On Sun, 23 Sep 2007, pueblo@mail.ljudmila.org wrote:
yes is basically valid for all people that are not white males or in other words for all the people that have different cognitive styles than the dominant western white model.
I can fetch you quite a few women and/or arabic or latino or whatever you want, who are perfectly comfortable with so-called western white male cognitive style, that they themselves are profs holding doctorates.
Meanwhile, when I was in university, I could hardly focus, I had a wandering mind, a tendency to nap in the classroom, trouble actually getting myself to attend classes, and most of all, I was much more concerned by knowledge in general than by actual grades, and by cross-course reasonings than by sticking to one course's assumptions and biases and blind-spots and to whatever the prof says.
Meanwhile, the often-reported fact is that girls score better in schools and you have magazine reports on what's the matter with the boys in schools because they underperform and fail so much.
19-year-old undergraduates in QC are 40% male, 60% female (figures of 2003, published in 2007).
A decade ago, for undergraduates regardless of age: In Medicine/Dentistry/etc (grouped together) it was 77% female. In Litterature it was 72%, in Biology it was 58%, in Chemistry 44%, and in Math 40%, just to give a few examples. The report I have doesn't say the figure for Psychology, but looking at "Class of 2004"-type portraits of UdeM it is obviously around 95%.
So I don't quite think that the main dividing lines in education methodologies are at all involving gender issues. Women seem happier in the current school system than men are.
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