While many students are indifferent to the fact that most honors classes have significantly more girls than boys in individual classes, science teacher Robert Winters notes the ratio of girls to boys in each of his classes and conforms his teaching methods to what he finds.

Every year in the summer, teachers get lists of the students enrolled in their classes. The first action Winters takes when he gets his lists is to identify the ratio of girls to boys. Winters, who has taught here for a total of 12 years, only teaches IB Biology this year. According to Winters, during the summer he plans ahead about how he will modify his teaching style for the incoming class combinations.

“Any class that has a lot of boys in it, you typically have issues,” Winters said.

Boys are stereotypically known for being energetic in class, but girls seem to be more mellowed out, according to Winters, so he modifies his teaching methods to keep the class alert and learning. This makes teaching easier for him and learning better for his students in the classes that have more boys than girls.

Winters changes his classes to help students pay attention and stay focused. In classes with more boys, he will go out more to collect data because he feels boys are more hands-on. With classes with more girls, Winters believes that group work is better for them, so he assigns more group projects.

According to Winters, classes with significantly more girls are more common for him to see than classes with significantly more boys.

“If you wanted to create a system to drive boys crazy, this would be it,” Winters said, speaking of the current way school is set up.

That statement usually holds true with boys getting restless and talkative in class. Yet some boys, such as Paul Pham, a senior who has Winters for IB biology, are dedicated to their work and are not phased much by the people in his classes.

According to Pham, some boys can hinder the classroom experience, yet he has never been in any classroom settings like that. Based on this statement made by Pham, there seems to be an ongoing stereotype that boys are more disorderly than girls, whether or not it always holds true.

One might wonder why there are random classes with more boys. The answer is a thing called “tracking,” which is when a group of students have a few classes at the same time, and then their schedules turn out very similar because of those classes.

“It’s unusual to have a class of more boys. It’s because of their schedules,” Winters said.

For example, a group of boys may have taken classes, such as Auto Shop, together, so the rest of their schedules become similar based on their previous classes together.

Obviously there are two sides to this story. Students like Pham can see how the amount of boys can change the class, but he does not always think about the gender of their classes.

“Classes are harder based on [the] content [more] than the people,” Pham said.

Another student, a junior named Timber Rice, had Winters for general biology last year, and this year decided to take IB biology with him.

“He teaches the class at a faster pace, and he knows that we selected this class and that we want to learn,” Rice said.

Rice plans to major in biology in college. According to Rice, Winters helped her make this decision because he made biology fun and interesting to learn. She also said that Winters finds new ways to explain things and makes class a fun environment.

“I believe that in general, grades and behavior are linked in high school,” Winters said in an email, “As boys become more engaged, then grades go up.”

Winters may adjust his classes to fit the needs of the different genders, but he notes that the ratio itself does not impact overall student achievement.

Students in IB classes do not usually realize that Winters modifies his teaching methods based on the girl to boy ratio. Some do not understand why he does it. In previous years, students in General Biology have noticed what Winters does and have seen their individual achievements.

In previous years though, Winters has changed seating charts, trying to have the girls and boys equally spread out, with no tables with a predominant gender. Winters says that students he has had previously have caught on to what he was doing, grumbled at first, then realized that the seating chart was making them more productive and decided to stay when given the choice to move.

Winters has seen how changing his classes has affected his students and believes it helps their learning experience.