NOTE: Slides that are referenced in this speech, may be obtained by contacting JoAnn Deak:

The DEAK Group, 333 Boston Mills Rd., Hudson, OH. 44236 Phone: 330.701.7945

www.DEAKgroup.com

Our next introducer is the NAPSG secretary, my long-time colleague Brad Lyman, and his recently developed organizational skills that led him to that high position.

MR. LYMAN: If anybody has seen a set of car keys, I may not be able to get my car from the parking lot.

This is all about coming together and finding ourselves, personal growth. Last night I discovered something, the inner country musician in me. I have decided I'm going to write a song -- I haven't done it yet -- called "Little Girls Shoes." Some of you I have heard were wanting the words for "Little Boys Shoes," but mine won't be about my reminiscences as a little girl. It will be about my total ineffectiveness, total ignorance in raising my three daughters. I made the mistake when I was in high school of saying, "Gosh, I wish someday I'd just be surrounded by women." God has a very good sense of humor, and I have learned so much.

But enough about that. So be looking for my song, Little Girls Shoes, to be coming out shortly.

It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. JoAnn Deak. She's spent more than twenty years as an educator and psychologist helping children develop into competent adults. The latter half of that period is focused on working with parents and teachers in the roles as guides for children. On her website is a quote that best describes her perspective of her new book. Quote, "Every interaction a child has during the course of a day influences the adult that child will become."

Parents of educators and schools in the United States and abroad, as well as organizations such as the National Association of Independent Schools, International Schools Association of Africa, and many others have heralded Dr. Deak's ability to demystify complex issues of child development -- thank you -- learning, identifying formation, and brain research. Mary Pipher has called her "an earnest and rigorous researcher, a good combination of head and heart."

Michael Thompson, author of Raising Cane and Best Friends, Worst Enemies, has said that her writing "offers parents humor, understanding, parenting, philosophy, and well-founded words of wisdom."

Dr. Deak has been an advisor to several organizations worldwide. The list is long. She has been awarded the 2003 Woman Achievement Award by the National Coalition of Girls' Schools, and was given the first Female Educator of the Year Award in 2002 by Orchard House School. She has been named visiting scholar in New Zealand, 2004 visiting scholar for the Red Oak School in 2004-2005, and the resident scholar for the Gardner-Carney Leadership Institute in Colorado Springs for 2006, 2007, 2008.

Dr. Deak has written two books, How Girls Thrive, published by NAIS in 1998, and Girls Will Be Girls: Raising Confident and Courageous Daughters, published in 2002 by Hyperion.

By the way, JoAnn has been a suggested speaker on many, many occasions over the years, and it was just so

wonderful to have her. Please join me in welcoming Dr. JoAnn Deak. <slide 1>

DR. DEAK: How many of you have heard me speak before? Let's do it the other way. How many have not? A decent group of virgins.

Peg, would you mind standing up next to me for just a second? Can you see us? Can you guess that we are quite different human beings? And yet, I find myself, the entire time that she has been speaking, sitting here nodding my head and I find that I agree with 100 percent of what she said. The issue for us in this room is how to set an educational culture and milieu, no matter what your gender is and no matter what your age or learning style, that, as I like to say, makes your amygdala sing. And when your amygdala sings, the cortex follows. Are you hearing what I'm saying?

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: No.

DR. DEAK: The amygdala is the center of the emotional part of the brain and when it is feeling a positive emotion, it tends to kick into gear the thinking part of the brain better and enhances learning. And when it is feeling frustrated or alienated or too weird to live, it kicks the cortex and says, "Ick. Don't like this. Don't want to do it. Won't do it well."

And so I think our job is simple. We just have to grab the amygdala of every brain in front of us. Isn't this fun? But there's more to it than that, obviously.

I rarely agree to speak for 45 minutes, because in our field, understanding human beings is so complex that we can't even begin the conversation in 45 minutes. But you are such an important group, because I believe we have enough information that as a society handles its girls and what it does with them is highly correlated with the success of a culture and with its treatment of everybody in that culture. So you hold my future world in your hands, and so I'll talk to you for two minutes, 45, 150, as many as you want. You are so incredibly important.

