Education

Protest over Pride month assembly at Los Angeles school turns violent
Reports of fights breaking out over a book reading about inclusive families forced police officers to separate clashing groups

Clashing groups, eh?

Protesters against the assembly outnumbered those who were there in support. Some protesters identified themselves as parents of students in the district but would not give their full names during interviews, saying they had agreed not to, as a group, citing safety concerns. Broadly, they said they felt elementary school was too young to discuss LGBTQ+ issues.

That’s a respectable enough view to hold, no?

Those are the wrong questions. What I want to know is why would any sensible people allow the US petrochemical industry annually to produce 7.2 million metric tons of a poison that causes liver, lung, and brain cancer, and to distribute it as polyvinyl chloride in water pipes, gutters, rubber duckies, and My Little Pony dolls?

Because people like having water pipes, gutters, rubber duckies and My Little Pony dolls.

These types of prohibitions prompted a similar brand of handwringing — the question being posed in op-eds and comments sections running along the lines of, “How can anyone ask us to sacrifice our gas stoves, just to cut carbon emissions?”

That’s the wrong question. What I want to know is what sacrifices we are already making to support a fossil-fuel industry that earned $4 trillion in global profits last year, an industry whose control over us extends even to how we cook bacon-and-eggs.

Because people like being able, to cook bacon and eggs.

How Big Oil is manipulating the way you think about climate change
A logic professor explains how a persistent, subtle fallacy has infected public discussion of climate change

Yet asking how you, individually, can calculate and reduce your carbon footprint is very much asking the wrong question. I don’t want to know what I can do to reduce my estimated 0.00000005 percent of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. I want to know what Big Oil is going to do to phase out the 73 percent of greenhouse gas emissions that they empower — which was 37,190,000,000 metric tons of CO2 in 2021. Of course, the fossil fuel industry would rather send me nosing into the compost in my backyard, than sniffing under the closed doors of political dealmaking that props up the hegemony of the fossil fuel economy.

They’re entirely an idiot, aren’t they?

The reason Big Oil exists is because people enjoy the things that the use of fossil fuels provide. Perhaps it should be so but the logic is really pretty simple, no?

The best way to defend against a red herring fallacy, I tell my students, is to call it out by name — “Oops. That’s a red herring, a question that is intended to distract us from the central issue” – and then to restate the central issue – “Let us focus full attention on the real issue here, which is, how can we stop the fossil-fuel industry from destroying the life-sustaining systems of the planet in their seemingly endless, and certainly shameless, quest for profit”?

By, err, changing the behaviour and desires of 8 billion people, actually.

A Christian teacher has been banned from the profession for “misgendering” a pupil in a case believed to be the first of its kind in the UK.

Joshua Sutcliffe, 33, was ruled by the Teaching Regulation Authority (TRA) to have failed to treat a pupil with “dignity and respect”. He was also found to have failed to protect the pupil’s wellbeing when he did not use the preferred pronouns of a girl who identified as a boy.

Mr Sutcliffe, a former maths teacher at The Cherwell School, a state secondary in Oxford, admitted he did not use the pupil’s preferred pronouns when he praised a group of pupils during a maths lesson by stating, “well done girls”. He claimed that this was not intentional and that he apologised immediately.

The TRA found it was “more probable than not” that he publicly referred to the transgender pupil using female pronouns on other occasions while working at the school between 2015 and 2018, which Mr Sutcliffe denied.

As well as the allegations of misgendering a pupil, Mr Sutcliffe was found guilty of misconduct for expressing his views against gay marriage when questioned by a pupil, and for failing to “consider the potential impact” on his pupils, particularly those who may be from the LGBT+ community, of a statement that being gay was wrong.

Part of education is finding out that views diverge on a number of matters, no?

The consumer finance champion Martin Lewis has highlighted the impact of the new arrangements for student loans, saying some school-leavers may no longer consider a degree is worth the cost.

This is precisely the point of thew entire system.

A degree has a cost. Whether that’s to society or the individual taking one there’s a cost associated with it.

OK.

So, as always we want to do things which add value and not do those things which do not add value.

OK.

So, people should do degrees which add value and not do those which do not.

Pretty simple really.

So, how do we gain that goal? The people making the decision to do a degree or not need to be exposed to the costs of the degree being done. They then face the correct incentives, prices and benefits, to make that decision.

That’s actually the damn point. That people intending to do Mickey Mouse at a third rate tech don’t.

A primary school teacher has claimed that she was sacked after refusing to use an eight-year-old’s preferred pronouns.

The teacher is taking legal action against Nottinghamshire County Council, which runs the school, for alleged unfair dismissal.

She claimed that, two years ago, the school where she worked decided to facilitate the social transition of a girl who wanted to be treated as a boy.

The school instructed all staff to always refer to the girl with male pronouns and a male name, and said that she should use the boys’ toilets and dressing rooms.

“Hey You!” is appropriate at all times, no?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) could mark pupil’s homework and make lesson plans, the Education Secretary has said.

Gillian Keegan said such use of AI could transform teachers’ day-to-day work giving them more scope to focus on “close up and personal” teaching which no computer could emulate.

