Introduction

At the Crossroads

             “Let’s go to the phones.  Phillip, in Millbrae . Good morning, Phillip, this is Sarah. What’s on your mind?”

             Someone had the radio on at the hardware store the other day while I waited at the counter with a roll of duct tape. Once I’d found out that the voice explaining second grade to “Phillip in Millbrae” was actually that of a young girl, I remembered what was happening. This was “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” and Sarah was cohosting her father’s morning radio talk show. To my ear, she sounded well in charge of things. Stephanie from Hayward wanted to know if Sarah had decided what she wanted to be and probably wasn’t surprised to hear her say she’d like to be a talk show host. “It’s easy.”

             The calls continued as I paid for the tape, Sarah fielding them like a pro. What especially struck me was the genuine attention the adult callers gave to this eight-year-old girl, and the seriousness with which they treated her comments. They could have been discussing the president’s foreign policy. I confess my satisfaction level rose a notch as I headed out the door and she greeted another caller – “ Michael, in Cupertino . Sarah here!” – as confident as anyone could expect a child to sound. “Now,” I thought, stepping into the daylight, “How to keep her that way.”

     That, in a word or two, is essentially what this book is about – keeping schoolgirls voiced and confident as they move into adolescence and young adulthood. Girls Sarah’s age generally do well throughout their early schooling, and they maintain a generally high level of physical and psychological resilience. Then, as they enter adolescence, many girls lose track of themselves academically, or experience a self-silencing of their once-sturdy voices. Others become at-risk physically or emotionally, slipping into depression or eating disorders. Still others experience a slide in self-confidence that lowers their achievement and scatters their dreams, weighing down some of our most gifted young women with such self-doubt that the flights they have dreamt of no longer seem possible. Researchers have called this, “hitting the wall.” [1]

 It was after teaching bright, gifted preadolescent girls for a number of years that these issues came to my own attention some time ago. For the better part of the eighties, I had taught part-time in the gifted program of a small elementary school district north of San Francisco . Since I worked with students between fourth and sixth grades, it meant that I often taught the same girls over a three-year period, before and during this critical period in their young lives. Yet I didn't know this juncture existed. I couldn't have imagined that some of the girls in my care might have been struggling through a troubled landscape of invisible adversaries, battling demons they could neither see nor name. In fact, I’m not sure that I would have grasped it at all, had it not been for a difficult stretch of months during the early nineties and a pair of especially bright, brash young schoolgirls who, in their own unknowing but timely fashion, set me straight.

§

 “The World’s Greatest”  

            A piece of brightly colored, fake parchment hangs on the wall above my desk and reads in a fourth-grader’s bold, slightly askew hand lettering: “Certificate of Merit to  Mr. F., For Being  the World’s Greatest.” It’s signed, “Julie and Sally” two girls who entered my Gifted and Talented Education Program (GATE) as fourth graders. Julie O. was the natural leader, about as striking a girl as I can remember teaching, with wide, dark eyes and what might be called a “media presence.” Julie O. took command wherever she went, even with older students in the class.

             My earliest memory of them is watching the girls high-stepping their way towards me across the basketball court, can-can style, smiles visible from the half-court line. We hit it off from the first hour. They soared through a unit on geometry, carpeting my wall each week with delicately rendered Arabic designs. As fifth-graders they plunged into a tough year-long course on cosmology, evolution and the beginnings of human culture. We ended the year making videos, and the two girls put together a parody of talk shows that I still use as a motivator in my classes. Julie starred, of course. With that kind of talent on hand, I began to think about mounting a full-scale television drama the next fall when they would be in sixth grade. At the end of the last class that spring I took Julie aside and told her I thought she had the potential to be a success in television. “You could anchor the evening news, someday. ”

             “Actually, I want to be a lawyer,” she said.

             “Even better. Run for governor. I’d sure vote for you.”

             The next September, classes started out routinely enough the first day, me chirping about the year’s dazzling course of study before us, picking up from where we had left off at the late Neolithic, looking at the rise of some early civilizations – Sumer, the Hittites, Egypt. As I described the subjects, some of the students started to glow with that radioactive look every teacher hopes to see. We’d read about pharaohs, draw diagrams of the pyramids, make clay sarcophagi with mummies inside! I was approaching liftoff when a sound came from the back that made me reel.

             “Hunh!” 