For those of you who haven't heard me speak, I'm going to skip over some things. Peg is going to feel like she disagrees with me, but if I had more time, she wouldn't. But we can also do the disagreement in our question-and-answer.

The brain research is quite clear. If you're sitting there thinking, That's just not right, she doesn't know what she's talking about, or I don't really like her, and you're a female, that will influence your learning tremendously, and you will negate much of what I say for the entire time. Isn't that something? So I can't afford to let you females sit there and think that.

So if I say something you disagree with -- only Peg is not allowed to participate in this, because we're going to argue publicly later -- if I say something you disagree with down to your toes, if you think I don't know what I'm talking about, stop me and don't wait for the question and answer, okay? Come at me now, and we'll have a little conversation.

You probably notice I have on a nice silk jacket. It's one of my nicer outfits. It matches. I'm 60. This is coming off. Plus you'll probably notice that I have on incredibly wonderful tennis shoes. And these microphone things were made by men for men. They were designed to go on your belt, which as a 60-year-old woman, I haven't seen a belt for a long time. And this was designed to go on your tie. And often when I'm talking, body parts start moving, and so it makes little swishy noises, too.

The Inventors Hall of Fame is actually ten miles from my house. You should go to it. It's really quite incredible, the things that women invented but up until I think it was 1890, females were not allowed to get patents, so many of the things we thought were invented by men were invented by women who used some guy's name to get it out there. You should go to it. It's really quite something. <slide 2>

The tennis shoes. Why? My message to you is this. Those of you dealing with girls and boys, you need to play the game. You need to have your silk suit, you need to have your advanced placement courses, you need to have your kids get good SATs. But only do enough in your school to let that happen. And the rest of the time, wear tennies, metaphorically speaking. Schools were not designed for human brains. They weren't designed for girl human brains and they weren't designed for boy human brains. And we have to change dramatically.

Having been a school administrator myself, I know it's almost impossible to change a long-term school dramatically, because your roots go so deep. But I want you to push as hard as you can against that envelope. So be bold. Wear tennies with your silk suit.

The world is changing. Make sure everybody in your school reads these books and watches this video. I predict in five years, SAT scores will be so unimportant to life success and job-seeking that we will throw them out the window. I pray sooner than that. There is very little correlation with high SAT scores and success in anything. University and life. All of these books on this video show us the coverage and information is something that will be in a fingertip and should not be a huge part of our curriculum and our time spent on the molding of these brains in front of us. I have not been to a school yet that has existed for more than ten years that doesn't spend most of its time going in a direction that is unrelated to where the world is going. Be bold, but be careful. You'll get fired. So be bold. Wear the silk outfit. But use what Peg's talking about. We're developing a whole raft of research and information to feed to our parents. If you don't educate your parents as well as you educate your students, you will be fired, because they will make you do things that are not good for human brains. <slide 3>

This happens to be the motto of a school where I spent 21 years of my life. Ann Klotz, sitting right there, is the head of this school. She's a theater major. Wouldn't you know somebody like that would come up with a "Dream, Dare, Do" kind of thing. And that's the theme. Not only be bold, but dream, dare, and do. Thank you for giving that saying to that school. The girls actually have bracelets that say "Dream, Dare, Do."

Quick things. This is where Peg is going to feel like she disagrees, but she really doesn't. Everything is pointing to we are as different from the neck up as we are from the neck down in terms of sex. Mary was saying to me -- she's now writing, "Mary was saying to me" -- Mary was saying to me, did I mean gender when I said this, and I said, "Well, clinically speaking, sex is the neurobiology you come with. Gender is what the world adds on top of that in terms of how a female should be, or a male." So technically, I will always talk about sex differences, unless I'm talking with adolescents. And then I just make it "gender" all the time because if I use the word "sex" for them, I lose them in the understanding of what I'm talking about. They tend to head from the neck down. But for you, I'll use the appropriate terms. <slide 4>

