You heard it here first

The only problem with working in a coffee shop – which is, until such time as they make waterproof laptops and I install a desk in the shower, the place at which I consistently achieve my highest productivity – is that every so often people decide to have meetings there. Four or five people, highly confidential information, much criticism of other people not in the room – and they appear to believe that all the rest of us are deaf. You don’t want to eavesdrop but unless you have headphones and head-banging music that you can crank up and drown them out (various Tchaikovsky pieces count as excellently head-banging for present purposes), they don’t give you any choice; they impose their confidences upon you.

At any rate, for the past week I’ve gotten in the habit of getting up early and going to a coffee shop to work for awhile on the backlog items that don’t require talking to people and that don’t get done easily while I’m at work because people keep coming up and talking to me. And this morning six ladies settled down at the table next to me and started talking about everything that needed to be fixed at the Catholic school to which they all apparently send their children. I’m glad they care, but I was finding out more than I wanted to know about which teachers they thought were hopelessly incompetent and how the daughter of the lady in yellow had “politely” told a teacher that she was a bad teacher and the teacher had inexplicably been unhappy about that...yikes. (Those of you who deal with teenaged girls: wouldn’t you love to be told by a fifteen-year-old girl that you are no good at your job in a manner that said fifteen-year-old girl considers “polite”?)

So I decided to crank up the sound barrier. But before I could dig the headphones out of my laptop bag, one of them complained about one teacher’s policy of “when your homework’s due, it’s due, and if you forgot it in the locker you get a zero and no makeup opportunities will be presented.” Now, I remember this policy from when I was myself in school back in the Dark Ages (though I also remember that there was perhaps a tenth as much homework as my kids seem to be saddled with). It had always struck me as on the stringent end of the spectrum, certainly, but hardly abnormal. But suddenly I realized something, and I am hereby going to make a you-heard-it-here-first prediction:

Within the next five years somebody is going to sue a school district for sexual discrimination because some teacher has exactly this policy, on the grounds that it discriminates unfairly against boys.

I think it’s inevitable. If I didn’t have deep moral objections to most litigation, I’d go find a lawyer and say, “Hey, I have an idea that’s gonna make you a ton of money if you get there first, and I’ll tell you what that idea is if you sign a contract guaranteeing me a 1% cut of your gross take from lawsuits of this type.” It has suddenly sunk in on large sections of our society that our educational system is predominantly run by, and its processes predominantly designed by, people who think boys are jerks and should be a lot more like girls...you know, the kind of people who think incentives based on competition are bad because they hurt the losers’ self-esteem, etc. I think this is fairly obvious to anybody who knows and likes boys and appreciates the ways in which they are different from girls. Furthermore, the empirical evidence that boys are served by our educational system even worse than are girls, is rapidly getting past the point where it can be at all easily refuted, especially in front of a jury that doesn’t understand ways in which statistics can be deceptive.

Now one of those differences, and one that I don’t think an intelligent lawyer would have any problem establishing to a stupid jury’s satisfaction, is that girls are generally speaking better at the sorts of organizational skills that have nothing to do with actually knowing the subject matter but have everything to do with remembering where you stuck your homework when you finished it last night. It will, I think, be trivial for a lawyer to show that a policy like the one that that mom described will have a disproportionately negative impact on boys. I myself don’t think that’s a reason to sue anybody (when the boys grow up and they show up for work without that presentation the boss wanted, saying, “I left it at home,” will not fly), but in a society that thinks Title IX is a great piece of legislation, clearly I’m deeply in the minority in that view.

Somebody’s gonna sue, and it’s gonna be a slam dunk, and five years from now public schools will have all had to start wrestling with how to devise homework policies that do not “unfairly” discriminate against boys. And good luck coming up with a policy that will keep the boys’ lawyers happy and won’t get you sued by the girls’ lawyers.

You heard it here first.