Nurturing a misogynist culture

The story this morning on the front page of the SMH about the students at an all male college of Sydney University and their proud “pro-rape”culture was horrifying.  But it was also not altogether surprising. The colleges at Sydney University seem to be mostly continuations of the elite private schools – students from the city [...]

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School Acceleration

We’ve recently been having a bit of an acceleration dilemma. When we first went through this process, I remember how thirsty I was for real stories, so I’m going to share mine here.
Chatterboy was born in September. He learned to read pretty much on his own, and around the time he turned four, he progressed [...]

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Helicopter parenting?

The boys’ school has a real emphasis on public speaking. From the last term of Kindergarten up, they have to do a two minute speech each term (on a defined topic). The top two from each class get chosen to go to the speak offs with their fellow winners from the classes, and there are [...]

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In the Classroom

Julia has a post where she asks her readers what they think of the many opportunities there are for parents to come into the classroom these days – what does that do to working parents?
Certainly compared with when I was at school, there are many many opportunities for school attendance. My mother was a stay-at-home mother – [...]

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The temptation of redshirting

In the US (and increasingly here) they call holding children back from starting school (if the rules allow it) redshirting – based on some sporting terminology.
We had the choice for HungryBoy. He turned five in May. If your child turns five any time between the start of school (1 February) and 31 July, then in NSW [...]

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Boys and fairies

Thanks to bluemilk, I got quite a few comments on my last post, so I feel I should follow it up with some actual commentary.
It seems to me that there are two issues with toys for boys, in opposite directions. The overly militarised aggressive toys - I’ll leave them for another post - and the strong societal [...]

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Scratch

There’s a great programming language, called Scratch, which makes it incredibly easy to create games. If by any possible chance you want to teach someone how to program a computer the easiest possible way, you should use Scratch.
Chatterboy, who is shaping up to possibly be a bit of a geek, made this program for a school [...]

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Teachers strike

Today the teachers went out on strike in NSW – over recruitment policies for schools. The SMH had two conflicting letters next to each other from teachers:
The Government’s tinkering with a fair, time-tested and successful transfer points system is just the latest unintelligent act that will make recruiting quality teachers more difficult.
and this one
As a [...]

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Educated sceptics

Mr Penguin alerted me to this interested article in Wired. As you would expect, in the US, Republicans are more likely to be sceptical about global warming than Democrats.  Environmentalism has always been found more on the left than the right, and Republicans have more to lose from action that makes energy more expensive.
But college-educated [...]

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Moral majority?

I’ve written before about how annoying I find the rules about religious education in NSW public schools. In 1880, the NSW government established the Public Instruction Act, which introduced compulsory free education in NSW. In a compromise with the (non catholic) religious schools, the government also took over most of the poor, parish schools. As [...]

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