Giving disorganised boys the tools for success

One afternoon in her cozy office suite in this affluent suburb south of San Francisco, she asked John Ferrari, 14, to go through a 2-inch stack of papers he pulled from his backpack. He sorted through the papers, placing them in separate piles — writing, spelling, vocabulary, tests — to bring order to his loose-leaf binder.

“Oh, here’s my class schedule, what a relief,” said John, an eighth grader. A moment later, he stumbled across something even more valuable. “I have to turn this in tomorrow,” John said. “It’s the name I want on my diploma.”

With girls outperforming boys these days in high school and college, educators have been sparring over whether there is a crisis in the education of boys. Some suggest the need for more single-sex schools, more male role models or new teaching techniques. Others are experimenting with physical changes in classrooms that encourage boys to move around, rather than trying to anchor them to their seats.

And so private counselors in places as diverse as Chicago, New York City, Sarasota and Bennington who guide juniors and seniors in applying in college, have devised elaborate systems — from color-coded, four-month calendars that mark dozens of deadlines to file boxes that students must take to each session.

Goldberg, Homayoun and other private tutors say boys must learn not only how to organize, but also how to manage their time and even how to study.

Robert Gittings, a sixth grader, has been coming weekly to work with Homayoun since September. He, too, is asked to empty his backpack, and on one visit, cheerfully removed a vast collection of textbooks, binders, workbooks, paperback books and hardcover library books.

Most of the binders were orderly and reasonably neat. But there was a stack of papers from science, nearly an inch thick, that needed to be sorted.

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