Please read this article and have your constituents read it. It's a nice quick summary of some of the brain research that we have, and it highlights these areas of the brain and how the wiring is somewhat different and the predisposition is somewhat different. We are stunned in the field of neurobiology how strong the hard wiring can be in some people. On the other hand, to talk out of the other side of my mouth, we are stunned with how plastic the brain is for a lifetime. And so whenever I'm asked the question about anything related to the brains or human beings, two words always come out of my mouth, and what would those two words be? "It depends." Human beings, by sex, are on a continuum above the neck. We have patterns that show up with 80 percent of girls, we have patterns that show up with 80 percent of boys, but about 20 percent are more of a mush and within the pattern of girls, there's great diversity, and within the pattern of boys there's great diversity, but knowing those patterns help us in responding to what human beings need.

So I'm supposed to talk to you about girls. Peg did a great job talking about how the neurobiology of boys, the predisposition, is not a good fit with the structure of schools. Example. Boys have a 24-hour testosterone cycle. Did you know that? Testosterone is at peak production in the morning after full awakening. Studies have given vials of testosterone and shot them into people called women. The testosterone has a profound effect on the need for movement. It is the worst time to ask boys to sit down and be still and listen to details.

Testosterone also causes the cortex not to focus as much on details. Isn't this a kick? And yet, what do we do? I work with some boys' schools that have put PE in the morning and have changed things tremendously. Twenty percent of your girls produce more testosterone than the other girls. They will portray more like a boy in terms of their need for movement. So really, there's no such thing as a single-sex school from the neck up, because your 20-percenters often have similar needs and developmental timelines of the other sex. So it isn't quite as simple as single-sex schools. <5>

So I'm going to make the case the neurobiology of that pattern within the 80 percent of girls isn't a perfect fit often with what the world that we know is going to be and is now. And so one of my main messages to you, whether we're talking about boys or girls, is that we have to do two very difficult things. We have to accept, for instance, that girls, in general, can sit for longer periods of time and actually like to focus on details and get the right answer, you know, just think it's wonderful.

We have to understand that. Use it. Let it happen. But also go against it. When you're doing math, you should have girls figure out three different ways to do a problem, not one way. With boys, you may focus them down in order to get the practice of doing it one way enough that they don't keep trying 80 different ways and not being able to come up to the level of achievement, if you will, with girls.

So you see how we're recognizing where what I call the big rubber bands are, using them but also going to the small rubber bands and stretching the heck out of them. It's a dual message that I'm giving us, and I don't care what your sex is. I'm going to do that based on the pattern of your brain. If I know what your sex is, I know 50 percent about you already. That's a lot. <slide 6>

You probably know that this is on the NAIS website and that you should read it. It basically has this picture on it, which I think was stolen from me, but that's okay. When I look at your brains, your heads -- I'll choose somebody that I know, so I won't bother her too much -- I don't see this wonderful clean hair. I see an assortment of rubber bands, because all the sectors of the brain, whether it's the part that deals with organization in the forehead, whether it's the part that deals with visual images in the back of the head, whether it's the part that deals with sticking out your tongue in the middle of the head, every sector and every brain is somewhat different in size and that size has something to do with how easily you're going to be able to do that thing from the get-go. <7>

So I use the analogy of rubber bands. You don't get to choose them. They come to you as a result of a variety of things. My rubber bands in the areas that went together to do spelling were humongous. I became a natural speller, taught myself to read, and was the best speller in the state of Ohio by the age of age 10. My genetic brother sometimes believes I'm adopted, but I was not. My genetic brother didn't get the same rubber band. He got a smaller one, and had to work, in those traditional days of spelling workbooks, to get an A in spelling, and he hated it, and if he wasn't such a good boy, he would have dropped out.

No brain has the same size rubber bands in all areas. So I say to kids, "Bad in spelling there, Lee? Not your fault. Got a small rubber band. Now work on it. Because you're quite plastic."

