reporting) omit is that girls' scores increased much more? In a world in which ever higher-level skill is required, does it mean there's no crisis for boys if their scores have increased a bit while girls' have increased much more? Why did the media not probe that finding as it surely would have if it were a pro-male finding?

2. The study says there's virtually no gap between boys and girls who enter college. Of course not---the requirements for getting into college are roughly equal for boys and girls. What the study (or the reporting) fails to say is that many more girls than boys go to college. Why did the media not probe that finding as it would have it were a pro-male finding?

2a. The study reports that since 1982, 57% of the college graduates are women. Why do the study's authors go back to 1982? To hide the fact that the gap is larger today. For the class of 2008 the ratio is 60/40 and is projected to increase further. Wouldn't the media have probed that finding if it were pro-male?

3. The study reports the terribly deceptive statistic: "Among all women and men working full time, year-round, median annual earnings for women were 77 percent of men's earnings in 2005." Of course, the study (or the reporting) doesn't mention that a far smaller percentage of women are working full-time. And it doesn't mention that women disproportionately avoid the high-paying fields: engineering, computer science, coal mining, sewer repair, etc. And that even those who work full-time work, on average, far fewer hours than men who work full-time. Or that women in corporations are far less likely to do the things required to be promoted to higher-level jobs, such as move their family to a far-flung place (Montgomery, Alabama anyone?) As reported in the book, Why Men Earn More, FOR THE SAME WORK, women earn the same or more than men. Why does the media give a free pass to such as misleading statistic as "women earn 77 cents on the dollar?" Wouldn't the media vet that claim if the statistic favored men?

4. The study omits the fact that eight times as many boys as girls are put on the methamphetamine-like Ritalin and similar drugs. If it was a pro-male finding, wouldn't the media have made the effort to interview and quote sources that would have presented that? But because the AAUW study advocates for females, the media somehow didn't bother.

5. The study omits that the suicide rate for boys is 400% of girls'. If it were the reverse, wouldn't the media have made the effort to interview and quote sources that would have presented that? But because the AAUW study advocates for females, the media somehow didn't bother.

6. The study omits that boys drop out of high school at a significantly higher rate. If if the reverse were reported, wouldn't the media have made the effort to interview and quote sources that would have presented that? But because the AAUW study advocates for females, the media somehow didn't bother.

Truly, I don't understand why the media would be so relentlessly unfair to boys and men.

Time for a Class-Action Suit on Behalf of Smart Boys?

Per a previous post, I believe that intellectually gifted students, especially boys and especially in the elementary school, are our most underserved students. That, of course, is ironic in that gifted kids have the greatest potential for solving societal problems and for the U.S. thriving in the global economy.

For 40 years, despite a vigorous lobbying effort by the National Association for Gifted Children, our legislatures have made clear they don't want to fund bright kids' education. Indeed, nearly all funding for the gifted has been reallocated to the lowest achievers, using such vehicles as Title I and No Child Left Behind.

Civil rights groups achieved many of their goals by skirting the legislature and, instead, filing lawsuits : Brown vs Board of Education (integrated schools,) Larry P (special education), Gratz vs University of Michigan (reverse discrimination.)

Perhaps advocates for bright kids need to take a lesson for the civil rights groups: file a class-action lawsuit on behalf of bright kids, especially boys (who are so underserved in today's girl-friendly, boy-unfriendly schools) demanding merely what the courts and legislators have bestowed upon special education children: sufficient funding to provide an appropriate education.

What do you think?

Smart, Active Boys: Our Most Underserved Students

by Marty Nemko
When I was a boy, I just could not sit still in class. I was very bored and active by nature, so I would rock my chair back, whisper and write notes to kids, even wander around the classroom until the teacher yelled, "Martin, sit down!"

That was decades ago. Today, I suspect I would, like so many boys, put on a Ritalin leash. Indeed there are eight boys for every girl on Ritalin.

The blame is placed on the smart, active boy, rarely on the schools, which claim to celebrate diversity of learning styles and needs but stop celebrating when it comes to smart, active boys. Indeed, this decade's signature domestic policy, No Child Left Behind redirects nearly all efforts to educate the lowest achievers.

This, of course, is ironic in that smart kids have the greatest potential to contribute to society: to cure its diseases, close the racial achievement gap, develop cost-effective solar power, etc.

The unfair treatment of smart, active boys comes from four factors:

1. The widespread abandonment of ability-grouped classes. In most of today's elementary schools, gifted and slow are placed in the same class. That creates more equality--especially racial equality--but the result is that all children receive a worse education. Imagine for example, that you spoke good Mandarin but wanted to become expert. Wouldn't you prefer a class with advanced students rather than one that also had beginners? Yet today, we don't give smart kids (or their parents) that choice. We force them into mixed-ability classes, where dispositive metaevaluations reveal they learn less and are bored. And because, on average, boys are more active than girls, they more often can't sit still for six hours a day, five days a week, 180 days a year, year after year. Rather than the harder task of accommodating to smart, active boys' needs, it's "take this (meth-like) pill." and/or be yelled at, and or given bad grades.

2. That elementary school teachers are overwhelmingly female. Today, the percentage is up to 93%, the highest ever recorded. Even if teachers believe they're accommodating to all students' needs, they can't help but tilt their teaching to what appeals to them. Thus, books about male heroism are replaced by those of female relationships and heroines, typically in which an inferior male is shown-up by a wise female. Competition--a prime motivator for boys--is replaced by so-called "cooperative learning," which usually reduces to the bright doing the slow's work, boring the bright kid and precluding him from learning new things.

3. The media's continuing to perpetrate the myth that females are oppressed and males are the oppressor. For example, they continue to spout these disproven assertions:

• women earn 77 cents on the dollar compared with men. In fact, a rich research literature documents that sexism is not at the core of pay differentials, for example, THIS is from the New York Times, THIS is from the Wall Street Journal, THIS is from Compensation Cafe, THIS is from City Journal. Alas, the media chooses to ignore all that research in favor of the broadbrush, "Women earn 77 cents on the dollar."
• women are underrepresented in high-level positions because of sexism. In fact, as documented in recent well-reviewed books such as Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox, women's not being in high-office comes much more from choosing to have a less work-centric lifestyle.
• the schools shortchange girls relative to boys. (the long-debunked Reviving Ophelia canard.)
• men abuse women--in fact, studies show that 30 to 52% of severe domestic violence is perpetrated by women.

Thus, the feeling among educators, policymakers, and the public, is that we need to do more for females than for males, ignoring such statistics that boys are achieving far worse in school than are girls, much more likely to abuse drugs, commit suicide, and drop out of high school, far less likely to graduate from college, much more likely, as young adults, to be sleeping late unemployed on their parents' sofas.

4. Society's bias that says: let's help those with the greatest deficit rather than those with the greatest potential to profit: "Those smart boys will do okay on their own. Let's commit our resources to the lowest achievers." I deeply believe that such a philosophy will reduce our society to the lowest common denominator, ironically resulting in a worse life for us all. Besides, it simply is unfair for the public schools to not provide at least a marginally appropriate education for all kids, and right now, smart boys get the very least appropriate education.

What do you think?