Individuals differ more than genders

By Suzanne Nadeau, Grand Forks Hearld, found on MenTeach website.  She interviewed
Marcus Weaver-Hightower, the author of the new book "The Politics in Boys' Education: Getting Boys 'Right." Weaver-Hightower spent a year in Australia looking at their approach to the education of male students. He is currently an assisstant professor at the University of North Dakota.
Why Australia?

A. Australia had really gone farther than any other country in addressing boys’ issues, doing practice-oriented research to see what was actually going on.
I wanted to see if they are so far ahead in these issues, what can we in the United States do to follow them? The focus of the book is the Australian policy directed toward boys’ education, but there is a concerted effort to compare it to what is in the United States.
We share a pretty firm idea about masculinity and gender: They’ve got the Crocodile Dundee image. We’ve got the John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone images. Both countries have this idea of hyper-masculinity. Both are trying to look backward to define masculinity, and my own take is that’s the wrong direction and we really need to redirect masculinity, especially in culture and an economy that has shifted and made hyper-masculinity more of a burden than it is an asset.
Q. You were a high school teacher and coach, can you tell us if boys learn differently than girls?
A. I think it depends. If we really wanted to generalize, I think there are differences between boys and girls. There are some biological differences, obviously, but we’ve trained boys and girls to be different.
Kids are different. But, I think there’s far more difference between boys and boys than between boys and girls.
There’s more variability between boys and between girls than there is between the two groups.
I think teachers, and really parents, know this at an intrinsic level. For example, parents might have two sons that are vastly different; then they might have a son and a daughter who are very similar.
Canada may not have either Crocodile Dundee or John Wayne as models of hypermasculinity. However, we certainly have models of "macho" masculinity that may be in conflict with academic achievement. These could include NHL "fighters" like Colton Orr, Tie Domi, Sean Avery...and then there are the 'high-scoring' recruits like Sidney Crosby, Taylor Hall, Alex Ovechkin, Mike Camelleri, and Phil Kessel.
And we look also to more complicated role models like Dr. David Suzuki, and our new Governor General, David Lloyd Johnston. And then, on the political level, compare Stephen Harper with both Michael Ignatieff and Jack Layton, and you might get a glimpse of the tension between such different examples of masculinity, irrespective of policy.
If the learning of this professor, from year of study in Australia is "one size does not fit all" in terms of educational policy and practice, perhaps that is instructive for our approach to learning in Canada.
Individual differences actually trumping gender sterrotypes in the perceptions, attitudes and interactions of educators with their students could go a long way to enhanced achievement of all students.