And so the crux and the hard part is going to be: How do you get these human beings to use their big rubber bands that brings them passion and easy learning, and how do you get them to log in or spend enough time on the small ones so that it equips them to be facile in the areas that they didn't come in as naturally facile in? And this has some sex messages for us.

Before I go on, thank you. I knew somebody was being bothered by what I said.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Could you just explain what you mean by the "neurologic unit"?

DR. DEAK: Yes. That's a person. You call them people. I call them neurologic units. And when I deal with children, I call them neurologic units. I do that purposely so that they start to see themselves not as JoAnn Deak or Diana Beebe, but as a neurologic unit -- I've been wanting to do this for a long time with this woman, one of the gurus of girls' education sitting right here, and I get to mess up her hair. (I'd pick on Blair Stambaugh, but she left.) I don't want her to think of herself necessarily only as Diana Beebe. I want her to understand that she's a neurologic unit. She came in with different rubber bands and she didn't get to choose. The big ones will pull her, and she'll want to do them. And she'll smile and her amygdala will go, "Oh, joy." And the small ones she'll want to avoid, and her amygdala will go, "Oh, I'm scared, I'm frustrated, I'm angry."

But what intelligence really is, the very complex thinking is, is when many of the rubber bands all start working together. So you can't afford to let any stay small. That's what we mean by formative years. It isn't that a window closes, but your rubber bands -- this is what they meant -- are more elastic at certain periods in your life.

I'm really bad at instrumental music. I quit after six months when I was eight. Had I kept going, now I'm 60. I could take instrumental music, but I'm not going to get the extreme that I would have gotten if I had stayed with it. That's what is meant, and that's why parents rush to do things, because the elasticity, once readiness is there, is going to be the key.

Because for boys, for instance, phonemic awareness on an average happens six to 24 months later than a girl's brain. And without that readiness, you can try to stretch until you're blue in the face and it isn't going to happen. And sectors have different readiness at different ages based on sex. Isn't this fun? So it isn't that you don't teach boys reading when they're four. But how you teach them had better not be very phonemically based. It had better be related to visual memory and context and exciting books like Snot Coming Out of Your Nose and things like that. Right? To grab the amygdala so it doesn't turn off to this thing that you're asking it to do that may feel like a small rubber band.

So the bigger the rubber band -- these are what I call natural rubber bands, what you got from your sex and from your gene pool. And the bigger the rubber band, if you look at young children, the more they will head in that direction. So observation teaches us a lot. Put me in a room with a kid, or you, for half an hour and I'll tell you I knew 50 percent of your brain if I knew about your gender, if I knew about your sex, about your parents and things. And now put me in a room with you and I'll watch and see what you choose to do and not choose to do, what makes your amygdala sing and what doesn't. And I'll start to flesh in the other rubber bands. That's self-explanatory. I already said that. Earlier is better if there's readiness there.

Plasticity happens all through life, but better, everyone agrees, in the first decade. I'll give you two. Even into the third decade, we see incredible plasticity here. The key is going to be to match your curriculum and the time you spend on tasks to what is the most plastic at that point in time.

Example. Adolescence. We're seriously worried about adolescent brains in this country for a variety of reasons. I have a three-hour workshop on that. Invite me, especially if it's outside of Ohio. For instance, the prefrontal cortex, the seat of judgment and organization, is growing massively during what we call the magic decade. Adolescence, ten-ish through twenty-ish, is also where ultimately morality is going to be.

When I think of Liza Lee, I think of a huge prefrontal cortex. I would love to brain-image this woman. But it's very plastic during that time. Also, parts of it, the organization parts, aren't functioning well, because when it's growing, some parts don't work well. You think of an adolescent with floppy arms and legs that aren't quite coordinated. That's what the prefrontal cortex is like in terms of organization, especially for boys.

But it's also a time of huge impact, we're finding, with character or moral development. Your middle schools and your upper schools should be embedded with judgment, decision-making, and, and.

