[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_75

Old baggage, Lissa Evans, 2018

When I read Mary Ann Sieghart's Guardian article “Why do some men misbehave?” I immediately thought of old baggage. Whenever we talk about sad cultural legacies, I think of old baggage. I also think of old baggage every time I find myself facing a patriarchal system that seems unshakable. “Old baggage is an obstacle—with roots in the past—that makes it difficult to pursue our goals in the present.

In her book, Lissa Evans starts by recounting the fight for the vote by English women. She shows the old baggage that feminism has carried over those years: being seen with hostility and suspicion, even by women themselves. Siege art's talks about why some men have an overconfidence problem.

The old baggage at play, in this case, is, obviously, the cultural and educational system that builds this network of hyper-security for men and chronic insecurity for women. And how this network is maintained and strengthened throughout people's lives.

It wasn't new for me. What I didn't expect, however, was one of the examples reported in the article. Sieghart says that statistically, teachers reward male students more than their female peers and give males more attention. Reading these lines, I felt a pang of pain: despite all my efforts in trying to fight gender difference, I contributed to creating it. I also rewarded male students more.

The typology of the class and the particular structure of the groups within it change profoundly depending on the type of school, the geographical region, and the historical period. From my experience as a teacher in Italian middle schools, I can say that in my classes, it was pretty standard to find greater liveliness and opposition from the male sex rather than from the female sex. On average, girls between 10 and 14 tended to be more attentive to the rules, diligent in their work, and more responsible towards their peers. On average, boys of the same age were less autonomous, more resistant to regulations, and careful to seek their own identity within the class group, even to the detriment of their performance. It is not a question of different genetic dispositions but of a binary educational system that continues to be reproduced within families.

The division of gender roles takes place in the cradle, with the colors pink for girls and blue for boys. Then,it is reinforced with toys: the girls are given babies to care for, miniature kitchens, fashionable Barbie dolls,males, toy cars, superheroes, and construction toys. Let's take the average Italian heterosexual couple as an example. We see how, for children, the divide is increasingly bifurcated by looking at their parents and considering them as a model and mirror of reality: the mother who spends more time doing household chores and taking care of children, compared to a father occupied with "more important matters." The same way of educating children follows this bipartition: from the different tone of voice with which boys and girls are addressed, from the various recommendations made to them to the other kinds of principles taught to them. The side of responsibility, care, and modesty is highlighted much more in females than in males, who concentrate on the aspect of doing.

When these same children sit in class, they bring all their internalized differences and reproduce them to school. If, at home, the female was told to obey, stay calm, not attract attention, and do her job humbly, you will have the classic "good little girl" who does her homework carefully and is afraid to raise her hand even when she knows the answer. On the other hand, those boys who have been educated to action, to occupy all the space they want because the world will be theirs, and who have not been given too many ethical limits because "they are just children" (and because modesty is a female virtue), will not only be more resistant to rules and authority of the teacher but also less respectful towards their classmates. Even though I am speaking in a generalizing way, using my personal experience as a reference, I do not believe this situation is unique and only concerns me.

I didn't pay more attention to males due to a cognitive bias or an unconscious internalization of the patriarchal system that wants the man in the front row and the woman in the second one. My behavior resulted from a strategy for my survival and that of the class.

When I had noisy, inattentive students with low performance and an oppositional attitude in class, I tried to involve them as much as possible, often rewarding their shy contribution in a highly positive way. It was my solution to avoid oppressive and punitive systems and to build a relationship of collaboration and trust for the benefit of the students and the entire class group. Unfortunately, students with "lively behaviors" heavily affect their peers' learning and participation. I applied this strategy beyond gender. The fact that the majority of cases occurred in male students, I believe, is the consequence of what I wrote above.

After reading the article, however, I wondered why I didn't use the same positive intensity in the feedback given to the female students who, in my experience, were the best in conduct and performance.

The reason is that girls often showed more discomfort in receiving compliments; they tended to turn red and then avoid participating for fear of further attention, and very frequently, when praised, they risked becoming the target of teasing by males. To pass on a gratifying message to them, I was forced to take advantage of the moment of handing in the tests, in which I called the students to the desk, one by one, and with the excuse of showing the errors, I gave an overview of their scholastic path, away from the ears of the companions. Is that how school consolidates female self-limitation and reinforces excessive confidence in males?

I wonder when we will stop carrying this old baggage as families and institutions. Above all, I wonder how we teachers can avoid reproducing the system with our choices and behaviors without causing further damage to our students and ourselves. Whatever anyone says, managing a class of more than twenty children constructively is not easy.