3596. At the Beginning of a New School Year. Some Anecdote

 At least in the north hemisphere of our wonderful blue planet we are before a new school year. What will it be like? Face to face classes or remote teaching or both? 

All in all the first lesson is paramount. Anyway, be relaxed on that first lesson, if you are the teacher. Well, with a bit of benign tension, otherwise that first lesson will be colorless. 

At K-12 schools our dear students may have new textbooks or new iPad programs that replace old textbooks. I personally prefer printed textbooks. 

Some days ago I worked on a video about single-sex or single-gender classrooms. It was so interesting. 

You know, at 4^th grade in a school in North Branch, Minnesota, parents have something optional, which works. They can choose single-gender classrooms for those kids at 4^th grade within elementary school. 

They have a young male teacher for the boys and a female teacher for the girls. And it works, as I said. You know, the girls’ class teaching is more emotional, in their teacher’s own words, whereas it is more physical in the boys’ class, according to their teacher. 

If you see the video, the girls are more neatly sitting down and you can see them fully focused on the teacher’s leading work, whereas the boys look also focused, yet they are allowed to stand up out of their seats, or a bit of that. 

Concerning this latter point I am not sure whether that is convenient, for the boys seem even a bit wiggly. However, the male teacher says that that is okay, because also on the school bus they may be out of their seats for a bit, yet they are learning from here and from there. 

The school principal Ms. Zimmerman says that before the splitting up of classes you had a boy that needed everyday phoning to his parents because of disruption and a lot of calling down, and now he may be at the top of the class, and the same you might have a shy anxious girl who had problems at the playground or on the school bus and now she is more relaxed. 

And as well the news presenter – for the video was shown on a news program – said at the end that bullying had been gotten diminished drastically. As I said, the school program is optional, and parents may choose it – out of 240 kids at the 4^th grade more than 50 had chosen that single-gender program, and it works. The school is Sunrise River Elementary School I think to remember. Have a nice day. Later I learned that the video is one of 2014, and then the single-gender classroom program seemed to work.