And newer work looking at the amygdala during the magic decade, it's swollen. Did you hear me? It's swollen. And in most human beings, the surges of hormones cause it to put more emotion attached than ever before. And one of the patterns that we're seeing is what happens emotionally at especially a high negative level -- look at the trauma research -- what happens emotionally, especially at the high negative level, tends to go into the hippocanthus and stay there for a lifetime. Do you understand what I'm saying? Most of us still view ourselves in the painful moments of how we were viewed in middle school and high school. And getting it out of our system is a lifelong project.

That's why everybody in this room should first take the Hippocratic oath, "First do no harm." Because harm at a high level, these people will be spending $300 an hour in private practice with me. I hate private practice. Don't do it.

So I'm going to zip through these really fast. I only have 15 minutes. It's just not right. Well, I might have to take a tad of your bathroom time, okay? Just a tad. <slide 8>

I want you to consider these three female characteristics. These are the FMRIs that Peg talked about. We have thousands and thousands of them now. The problem, as she said when we argued a bit before things started, is that an MRI, even though it shows you a sex difference, does not tell you what to do about it or what it means. That's the problem. <slide 9>

So there's no research saying, "Look, girls have basically two language processing centers. Boys have one." There's no clear research to say what that means and what we should do about it. Because research doesn't answer those questions well until way down the road. So what you all are doing now is taking this preliminary brain research and plugging it into what does it mean and what do we do about it. <10>

Peg said the research shows boys talk with fewer words and with less nuance at age 5. Well, look. If your language processing areas -- and we can also see the input areas being bigger at birth -- in my parlance, a girl comes in with a slightly bigger rubber band than a boy in those areas. That's what that means. And, you can see in the fine print, we even see more of a dramatic difference early on in life. This is a man and a woman.

And so what it says is, you don't have to sign up for Mom and Me Mandarin, but you had better be talking a lot to this blue rubber band, reading to it, listening to it, to stretch it, so that when it hits school, it's not going to be equal to a girl, but it will be more comfortable in a language-based learning situation.

For a girl, I'm going to say something very bold later. Unless a girl -- a stereotypical girl, not a 20 percenter, who has a brain more like a boy -- but for 80 percent of your girls in your schools who are above-average intelligence, if they don't have a reading disability, stop having them read so bloody much, for God's sake, and don't dissect every book with questions and journal writing and what does it mean, because you're taking their already big rubber band and just blasting it out of their heads at a time when you could be doing very important things in the stem areas.

See? I have gray hair. I'm going to be bolder and balder with you. I refuse to be gentle. Ha, forget that. I thought I was going to retire next year, so I started to do bolder. Then I looked at my 401(K) and I'll be nicer to you. I'm going to be around for a while.

So part of the wiring difference shows at birth and in the early years a slightly different pattern. This is not exact. There are exceptions to it. It's more of a continuum. But in general, if you have an 80 percent girl, some or all of these will be slightly bigger at birth than 80 percent of boys. If you have an 80 percent boy, some or all of these will be slightly bigger, just by sex preference, than 80 percent of girls. 20-percenters are more of a mush, and we all have all of them.

Everybody in the field agrees that this has been the result of an evolution over millions of years. The problem is, in 2008, we don't care if the male of the species can figure out how to go ten miles to kill the sabertooth tiger and get back without a map. And now we have maps, and that same guy won't use them, because it is more detailed and visual and he doesn't want to do that, because that's a smaller rubber band. <11>

I am making crass and general gender statements. Please water it down and take it with a grain of truth that it comes from, but know that this pattern is what we see in schools over and over. And I'm making the case to you with young girls, many of them, Go here early to help balance us out, because when intelligence really is, it's when all the parts are big enough to be fluid. So that then my visual/spatial thinking combines with my great language thinking, and, and, and, and that's what the highest level of thinking is. <12>

So quickly speaking, I would say these three things to schools, in terms of looking at that imbalance somewhat, in terms of cortex. I want girls' schools to put math in the morning. And please look at curriculum like everyday math, which gets girls to think and not do first single-digit addition until it's mastered, and then single-digit subtraction until it's mastered. Because you know what? It's all the same thing, unless you learn it in that static approach, and then I will get good grades in math. And if you really look underneath that research, what it shows, in general, girls start out being very good at calculation, and only become very good in math concepts and come up to boys if they have had appropriate instruction.

