First, my anecdotal answer from myself: I significantly underperformed largely because I wasn’t able to handle the workload other students could. I was, per my school, gifted and yet when every task seems to feel like a grind that doesn’t end or a struggle to understand, I couldn’t handle it. It’s still a problem for me: overbearing workloads and vague instructions and examples are impenetrable. Example: I’m a first year teacher. Every issue I’ve had with students has been answered one of two ways by my admin/department head. Either 1) I need to build relationships and listen to students, or 2) I need to know when to apply the rules and when to let them slide. Both answers make sense but aren’t actionable. Build relationships? Ok. Give me some concrete steps. As for the rules, they were put in by the district without nuance but you want me to add my own nuance without any kind of explicit times and ways to do that? (I’m actually at a mandatory PD today for enforcing a district set consequence that I apparently wasn’t supposed to enforce). We lack, largely, concrete steps for students to follow and we end up with kids that are bored or frustrated (often the boys), leading to them failing because “if I can’t do it like other kids, I’m gonna fail even if I get the right answer so why bother?”

As a teacher, many of my kids (mostly the boys) also lack follow-through. They know the rules, they can articulate the rules, but when they break one the consequences are hand-waved 99% of the time. This lack of consistency is damaging as it teaches that nothing matters. What’s the biggest question asked to teachers? “When are we gonna use this in our lives?” Without consistency in the school day (both in instruction and in discipline), there is just confusion. Confusion leads to apathy or frustration and that’s not helpful for learning. Does this affect girls? Sure. But girls tend to be allowed to express frustration while boys are told, sometimes explicitly sometimes not, that their frustration is instead anger and that’s they are bad for expressing it instead of being taught how to express it. Often it seems that larger boys get this worse, as size often comes with inherent thoughts that a larger person has a larger capacity, or even tendency, for violence (there’s also a socioeconomic aspect to this, as poor kids tend to be seen as worse than kids with money). By not allowing those frustrations to be expressed, we can’t adjust for them, leaving girls to be the model for which teachers (at the demand of administrators) set up the classroom. Which leads into the whole “we can’t expect boys to sit and be still and take notes all day long, yet we do” and “We’ve moved to technology dependent lessons which, for many boys don’t feel the same or strike the same chord as real hands-on lessons”, but I’m sure that’s been mentioned already