             I thought at first I was hallucinating. But a second “Hunh!” followed, louder this time, and it came, startlingly, from Julie and Sally together, as though they had choreographed an opening day surprise for me. I can still feel the chill that ran across the classroom and up my spine when I figured out what was happening. I stood silent a beat or two, took a deep breath, and raced through the rest of my talk.

             Later, it became clear that Julie and Sally had come into my classroom much different than when they had left it in June. Things would not be the same, I was made to understand. They were no longer the chirpy enthusiasts of the past two years, and if I forgot that, I risked open mutiny. Restless, irreverent, sometimes outright combative, Julie and Sally struck like a siege of lower back pain, alternating between open resistance (“This is so boring!”), and a studied, sullen withdrawal. I felt wounded and rebuffed: I was the same affable Mr. F. who had so charmed them for a couple of years. Where was the problem?  

            “What problem?” Julie shrugged when I challenged her a few weeks into the semester amid signs that things were not going to improve.

             “They’re just being sixth-graders,” said Mr. O., Julie’s classroom teacher. “Don’t take it personally.”

              “It’s what they do,” added Mr. T., his colleague.  

Finally, I placed the two girls into different classes, severing our bond and ruining any hopes for a video spectacular. The moves stanched the hemorrhaging and allowed me to teach. Sally settled down and managed to perform adequately, if reluctantly, for the rest of the year. But moving Julie O. to another class proved disastrous, unsettling what had been a solid group of students, destabilizing the boys with her subversive charm, and annoying the girls. I found myself struggling to keep the group focused and felt drained by the end of the year.  

            All the while I was experiencing a vague familiarity with something I couldn’t put my finger on. When it finally surfaced, I realized that I had been having trouble with sixth-grade girls throughout the decade, though of a more muted kind than my experience with Julie and Sally. Though my GATE program was popular, I lost a few students each year –kids who didn’t want to leave their classrooms or make up the work they missed when they did leave. Or students who simply wanted out of being smart, whose very giftedness had become a burden to them. Looking back more closely at those students, I found that a disproportionate number of my dropouts had been sixth-grade girls, and I could see a pattern in the attitude of the typical girl student who dropped out of GATE. She might have inhaled the program as a fourth- or fifth-grader (as had Julie and Sally), delighted with the chance to paint and model and publish, to tackle subjects like cosmology or solid geometry or spend uninterrupted sessions at a computer, and to collaborate with other gifted students. But during the first few months of her sixth-grade year, the pattern dictated that she grow resistant ("Do we have to study stars?"), then turn incommunicative, then stop coming altogether.

             "What's wrong, Angela?” I’d ask, tracking down a recalcitrant student in her classroom. "Why don't you want to come to GATE anymore?"

 "I just don't."

             I came to understand these as regrettable, but predictable losses, since GATE students missed a day of regular school each week and had to be bussed to the GATE classroom at another school. It required a commitment and some inconvenience. But seeing the recurrent pattern of sixth-grade girl dropouts, I couldn’t escape the notion that something was wrong in my work with early-adolescent girls. By the time that difficult school year came to an end, I had decided that what was wrong was me. I even scheduled an appointment with my superintendent and suggested that perhaps the time had come for a reassignment.

 §

             Dr. Billye Raye Lipscomb is a transplanted Texan, and was one of just four women school superintendents in our county at the time. A Southern belle with a nineties flair, Billye speaks with a trace of central Texas and hangs her office walls with brilliant, sunny pieces of artwork created by her mother, a professional artist. She is shrewd, knowledgeable, a masterful handler of people, and during her six-year tenure, had brought a wonderful constructive peace to our small district that had spent much of its prior fifteen years in turmoil. Billye and I had long been teaching colleagues, working together as reading specialists while she managed a Masters degree, then a doctorate in education. What I didn’t know about Billye was that she had been an advocate for girls long before it was fashionable. She was a quiet, efficient mover who bided her time and was savvy enough not to force her personal issues on her staff. Looking back now at that meeting, I wonder if Billye hadn’t sensed that this might be an opportunity she had been waiting for.

 

After hearing me describe my problems with my older girl students, she told me that I didn’t need a new job, just “a little reeducation.” She spoke about the recent studies at Harvard and elsewhere that had found that early adolescent girls stood at risk for losses of confidence and self-esteem, and that these losses paralleled upswings in emotional and physical problems, along with declines in academic achievement and career dreams, especially among the high-achieving girls that I was working with. “Read the studies,” she suggested. “Then let’s talk.”

