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Class Notes
	Testing limits, breaking shells (Published March 8, 2004) By MATT WENNERSTEN

Last week Bell Multicultural Senior High School wrapped up participation in the winter "Chill" program.

"Chill," sponsored by Burton Snowboards Inc., takes a group of at-risk kids snowboarding in Northern Maryland one night a week for six weeks. The kids learn how to snowboard, but more importantly, they learn how to test their limits, break out of their shells and spend time interacting with the positive role models who run the program.

Each week has a theme (respect, patience, etc.), and the four-hour round-trip bus ride is time well spent: getting to know the kids, the good and bad things happening in their lives, the fears they have, the things they’ve learned, the things they need to learn.

On our last trip, the conversation was much better than the snowboarding. After all, spring is nearly here and the snow was almost melted away. As Bob Marley would say: "The sun is shining; the weather is sweet." In the hills and woods of Maryland, the birds were chirping, the bees were coming out and the kids had sex on the brain. In fact, all this past week, students at Bell have been doing everything short of getting naked in the classrooms.

On the Chill bus, we naturally got into a conversation about boys and girls being together in class. Is it better to be in a single-sex or a co-ed school? One of the Chill instructors went to an all-boys school for a year and loved the experience of being surrounded by peers without the pressure of dealing with the feelings, hormones and emotions of being around girls.

As soon as talk turns to anything about sex, the Bell students – even the ones wiped out from three hours of snowboarding – perked up. What did they have to say about same-sex classes? Not much. Our school is co-ed. All the schools the students have attended are co-ed. Do schools have to be co-ed? Probably, since public schools teach the public, and our public is co-ed.

There is, though, potential for a new way. D.C. public schools are, in many ways, a national laboratory for new ways of educating young people. We lead the country in the areas of charter schools and vouchers. We are required by federal law to implement scientifically based "reform models" to improve student achievement – essentially, purchasing the bright ideas of consultants and researchers and using them as an experiment on children. Results in D.C. high schools have been poor for a long time, and the school system is open to changing educational methods (even if it’s not open to changing the overall level of inefficiency).

Why not try single-sex? Not so much single-sex schools, but gender-specific classrooms. At Bell, there are five Algebra teachers and 15 Algebra classes. We could easily keep the school co-ed and have some mixed Algebra classes, some girls-only and some boys-only. This could be research at the ground level: Simply compare the results from the different classes.

One caveat: If we do this, we need to be aware that separate gender and equal instruction is a short hop to "separate-but-equal" and different instruction, different standards – which is, of course, illegal and unethical. Let’s not forget Brown v. Board of Education. But the potential for improved achievement is huge.

"You witness so much distraction," said another math teacher at Bell.

It’s not just the hormones. Research has shown that girls participate more and take more leadership and ownership in their subject in an all-girls setting. Not only that, the change would be good for the boys. Honor rolls in DCPS have become majority female. I see this daily in the behavior of the boys in my classes – passive, yet also desperate for female attention.

I’m fortunate to know many teachers in the D.C. metro area, including teachers at all-boys and all-girls private schools. What they tell me is intriguing: that the kids in single-sex schools are freer in the classroom to work – that the pressure is off appearance and on learning.

Two weeks ago at Chill, I went down the Black Diamond slope – the steepest, nastiest slope of the mountain – with a small group of boys. These kids were deeply scared. I listened to their conversation. "Are we crazy?" "I’m scared." "Yeah, me too."

These are the same kids with machismo, who would never let on to a woman that they were afraid. Yet there they were. Going down the steepest slope let them truly test their limits, and testing your limits is when you grow. Would any of them have faced up to their fear if there had been a girl around? Being scared, but in safe company, was an important part of their success.

Contrast that with this week, when I saw two kids, a boy and a girl, lose 20 minutes of their limited snowboarding time hanging out, holding hands. This is an over-simplification, but still, a little less sex and a bit more ed in the classroom would probably be a good thing.

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Wennersten is a third-year mathematics teacher at Bell Multicultural Senior High School and a graduate of the D.C. Teaching Fellows program. Please send stories, comments or questions to him at mwenners@yahoo.com.

Copyright 2004, The Common Denominator