I'm not going to spend time with that because that's a whole other workshop, but I want to get through some of these.

The second thing we see is the thinking, up here, or feeling, down here, is a bit more integrated in the female brain. We see more connections up in the right frontal cortex with emotion than with many males. This is a simple generalization, but it is true that for many females, we attach a little more detailed emotion to things. In general, the female memory system tends to work slightly easier on details. For males, slightly easier on overviews.

So when something happens that I think about and feel, and it hits a high level of emotion -- I have been married to you for ten years. No, 30 years. I haven't. He's yours. I won't take him. But if I have been married to him for 30 years, I'll remember the first week that we were together, how he left his dirty underwear on the bathroom floor, and I had to step on it before I got to the sink to brush my teeth. And then I shape him a little and he stops doing that, and he gets tired sometime in our 30th year together and starts doing it again and I say to him, "Remember on April 18, 1972, when you left your blue jockey shorts" -- he's now into briefs, because older men -- never mind. "When you left your blue" -- and he will go, "What?" So anything we attach emotion to, we see a longer life in the life of females. Isn't that something?

And so I say to teachers of girls, "I will only hire you if a girl believes you care about her." We have growing research to show that if a girl believes a teacher cares about her, her cortex works better. If a girl believes her teacher doesn't care about her -- or an administrator, for that matter -- she will not learn as well.

I wish that wasn't the case. I don't want to have to think about a girl's amygdala. I just want to think about getting her understanding of Mandarin. But if she believes I don't care about her, she's not going to learn Mandarin as well with me.

Don't like this research? We must deal with it. Faculty, especially in girls' schools, need to understand this. That does not mean you have to be sweet and kind. It does not mean you have to be their friend. But even if I push the heck out of you, you know, Peg, it's only because I want you to be the best you can be. And if she believes that, I can really push her against her small rubber bands, and her amygdala won't hold it against me. <13>

This is also what I call the double-whammy.

Yes, so he's just a troublemaker. In a co-ed classroom, if you do nothing about it, the boys will take over the classroom in some way, either with their movement and noise, or if we've programmed them, with their hand.

MR. GALBRAITH: Or their signs.

DR. DEAK: Or their signs. You didn't do that for her.

MR. GALBRAITH: I came to give you a better head, in case you need to rub something else.

DR. DEAK: I have been wanting to do it, but you have to kind of know a person. I don't know him that well.

Oh, this is nice. My amygdala, what I call my red line, goes so high, then my cortex starts to lose it. Okay.

So it's a double-whammy, because we find that with learning attached to memory, it tends to last longer in females than males, in general. Not by much, but -- so we have to watch. When we push a person to a high level of feeling, we had better really want what's happening during that time to stay in the system.

I have been in private practice long enough, I have had girls come to me and say -- not you, not you in this room, but other people -- "When Ms. Smith said this, or the look on my physics teacher's face," it goes right into this thing called the hippocanthus, which is a long-term memory system, and it stays there. And then whenever you come close to taking physics again, it raises its head and goes, "Physics. It's physics. Yick."

So you have to be careful what goes in there. That's the double-whammy of working with girls. In general, more goes in there with girls than boys.

So what does this mean? Let me go back a little. It also means that when you ask a boy to take a risk or do something hard, there's a spurt of testosterone. Part of what that does is cause that part of the species to want to go forward and do.