             During that summer and fall, I studied the literature on loss of voice and self-esteem among adolescent girls that had been pioneered by Carol Gilligan and others at the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development in the late eighties and which first documented that the period between childhood and early adolescence was a time of heightened psychological risk for girls. [2] The fault line, they determined, was around the age of eleven, or sixth grade. Gilligan’s work inspired the American Association of University Women to fund a study that found that teenaged girls experienced a loss of self-confidence that was three times the rate of adolescent boys. Its publication in the early nineties made headlines and has stirred controversy ever since. [3] Since then, our understanding of girls’ development has become more nuanced, as researchers determined that not all girls experience these losses, and that racial and economic factors influence development as well. And, increasingly, researchers (including Gilligan herself) have begun to detect a similar psychological dislocation occurring in boys, though at a much earlier age.

     At the time, though, pouring over these early studies, I realized that I had been working for more than a decade with bright girls as they moved across the fault line between the heady days of late childhood into the potentially treacherous landscape of early adolescence. I began to suspect that the problems I encountered with my adolescent girl students might not be entirely of my own making. In fact, Julie and Sally’s distancing fit a pattern among high-achieving, young adolescent girls who sense (rightly) the culture’s ambivalence towards their intelligence. Resisting narrow cultural prescriptions for how they should behave, bright girls may “dumb down” their intelligence, or even repudiate it altogether, when they realize (again, rightly) that it’s not the ticket to popularity among girls or boys.

 

Missing In Action  

            Virtually overnight, then, I began to see my own girl students in a new light, as embattled youngsters pitted against an array of forces they should not have to contend with. My dropouts began to haunt me – girls like Jenny R, whose departure from my program during my second year of teaching GATE still leaves me with a sharp sadness; Emily and  Jaime, a pair of wise-cracking kids who unnerved me with their sixth-grade defections, then returned together years later to apologize for behavior they regretted but still didn't understand; bold, brilliant Laura, who started crying herself to sleep toward the end of her fifth-grade year; and then, Julie O. and Sally.  

            I had to accept that for some years I may have served as an unwitting collaborator with cultural forces that can turn girls silent and strain their self-confidence. My own collaboration took the form of a subtle tilting of the curriculum towards boys' interests (cosmology, evolution, navigation, bridge building – never literature, though that was my major, because I must have suspected that it would bore the boys), and the passive acquiescence to the monopolizing of the classroom conversation by my most verbal males. The bias in my teaching was unconscious, of course, as it is for most teachers, something that had seeped into my bones through the culture I grew up in. Of course, this bias had been reinforced by my training as a teacher to attend always to the male energy in the classroom (Don't forget the boys in the back! ) lest it capsize you. Without knowing it, I had allowed some of my brightest girls to withdraw into accommodating silences that served my own ends of classroom control.

             One day rummaging through my old class records I found myself recoiling at the dark, deliberate lines I'd penciled through the names of girls as they left my program – Laura, Emily, Jaime, Jenny, Annie, Elizabeth – disappeared, as it were, like veterans missing in action.  One way or another I had lost each of these girls to forces that neither they nor I recognized. I wanted them back. I understood for the first time that these once sturdy, self-possessed eleven-year-olds may have found themselves in the grip of forces far beyond their years to understand.

             Well, I couldn’t get them back – but I decided to do all I could to prevent harming the girls who followed in their footsteps. I attended an AAUW-sponsored gender-equity  conference about that time (me, half-a-dozen other men and 400 women!) and it served as a full-immersion baptism in the gender waters. I continued to read whatever I could get my hands on and what I read profoundly altered the way in which I viewed the girls I taught, and ultimately, the direction of my professional life.

      I started from my concern about gifted girls, since they formed my natural constituency. But I found quickly that I couldn't look away from the troubling implications this research held for all girl students. At a loss as how to begin, I sent out a kind of SOS to all the adults in the school district, inviting them to a monthly meeting in my classroom to discuss these issues and look for ways to try to change things for the better. A dozen women turned up – some teachers, an aide, a handful of concerned mothers. We formed a gender-awareness program in the district, began to educate ourselves, and planned some initial interventions. The next year, I received a gender-equity mentor fellowship and was able to offer workshops to the district staff. Each year more people became interested, and we developed some practices which I describe in the book. I offered courses and workshops for parents and learned much about the challenges mothers and fathers face in raising healthy daughters and the primary concerns they shared. Teaching these workshops and courses has crystallized my thinking about what girls need most to develop sturdy, competent, confident selves, and what parents can do to help them get it.

