Marie Ducote-Comeaux - Certified Trainer
E-mail: ducotecomeaux@cox.net

Counting backyard neighborhood school rooms, I have been teaching for nearly 40 years!  Professionally, however, I began teaching junior high in August of 1990.   I absolutely loved every single class period of every single day, of every single year for the following 14 years.   In 2004, having earned an MA in education administration, I took a position as assistant principal in charge of curriculum and discipline—Pre-K through 8th grade.  It’s probably this combination of “curriculum and discipline” that set me up for my fall into gender-based learning.
   
My interest in gender learning differences began when I read “The Trouble with Boys,” in Newsweek (January, 2006.  I kept that article and shared it often with faculty members when they’d express frustration with an overactive boy in their classroom. 

The line that grabbed me by the heart was Michael Thompson’s  “….boys are treated like defective girls.”  Slowly I started thinking in terms of gender differences and discovered the work of Michael Gurian.  I found myself becoming an advocate among my colleagues for misunderstood (or under-understood) boys.

I look forward to the opportunity to share my passion for gender-based differentiation with educators who have the power to change kids’ lives.  I am excited about playing a role in reducing the “frustration” that kids suffer when their individual needs are not recognized.    In my junior high classroom, I had a gift for connecting with kids.   It comes quite naturally for me to love them right where they are for exactly who they are today—understanding that tomorrow they may be somewhere else entirely. The more, we as educators, understand about how the minds of boys and girls work, the more we can affect great change.