We don't get a spurt of testosterone, ladies, when we're asked to do something hard or scary. Evolutionarily, the female was designed to avoid risks. I hate this. To put it in easier terms, we were designed to feel more fear and trepidation when asked to do something really hard or scary. Otherwise, the species wouldn't have survived. The problem is, that amygdala was designed not for 2009 and beyond, and we need girls to be able to do hard and scary things. What we see in the psychological world is, the more a girl does that, the more she walks into her fear and trepidation, the more it changes her, and the less fear and trepidation and anxieties she will feel within that next risk. <14>

So all great schools that have girls in them must increase risk-taking and have it embedded in the curriculum. Laurel School has a climbing wall. You were expected to get to the top of that by a certain grade level. Madeira used to have a climbing wall. I don't know if you still do. It was a natural cliff at the back of their property. And all of the incoming girls were expected to get to the top of it, metaphorically and literally.

Embed risk frequently. Girls do not become more resilient, in general, when they operate in their comfort zone. I say this to parents all the time. You want your daughters coming home saying, "Oh, God, that was hard. Oh, I was scared. Oh, that made me nervous."

That's what we call stretch. You're out of your comfort zones, but you're not in the trauma zone. Trauma is stress. There's good stress and that's what we call stretch. Every school that has girls in it should have a conflict management training program. The double-whammy is this. If she says something to hurt my feelings, the purpose of a negative emotion -- understand this -- the purpose of a negative emotion when I get hurt is to kick the cortex into gear to do something to get rid of that. Why don't I stay in conflict with Peg? What happens to the emotion if I stay there fighting with her? It gets worse, doesn't it, for a while? It is a natural neurobiologically predisposed tendency, if she says something to hurt my feelings, for me not to face her, because I want to get rid of that feeling, but to go to Liza Lee and say, "Do you know what Peg said?"

And what does Liza Lee say to me? "Oh, you poor thing."

I feel better. 80 percent of boys report in the studies I have done that when somebody does something like -- I'm now Joe, and this is -- what's your son's name? Mac -- towards him, Mac punches me, I don't get upset and hurt. I get angry, and what do I do? I punch him back. Doing. And then it dissipates.

We must get girls to be able to handle and get so used to it that it's a piece of cake, when a girl does something to upset me, that I stay there and deal with it. For most 80-percent girls, if you don't have some training in this area, they won't reach their real sturdiness until when, ladies? What age? When do you stand up and tell it like it is? 40. 50. 60. That's too long to wait. We must stretch that rubber band. And it takes training.

Most faculties in girls' schools really need training in this area, because they're role models.

Third, action therapy. Know that if you ask a girl to stand up in front of a group of 300 people, even if her friends are sitting there, it's going to be upsetting for her, for most girls, unless they're Ann Klotz, who is a natural ham, who grew up wanting to be in front of the group.

Other than that, you need performance in your schools. Sports, theater, karate, martial arts. Just the way the girls stand changes their perception of being able to face into and doing things.

I will use Ann for one more example. Ann has a famous saying that she uses when she stands up in front of chapel with the girls. "Walk and stand with poise and purpose even if you don't have either." What happens on the outside changes the amygdala. Isn't that weird? That's why martial arts works. We don't care if you know how to do a karate chop. <15>

Third point, emotion and Oxytocin. We produce a lot of Oxytocin throughout our lives. The most easily recognizable dose is when we have a baby. When the baby comes out of the birth canal -- two more minutes, okay? She went two minutes over. It's fair. When the baby comes out of the birth canal, it signals the hormonal system, and we get a surge of Oxytocin. We know what that does because researchers have taken vials of it and shot it into people called men. I truly love these studies. Guess what you guys want to do, Dr. Lee, when we shoot you full of Oxytocin?

DR. LEE: Have babies?

DR. DEAK: No, not have babies. You want to talk, cuddle, nurture, take care of. If we didn't have that surge of Oxytocin after those hours and all that bloody mess, do you really think we would want to hug that thing? Or even have another baby? No. It wipes that out when we get the surge.

