08 Jan Disputing some of Sheryl Sandberg’s Cultural Claims
While I’ve been inspired by Sandberg’s message and appreciative of her honesty, here’s a small rant refuting a few of her cultural claims.
She talks about the differences between raising boys and girls, citing that parents talk to girls more than boys, overestimate the crawling ability of their sons and under estimating that of their daughters. Here I took issue. Certainly in my own home I did not speak to my daughter anymore than my son. I talked my face-off to both of them and in fact they’re both extremely expressive, verbal people, who spoke exceptionally early, I like to think, in part because of my conscious (and not so conscious…I am a yakker) effort to communicate with them, even as babies.
I do understand what she is getting at and maybe I personally made an effort not to fall into that stereotypical statistic….but…Here’s another claim I took exception to. On page 20 she talks about the fact that teachers interact more with boys, calling on them more frequently, asking more questions, and chastising them less when they call out answers without raising their hands. Girls are supposedly scolded for breaking rules. This is absolutely ludicrous in my opinion. Maybe I’m just speaking from personal experience but that is not the way I operated my classroom and frankly it is not the way I saw my colleagues operate theirs. An American crime, perhaps? I can’t quote the stats but I don’t see this happening in Canadian schools. At least not the ones I worked in. Nor did it occur in the American school I worked in while living in Abu Dhabi, UAE.