At which point all you’ve got to do to pass though school is hack the marking LLM. You don’t need to change the results, not at all. Just get it to write the damn stuff for you…..

Rishi Sunak will warn that Britain must end its “anti-maths mindset” if the economy is to grow.

In a major speech, the Prime Minister will argue that numeracy is “every bit as essential as reading” and say it is wrong that it is considered “socially acceptable” to be bad at maths.

Tsk. General numeracy would entirely destroy The Guardian’s comment pages now, wouldn’t it?

On 29 June 2022, all the staff at Queen Mary University of London, where I work, received an email from management. To our horror, they were threatening to withhold 100% of our pay for 21 days of both July and August, because we were participating in a marking boycott over pensions, pay, labour precarity, inequality and working conditions. Life in the higher education sector had been getting tougher ever since I started my career in 2017. But at that moment, I not only resolved to continue to strike, but redoubled my efforts to get as many colleagues as possible to join me on the picket lines. The condescension from my employers made me feel something stark and visceral.

Going on strike does mean losing your pay. That’s what the union’s strike pay fund is for.

Hmm? Your union doesn’t have one of those? Because you’ve not been paying unions dues large enough to build up a strike pay fund?

Gosh.

Middle-class families ‘priced out of private schools’ for their children as fees ‘go up and up’

Prices rise when demand goes up and supply doesn’t. Or, alternatively, if prices rise then fewer people will be willing to pay.

So, the question is, are fewer people sending kiddies to private schools? That would help us untangle what’s going on here. And at least as far as I know no, there are not fewer private school pupils. So, therefore, there must be people willing to pay these higher fees in the old volumes.

The implication of that is that we’ve got more people in the upper middle class who can afford these fees as they move out of reach of the middle class.

But in the “call for supervisors” on Feb 6, lecturers were told: “The programme will be advertised for second or third year UG [undergraduate] students from Black, British Black, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or British-Pakistani, British Bangladeshi students studying at traditional research-intensive universities, who are planning to continue their studies in 2024.”

Why only Musslmen from the subcontinent and not Hindoos? Is they bein’ racist?

The university’s School of Arts and Humanities internally promoted “an exciting new widening participation project” that will “give an opportunity for students from under-represented groups to experience postgraduate research at Cambridge”.

Yep they is

A school that banned girls from wearing skirts was closed on Friday after pupils staged a protest against the uniform policy.

Police were called to The Warriner School, a co-educational secondary school in Banbury, Oxon, as pupils protested against the gender-neutral uniform plan and refused to attend classes.

It comes amid a spate of school protests, reportedly inspired by a trend on the social media site TikTok.

Parents were told on Thursday that all pupils must wear black trousers or knee-length shorts from September.

Lotty Keys, assistant headteacher, said that girls who “roll skirts to an inappropriate length are sending out the wrong social message in their choice of style”.

She said: “They seem to feel they need to conform to a certain image, in order to fit in with friendship groups.

“We feel this has no place in an educational setting and for this reason, we are introducing trousers for all students.”

How did we end up with someone this dim in charge of an educational establishment? Anyone who has been exposed to the behaviours of teenage boys and teenage girls over the years should, really, be able to recognise that the human species is not single sex. And those teenage years – full of angst as they are – are where the playing out and testing of the differences happen.

It’s not the trousers or the skirts that are the issue here. It’s the woeful stupidity of Lotty and her pals. Seriously, how can someone this ignorant of humans be in charge – or assistant-charge – of readying the next generation of humans for their lives?

he will take up the role of professor of sociology of education

That sounds like one step further back into woo, doesn’t it?

Sociologists not being known for a deep and vibrant grasp of reality. And then there’s the those who can, do, those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach teachers. Those who cannot manage that become professors of education so that the wibble about those who can’t teach should teach teachers. Which leads to one more step of removal from reality, the sociology of who not to teach teachers to not teach.

At least angels on pinheads was a discussion about an important underlying – the corporeality or not of the angels.

a highly respected scholar of race, inequality and education,

Ah, yes.

Instead, there should be collective responsibility, Arday said, and those working to advance equality, diversity and inclusion should be properly supported and paid.

Amazed at my own perceptiveness.

“The final thing is recognising how violent some of these spaces can be,” he said, “and decision-makers recognising that to be a serious challenge towards the mental health and psychological wellbeing of black and ethnic minority people, particularly women of colour, and more specifically black women in the sector, who to be quite honest are treated differently. I think that is a stain on the sector, and that’s something we collectively need to think about, how we do better.”

Violence in academia, riiiiight.

Prof Bhaskar Vira, the pro-vice-chancellor for education at the University of Cambridge, said: “Jason Arday is an exceptional scholar of race, inequality and education. He will contribute significantly to Cambridge’s research in this area and to addressing the under-representation of people from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, especially those from black, Asian, and other minority ethnic communities.

And now another amazing prediction. Our man will not, in any of his work, even mention the different age profiles of the varied racial groupings in the UK. By not doing so he will of course invalidate all that he says about jobs and race. But that will be overlooked.

Oh, and I’d love to see the work that manages to show South Asians being under-represented in academia…….suitably corrected for age cohorts of course.

