The Boy Brain: Wired to Go

Fidgety boys falter in classrooms ill-suited to their very natures

WHEN Michael Gurian was growing up in Aina Haina in the 1960s, he had trouble sitting still in class, got bored easily and often wound up in the principal's office.

Now he is helping teachers from Hawaii to Georgia keep restless boys like himself engaged in school, using research that shows fundamental differences in the hard-wiring of boys' and girls' brains.

"This struggle boys are having in school is a huge problem," said Gurian, author of "The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life." "There is not a single state in the U.S. where the boys are not behind."

A generation ago, educators worried that girls were getting shortchanged in school. Today, girls dominate in the classroom -- it's the boys who are faltering. Females have caught up to males in math, but males still trail way behind in reading -- the foundation of the educational system.

More than twice as many boys as girls are labeled as learning disabled and medicated for behavioral problems, Gurian writes. In Hawaii, 70 percent of children in special education are male. Boys drop out of school more often than girls, and they are starting to cede college to the women. At the University of Hawaii, for example, six in 10 students are women.

Many boys are doing just fine in school, of course. But the conventional classroom, where students must "sit still and listen," loses too many of them, some observers believe.

"We don't want to say all the boys are doing badly," said Gurian, the father of two teenage girls. "In a classroom of 30, five to seven boys and just one or two of the girls are going to be having difficulty."

The plight of boys has caught the attention of educators and was also highlighted in a recent public television documentary, "Raising Cain," based on the best-selling book by Michael Thompson that delved into boys' emotional lives.

Thompson and Gurian believe that physiology explains part of the problems boys are having in school. Boys, on the whole, mature more slowly and are biologically wired to move, while girls' brains are wired for language, the currency of the classroom. The push toward reading as early as kindergarten and the pull away from physical education can set some boys up for disappointment.

"In an environment that requires a lot of sitting, boys are having trouble," Thompson said in an interview on "Island Insights," a joint project of PBS Hawaii and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, which aired last month along with "Raising Cain."

"Boys are trying to do something to stretch their muscles, be active, and school's pinning them down," he said. "The elementary classroom is four-fifths language based, and so the girls have a huge advantage there."

The average boy is more active and impulsive than the average girl, research shows. Gurian says that's because he has more blood flow to the part of the brain that controls physical action and higher levels of dopamine in his blood stream.

Boys' brains, on average, devote more cortical areas to spatial and mechanical functions. That makes many boys want to move objects through space -- including their arms and legs -- and orients them toward diagrams and graphics. They use half the brain space that females do for verbal-emotive function, Gurian writes.

Male brains regularly go into a rest state, with far less blood flow than the typical female brain at rest. Boys also are slower than girls in processing words they hear and their hearing is less acute, according to Gurian.

"My family is a prime example of that," said Lori Takase-Dung, who has two sons and a daughter. "I have to shout at the boys to get something done. The boys just don't focus as well as girls. They're thinking of their next recess."

"I didn't even know until Christmas that the first-grade teacher was doing newsletters, because my son was using them to make paper airplanes and throwing them at people," she added. "The teacher took a survey, and almost all the parents of the boys were clueless. So she started e-mailing parents this year."

Takase-Dung recently attended a forum for parents at Punahou School, led by two Punahou teachers, fresh from the Gurian Institute Training Division in Colorado Springs, Colo. Since 2003, the institute has trained 20,000 teachers nationwide on gender-based learning differences. Gurian, a Kaiser High School graduate, educator and family therapist, co-founded it with Kathy Stevens after a pilot study that led to his book "Boys and Girls Learn Differently."

Mark Eliashof, who teaches science and math to sixth-graders at Punahou, said his visit to the Gurian Institute helped him understand the biological underpinnings of behavior he had seen in the classroom, such as the boys' need for space and movement.

"Awareness of the differences means I'm more tolerant when I see the behavior of the boy or the girl," he said. "He or she is doing that because of the hardwiring of the brain. You realize there's no reason to scold. It's part of what the research has shown is normal."

He cautions that gender differences are generalizations, and there is great variation within each sex. But the tendencies are evident as students tackle experiments in the lab.

"The boys ignore the directions and just jump in and start tinkering and figuring it out, even though I made a printout with 10 steps to follow," Eliashof said. "The printout sits on the side, maybe upside-down, maybe it ends up on the floor. The girls will read the directions, maybe twice, and then they'll get started."

The end products tend to vary as well, he said.

"The boys will often come up with a more creative solution, something that I never expected," he said. "But at the same time, it'll be the boys who turn in the lab half done and girls who turn it in complete and neat and thorough."

Bold physical action may have been prized when men were hunters or even when they did much of their learning on farms or through apprenticeships in trades. But it can be hard to manage in the classroom.

