Differences in gender make boys and girls learn differently

I am seriously considering all that happens with my students' behaviors. My girls appear to be milder in behavior than my boys and they get better grades too.

• From research according to an article :Mars and Venus in the classroom,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/17/AR2006051701778_pf.html

boys and girls achieve differently in class for some reasons. From kindergaten they both do equally as well but over time gender gaps double in science and reading. By age 17, "the underperformance of . . . boys in reading is equivalent to 1.5 years of schooling, and though men continue to be over-represented in college level science and engineering, girls are now more likely to go to college and persist in earning a degree.

The good thing is that one year with a male English teacher would eliminate nearly a third of the gender gap in reading performance among 13-year-old boys. Now the bad: Having a male teacher improves the performance of boys while harming girls' reading skills. On the other hand, a year with a female teacher would close the gender gap in science achievement among 13-year-old girls by half and eliminate the smaller achievement gap in mathematics.

• http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/gender.htm In our world of today boys' failure is attributed to external factors and success is attributed to ability. This helps them keep their confidence, even with failure. With girls it's just the opposite. Since their success is attributed to good luck or hard work and failure to lack of ability, with every failure, girls' confidence is eroded. All this works in subtle ways to stop girls from wanting to be astronauts and brain surgeons. Girls can't say why they ditch their dreams, they just "mysteriously" lose interest." Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia : Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls.
• Now why the differences, is the brain to blame for all these? {By Janine R. Fuertes}

The human brain is remarkable in its ability to work in a use-dependent fashion - that is to say that the more a neural system is activated, the more it will change (1). During a child's development, all of the patterned, sensory experiences result in the subsequent organization of neural systems and functioning. The brain displays functions that mirror the repetitive experiences of childhood (1). Different areas of the central nervous system are forming at different times, and so at some points, it is more sensitive to organizing experiences (2). Disruptions of the neurochemical signals during these periods may potentially lead to abnormalities in neurodevelopment - some of which are irreversible (2).

• According to Paul Grobstein, March 2007, {/sci_edu/brainedparallels.html} it is recognized that the brain/student (and teacher) function simultaneously and interdependently in two modes. One is an unconscious explorer/learner/creator who interacts directly with the world. The second is a conscious explorer/learner/creator who experiences/creates stories about/reflects on the information it gets from the unconscious and in turn both influences the unconscious and acts on the world through it.
• The educational need is to faciliate both unconscious and conscious processing and, most particularly, the ability to productively exchange information between the two systems. This in turn depends strongly on effective social interactions, not only between teachers and students but among students and between students and teachers and the world at large.
• To achieve this, classrooms need to be organized not only to facilitate unconscious learning but also to encourage story telling as well as the continuing process of using stories to generate new observations and observations to generate new stories. Teachers need to model the entire set of activities, to create an environment of open-ended, transactional inquiry.
• Education is as much about helping boys and girls enhance their ability to make their own sense of the world as it is about conveying existing understandings. In fact, the latter should be regarded as relevant precisely to the extent it serves the purpose of maximizing the capability of all individuals to continually create and revise their own unique understandings.