A loved one is in the hospital or a nursing home. How do you know if that registered nurse or licensed practical nurse providing bedside care has received the proper training? In January, the Justice Department unsealed criminal conspiracy and wire fraud charges against 25 people in connection with the sale of 7,600 fake diplomas from three now-defunct Southern Florida nursing schools for $114 million. The certificates enabled untrained individuals to sit for the national nursing board exams and at least 2,800 of them passed.

The fake degrees didn’t make them nurses. The fake degrees allowed them to sit the nurses’ exam. So, the only people who got conned were the nursing schools who didn’t get to charge for 4 years of blather to be allowed to sit the nurses’ exams.

Ain’t that a shame?

University cheating doubles after switch to online exams

Detected, or bad, cheating doubles……

Ithink a lot of people think my generation don’t care about politics or aren’t interested. They underestimate how perceptive we are. We’re part of the world too. We sit in classrooms. We know that schools don’t have proper funding and that our teachers aren’t properly paid for the hard work they do.

Teachers should have better working conditions. They are teaching the next generation to move academically through the world, and they deserve to live and work comfortably.

My school feels different at the moment. Maybe it’s a result of my having moved into year 9, a step closer to GCSEs, or maybe it’s something that other young people are experiencing.

It’s been a lot colder in my classrooms, because the central heating is turned on less frequently due to bills going up. Leaks have appeared in some of our classroom ceilings. Students take good care of the school, but we can’t do repairs. There also seem to be fewer classroom materials. Maybe this is what happens when you go up a year, or maybe they cost too much?

Both we and you have identified that you know something between little and not enough. That’s why you’re in school, to have knowledge poured into you.

Thus your analysis of what might be wrong with the world, what could be done to rectify such errors, might be lacking a little. Possibly?

Reading too many novels causes a great deal of anguish for the naive heroine of Northanger Abbey, and students studying the book could be similarly troubled.

This is according to academics who have issued a trigger warning for Jane Austen’s work because it depicts “gender stereotypes”.

The 1817 novel about a callow young woman’s coming of age in Regency Britain has been deemed potentially upsetting by academics at the University of Greenwich.

Which is the stereotype? The drippy bird who believes what she reads? Good thing not to be these days. Sadly, Jane never did get around to founding the Wilt series, which accurately describe U Greenwich….yes, about the same academic level as Fenlands Tech.

This new class:

AP African American Studies

Anyone able to find the actual syllabus here?

He made the remarks when asked about complaints from some Islamist leaders and netizens that religious teachings were absent from the books and the social science books of grades six and seven were promoting a “controversial history”.

Prof Moshiuzzaman further said: “Transgender people are alienated from our society, so we included them in the curriculum to ensure that our students learn to treat transgender people as human beings. I do not know if there is any different interpretation of this from a religious point of view.”

Asked about the same matter, Deputy Education Minister Barrister Mohibul Hasan Chowdhury Nowfel told Dhaka Tribune: “Religious books contain religious content. We cannot put religious content in books that are meant to teach Bangla, English, or other subjects.”

On the issue of homosexuality, NCTB Chairman Prof Md Farhadul Islam said: “Homosexuality is not legal in Bangladesh, so why should we promote the subject in the curriculum? However, the issue of transgender people is socially accepted here.”

Trans? It happens. Why shouldn’t it be in a textbook? Mebbe something shouldn’t be against the law but if it is that’s an issue for the legislature, not the schools.

And putting some subject into every lesson? Nope, that’s propaganda, not teaching.

Wouldn’t claim that everything is right here but Lordy Be that’s better than some of our textbooks.

Students are increasingly failing exams after inflated pandemic A-level grades helped them win a place at university, a vice-chancellor has warned.

Universities found themselves scrambling to find enough places for students in 2021 after record grade inflation caused by teacher-assessed results meant that more students than expected met their offer conditions.

However, some of those students are now dropping out because they are failing exams or failing to submit work, it has been suggested.

This is also an oft used critique of diversity standards on UI entrance. By offering lower grades to the more diverse student we end up doing them no favours for exactly the reason above.

We can even work out what the cause is. We could think of entrance standards – whatever they are – as being something used to select between those who are worthy of getting in. Everyone is worthy of a uni degree, so we’re just deciding which sorta thing.

Or, we might think that the entrance standards are to decide who is worth of the uni degree. Who is capable of doing it.

Guess where the prices for all, tabula rasa, left tends to be on this choice?

Santander becomes first major UK bank to hire graduates with a third class degree

Well, yes, sorta:

Around 16pc of students who leave university graduate with a 2:2 degree or a third, Santander said. The move will therefore open up to thousands of new potential candidates as applications open later this month.

Ah, no. Firsts and 2.1, show a certain amount of brains and also application. Now that Oxford no longer offers the fourth, that means that we’re left with the distinction between a Gentleman’s Third and a Desmond.

The Third is something of a distinction in fact. Clearly bright enough to be there in the first place, entirely capable of doing the work, just not doing any of it. A Desmond is merely the sign of a dullard.

The correct change is therefore to take Thirds but not 2.2s.

As an added bonus question, guess the degree of the writer.