At Pauoa Elementary School, first-grade teacher Faye Miyamasu has 13 boys and seven girls in her class this year. She bought "The Minds of Boys" last fall and says it has helped her deal with the high energy level in her classroom. A veteran of 36 years of teaching, she has always incorporated physical movement and songs to help her students learn. This year she added palm-sized "Nerf balls" for squeezing, one of the suggestions in the book.

"The fidgety kids help themselves during story time," she said. "It gives them something constructive to do with their hands, rather than poking their neighbors. It also helps the boys keep their brains active so they don't zone out."

Pointing to the little basket of colorful balls, she said: "You can see how well worn they are."

BOYS AND GIRLS IN HAWAII Test scores Hawaii's public school eighth graders, average scores, 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress: BOYS GIRLS Reading 242 256 Math 264 266 Sources: Hawaii Department of Education; University of Hawaii; Digest of Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education

Burt Tomita, principal of Damien Memorial's Middle School, says that on the whole boys are "very kinesthetic" in their learning and his all-boys school takes that into account. Going ice-skating, for example, helps his students grasp lessons on physics and momentum.

"Boys need a visual and actually hands-on approach," he said. "They like a lot of role modeling."

Iolani School, which invited Michael Thompson to Hawaii earlier this year, has a long-term perspective on the question of how boys and girls learn.

"If you look back historically, the concern was for girls," said Fred Okumura, who has been dean of Iolani's Lower School for 29 years. "When we went coed back in the '80s one of the first things we did was get rid of all the sexist books in our library. We wanted books depicting women as corporate executives and firefighters, doctors, anything they wanted to be."

"The pendulum has swung," he continued. "Now we're looking at how we can support boys more. We are focused on what instructional practices are the most effective, and gender is a part of that. But it's much larger than gender."

Teachers know every child is different, Gurian said. "All we're doing is adding to the tool box," he said. "If they're boys, here are some things to look for. If they're girls, here are some things to look for."

"We don't want anyone to lower standards," he added. "We want them to expand their standards."

Debra Farmer, administrator of the Special Education section of the state Department of Education, said public school teachers are trained to use various strategies in hopes of reaching all children.

"Children learn not only at different rates but different styles, and you need to be cognizant when you're planning a lesson that you address all learning styles, not just the traditional lecture," she said.

"We do training for all teachers in how you differentiate a lesson," she said. "It's not specific to gender, it's specific to learning style. If you address the learning style, the gender issue would become moot, we hope."

TIPS ON REACHING BOYS Brain scans show that different parts of male and female brains light up when doing various tasks. Here are some gender tendencies and suggestions for reaching the typical boy. WIRED FOR WORDS Girls are more wired for words. Boys, on average, use half the brain space that girls do for verbal-emotive functioning. More cortical areas in the male brain are devoted to spatial-mechanical functioning. » Give visual cues, such as diagrams, charts, lists. » Help students learn by doing. » Provide books that feature movement, such as science fiction, suspense, sports, graphic and technical selections. WIRED TO MOVE Boys tend to learn well through physical movement because they have more spinal fluid in the brain stem than girls do, which connects learning with action. The male brain's spatial-mechanical orientation makes boys want to move things through space, from balls to their own bodies. » Allow students to move around, even during reading and writing assignments. »  Give fidgety students a soft, squeezable ball to keep their hands occupied and brains stimulated. » Bring literature to life by having students act out characters. » Send a restless child on an errand. » Give kids active play time before school. "WHAT DID YOU SAY?" Boys tend to process what they hear more slowly than girls. Their hearing is generally less acute, especially in the sound range important for speech discrimination. » Speak louder and allow more time for response. » Don't call on the first hand that goes up. Give everyone a chance. » Seat those who tend to tune out closer to the front of class. IMPULSE Boys have more dopamine in their bloodstream, which can increase risky, impulsive behavior. Girls have more serotonin, making them less physically impulsive. » Be prepared for such differences. » Make a place in your classroom for bold action, not just quiet contemplation. ZONING OUT Male brains regularly go into a "rest state," making it more likely they will "zone out." Girls' brains show far more activity at rest. » Beware of talking too long. » Take breaks to stretch; have students move with active music. » Use humor to break the monotony. INCORPORATE THE ARTS Functions such as language are compartmentalized in boys' brains, while females have more connecting tissue between hemispheres. » Use music, which engages both hemispheres of the brain at once. » Drawing a subject first can help many boys write better about it. FEED THE BRAIN The brain is 80 percent water and it needs a fresh supply. » Be sure to drink water in the morning. » Protein at breakfast can help set up a brain for learning, while carbohydrates alone make it groggy. ON THE NET: www.pbs.org/parents/raisingboys/ www.gurianinstitute.com Sources: "The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life," by Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens, 2005; "With Boys and Girls in Mind," by Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens, Educational Leadership, November 2004