 One thing led to another: teaching “Helping SchoolGirls” workshops to teachers, giving presentations at conferences, offering a course to parents at the local state university, and assessing schools for compliance to gender-equity regulations for the California Department of Education. From a personal standpoint, my “reeducation” renewed my delight for the classroom, and transformed my understanding of adolescent girls and the world they live in.

§

 A Note To Parents

             Parents matter to girls, more than many parents may think. Studies have found that for adolescent girls, their parents are their greatest influence, and matter most to determining their self-esteem. Scholars at The Harvard Project on Girls’ Development, for instance, maintain that just one supportive adult woman present in a young girl’s life – a woman who had “rejected the conventional definitions of femininity” – was sufficient to ensure that the average adolescent girl was able to remain herself. [4] While  parents can’t prevent the culture’s biased messages from reaching their daughters, they can certainly do much to interrupt those messages, defuse their power, and protect their daughters from their most damaging effects.

 

            I do not view girls as an endangered species, apart from a sense that all children in our culture are endangered. I have known too many strong and confident young women to feel that way. But it is clear that most young adolescent girls endure unnecessary turmoil brought on by a sexist culture, and many of them suffer irreparable losses – losses which appear to me to be neither inevitable nor necessary.

 A Note to Teachers

             Gender bias is woven so deeply into our history and the structure of our culture that no one escapes it, and no institution is entirely free of it. Our attitudes and practices that disfavor girls are largely unconscious, but they do not have to remain that way. We can change them with training, but we cannot ignore them. Even our education and training as teachers cannot make us immune from an historical bias against the feminine that is as old as Western culture itself.

 

            Schools and classrooms are the first public forum where our children’s attitudes and beliefs come under the scrutiny of adults other than their parents.  As their teachers, we have to get it right in our schools, and early on – openly  challenging the sexist attitudes that even young children bring into our classrooms, while making sure that our own instructional practices don’t unintentionally propagate them. Those of  us who remain indifferent to gender bias, or choose not to see it in our classrooms, or who sincerely believe that they are not guilty of it (that’s most of us), may constitute one of its most insidious forms. Our indifference reaches our students stamped with the weight of our considerable authority.

 

            I know – this places yet another unwelcome responsibility upon teachers who are already overburdened and underfunded. But it is inescapable. Throughout Section II, I've kept  in mind the all-consuming demands placed upon teachers’ time and energy, describing only the most common forms of classroom bias, and describing relatively simple interventions that can begin to undo some of them.  

§  

Lastly – and I won’t make too much of this – the fact remains that I am a male and I won’t pretend that my gender doesn't matter. This is a book that concerns the needs of schoolgirls – needs which have not been part of my own life experience. Since that ultimately limits my understanding of girls’ needs, I’ve leaned a lot on the work of women scholars, educators, and writers, as well as many able colleagues to shore up my deficiencies. And although I haven’t asked for favored status in a culture of male privilege, I understand that I am nonetheless served by it, have always been, and will be for a long time, though I truly wish it were otherwise. Like it or not, I am inescapably bound by my gender to the sources of the very problem this book is trying to help erase. Since I probably can never completely escape these limitations, I’ll go on working within them as well as I can, relying on the many generous women I work with – and Carol, of course – to set me straight when I need it.

             I've had the good fortune to combine teaching with writing for the past two-and-a-half decades, and I’ve tried to inform this book with both perspectives – that of a longtime resident of the classroom world schoolgirls inhabit, and as an occasionally distanced chronicler of the many subtle undertows that eddy about their lives. I'm a fellow traveler, basically, someone troubled by the plight of girls coming of age in an unfriendly culture – a schoolteacher often baffled by the perplexities of my calling, but, like most teachers I know, trying to get it right for as many of my students as I can.  I hope this book can help you get things a little “righter” for the girl in your care, keeping her confident, skilled, and fully voiced –

             “Yo! Marian on a car phone! Sarah here. What’s happening?

 §