This past weekend, I attended the annual conference of the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education.  (As you may have guessed, they promote the advantages of single-sex programs and seek to expand their reach and exposure.)  It was a great Conference and very informative.  Some highlights:

The always delightful Dr. Abigail James spoke about strategies and methods for teaching both boys and girls.  Dr. James has great energy and plenty of tales from the classroom, as she is still an active teacher.  She had some great suggestions for different ways to help boys learn writing (one of the larger gender gaps where girls far outscore boys), and I especially liked the suggestion to create grammar "puzzles" by cutting up the individual words in a sentence (or sentences in a paragraph) for boys to put back together in order to learn paragraph or sentence structure. (Hint: don't use capitals or punctuation for individual sentence puzzles, and for paragraphs, make each full sentence one full line so that you don't accidentally create a physical puzzle instead of a grammatical one.)

Another particularly interesting presentation was from Dr. Roy Baumeister, Professor of Psychology and Director of Social Psychology at Florida State University.  Dr. Baumeister was speaking in favor of the sadly controversial notion that men and women are different, though equal.  He hit on a lot of issues relating to trends and preferences between men and women, but the one that really struck me was when he dipped a toe into the waters of evolutionary biology.  He pointed out that, of all the people who have ever lived, only about 30% of men have a living ancestor today (compared to something like 60-70% of women).  His point was that if there is anything at all to evolutionary theory, than the characteristics that made up that successful 30% are going to be very different than the successful majority of women--which may explain the competitive and risk-taking inclinations of men.  There was a quite a bit more to that talk, and I don't want to oversimplify it (too late), but I've been pestering everyone I know with the 30% figure ever since.  (Also, did you know that most everyone alive in Mongolia today can trace some ancestry to Genghis Khan?  That guy really got around.)

Myself, I was at the conference to speak about boys and depression.  As I've said before, boys' depression manages to combine all the complexity of men's depression (the stigma, the unwilingness to admit a problem or seek help, etc.) with the complexity of children's and adolescent depression (the difficulty in determining the depth of the problem, the possibility that the child or teen doesn't recognize their own feelings of sadness, the acting-out behaviors, and so on).  Given that this conference was attended by a large number of teachers, we agreed that it was especially important to stress how boys' depression often manifests itself through acting-out behaviors that can be mistaken for ADHD or other behavioral problems.  Depression causes a lack of concentration, which can result in falling grades, combine this with behavioral troubles coming from the fact that depression often manifests as extreme sensitivity and irritability in youngsters, and you can see how those around a depressed boy may come to exactly the wrong conclusion about what's troubling him.  (Which is why caregivers and teachers need to be aware that in cases where ADHD is suspected, it is important to screen for depression as well--and that one should go to a qualified specialist for such an assessment.) 

At any rate, I'm very grateful to NASSPE for inviting me to speak at the conference, and I hope that their other attendees found it as interesting and helpful as I did.