Well, guess what? It's one of the best arguments for a girls' school. Because when you ask these girls to do something hard or scary, and we are Oxytocin machines, and you let us talk with you about it or do cooperative learning or we feel connected to you, girls who go to girls' schools in general take more risks and become more resilient than girls who go to co-ed schools. You co-ed schools need to start doing something about that. I hope in my lifetime we put girls' schools out of business. Yeah. Don't you want a world where you don't have to separate girls to get the best out of them, and separate boys? It's not going to happen? So all of you in this room will have a job in your girls' schools, and that's why we want you here in this world, because it isn't happening, as well, in most of the co-ed schools in this country. So I put a challenge to you that are co-ed. <16>

So that Oxytocin is very important. And because of our language skills, we often use language to connect. And again, this leads us to: We must give girls training in how to use language and deal with conflict and connect in a more resilient, independent, growth-producing kind of way. We must, we must, we must. <17>

I say to schools, you should have most of your day with assigned seating that you keep changing about every week. In general, because of a whole variety of neurobiologic things, girls tend to glom on sooner to certain types than boys. "Mary's my friend. I like Mary. I don't like Liza. No, just Mary."

And we see this happening with girls as early as three and four. We have to expand the band of taste buds, so to speak, by making sure that I have to sit next to Liza Lee or Diana or Ann or Helen. And then by spending enough time with them during my high-plasticity time, the first two decades of my life, then not only am I better at handling the Dianas of the world, but my comfort level is better, too, and I will be willing and more interested to get to know people who are very different.

In our world, in terms of diversity, if you look at the books and the research, it says one of the things that the whole world is looking for is human beings who can interact with a wide variety of human beings. And unless you expand the band early with girls, for a lifetime they tend to go only towards their small band. And because girls tend to, what I say, spend most of their Oxytocin needs on their friends, if anything happens in the friend world, they get mean. I have written an article called "Don't Want To Be Mean; Just Want To Be Meaningful."

You must water down this need to connect with the girls having something other than friends that is a passion. I don't care if it's horseback riding, I don't care if it's tutoring little kids. Even if it's acting. I don't care what it is, but something that is a passion that you connect to will water down the importance of those connection needs with friends. Girls' schools must do this. Schools with girls must do this. They must do this.

Please hire what's called connected teachers. You can Google it. Connected teachers do two things. One, they understand that if a girl believes you care about her, she will learn better. And two, if a girl believes you're passionate about teaching or your subject area, she will learn better. Get rid of your burned-out teachers. Send them off to be Fed Ex drivers. I don't care what you do with them. Get them out of your schools. They do not enhance the learning of girls. It's helpful for boys, but not as critical. <18>

And connect the girls in a meaningful away in the school world. I hope you all are looking at something like this, Buckminster Fuller's Global Simulation Workshop. How many of you are using it?

This is a travesty. Not one hand in this place went up. It's a travesty. Write this down and look at it. Real-world problems with real people are part of the simulation. The girls and boys are asked, for instance, what to do in a country where there's genocide and then they have that information. And they become the people making the decisions. If you don't do something in this school, in your school, like this, you are not understanding what we need to be doing with these girls. We have to embed their connectedness meaningfully into the world and get them thinking in a global way of how to problem-solve. This is one of the best programs available. The next time I talk to you, I expect to see some hands up of you that have at least looked at it, if not adopted it.

And this is what I mean by wearing the silk suit with the tennies. Okay, have your advanced placement course in history or whatever. But also have a course in this, whether you call it contemporary topics or whatever you call it, and do this real stuff. Sitting in seats, having chatty little conversations about abstractions is not doing it. It is not doing it, it is not doing it. <19>

Another example. Oh, look. Roland Park School. They're doing the Laramie Project. Jean Brune. I use her as an example, not just for this, but other things. She has asked her girls -- meaning all of what that means -- Roland Park has asked their girls to take on incredibly controversial, meaningful things, and they have taken a hit with the media in a variety of things, and they have all stood tall and dealt with it. It's easy not to do stuff like this. Real easy. <20>

Bruce says I have to go. Those are the three things I covered and what you need to do about it. Thank you. <21 and 22>

MR. GALBRAITH: At quarter to the hour we'll have a fascinating question and answer about the boys by an investigative reporter; about the girls by a frustrated masseuse, I think. See you shortly.