Gurian is not saying we should expect different achievements from girls and boys. His point is that we need to teach them differently. One of Gurian s most controversial findings is that by teaching girls and boys the same way, teachers are doing a disservice to one of the genders. Without reaching out differently to boys and girls, he believes female teachers, who predominate in elementary school, will be more in tune with the way girls minds work, and the male teachers, who predominate in teaching math and science in high school, will be more in tune with the way boys minds work. The differences in how girls and boys learn start in the womb, he explains, and increase and accelerate through adolescence.
Boys do better at learning mathematics on a blackboard.
Girls tend to prefer concrete reasoning. Girls like learning math concepts with objects they can manipulate. Boys tend to work silently. Boys also enjoy jargon or coded language. They like symbolic texts, diagrams and graphs, and they get into an author s imagery patterns.