Beautiful Distractions

I taught a Vacation Bible School class years ago that, simply by chance, turned out to be a class of boys. We used drama to memorize our verses. We used action to play out the Scripture. We charged from one station to the next like the good Christian Soldiers that we were.

The pencils maintained their pristine points, while the workbooks gathered dust on the table.

If I'd had ONE girl in that class, I could not have taught the same way. We'd have had to do the workbooks at some point. I was so grateful to be able to reach & teach the boys without workbooks.

Dr. William Campbell Douglass II, M.D. has a newsletter about common sense medicine. He talks about the distraction that pretty women pose to men in academic (or other) settings. Here's what he says:

Their drop-dead good looks make our minds turn to mush.

When I had a few moments free from the distractions of the pretty women in my life, I read about a study in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology that looked at how these women damage our thinking.

The study asked men to perform a simple memory test. Then, they repeated the test after talking to other men, and talking to beautiful women. What they found was unsurprising: The more attractive the woman, the worse they did on that test.

Women, on the other hand, performed about the same on their tests no matter who they spoke to, proving once again that whoever called them the weaker sex was probably weak in the head.

Single gender classrooms work.

A respected medical journal verifies what my experience teaching all-girls, all-boys, and mixed classes has long ago taught me. "Male and female He created them." They do not think alike. I'm thankful for the differences. And I'm thankful for this information because every time there's a single gender class to teach, my hand is going up fast.

How are you going to use your knowledge to help someone today?