Nature vs. Nurture

I volunteered in my son's class today and was assigned the task of working with a few different groups of students on the long "a" sound when the letters a and i appear together (as in "train", "waist", "hair", and "pain"). A few of the kids were able to work through the assigned tasks quickly and needed more to do, so I asked each of them to pick an "ai" word from the word list and write out a sentence using the word.

Sample sentences from the girls:

"At Christmas, I put braids in my hair." (Note: She used two "ai" words in that one.)

"The snail moved slowly."

"I am sitting in a chair."

Sample sentences from the boys:

"The car ran over the snail."

"A train crashed into a building."

"The man was bitten by a shark and felt pain."

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I don't know why this happens - and by that I mean the Jerry Bruckheimerization of boys - but it really is remarkable that it plays out so boldly sometimes. Most (but certainly not all) of the boys included violence and/or destruction as some aspect of their sentence. The girls were much more varied in their subject matter and I don't think there was a single shark attack to be found in their work.