Staff outing - only ladies invited

ArcticRoll

pinkshoes wrote: »

So how would you recommend I target this specific group of girls who on average are at least one if not two grades lower than the boys in the final exam?


There is a statistical significance in their data and they NEED helping to bridge the gap.



If it was a general revision class, they wouldn't come. The girls I am targeting feel intimidated by the majority of boys in the class.



There is also a revision class after school for ALL kids. So it's not like the boys have no other options. This is an additional class as I know my target students won't attend the other one and I want them to do well.



ps - I don't get paid for these revision sessions. I give up my lunch break and other free time. (as do most teachers nowadays)

The problem is that by your own words you only offer help to the girls in the class and make the boys have to argue/justify their inclusion. I'd find that very hard to defend regardless of how good intentions are.

Are you honestly saying that none of those who are struggling in your class are boys? It would be quite an extraordinarily neat gender divide.

Isn't your job to help all your struggling students rather than deciding you prefer to only help the girls?

Imagine your child was struggling with maths and there were additional classes in order to support children struggling with maths but you find out your child has to plead to attend because the teacher arbitrarily decided they're only interested in helping children struggling with maths if they're one particular gender.

Honestly don't get the difference between this and what you're doing. Of course you're right to identify those who require additional support but I don't think deciding from offset that if a pupil possesses a penis you don't offer additional support, I don't think can be justified at all.

Also you said before that boys can come if they really want to - so you clearly do have boys in your class who have also identified that they need additional support. As their teacher isn't it your job to identify that for them as opposed to try and discourage them from seeking it which it appears you are.

John_G_Jones

I believe the argument tends to go like this;

Boys outperforming girls -> lift the girls up
Girls outperforming boys -> see, girls are naturally better

Similarly, girls get more second class degrees than boys, less firsts and thirds -> we have to help girls get more firsts.

My old university’s outreach officer asked me to support exactly this last year, a program to get women to get more firsts. She didn’t understand my point when I asked if it was also going to try to get women more thirds.

The other request was to support a program to get more women into physics. There are more graduate women overall than men and, again, she didn’t understand why trying to equalise numbers in one of the rare male-majority subjects was problematic.

Comms69

John_G_Jones wrote: »

I believe the argument tends to go like this;

Boys outperforming girls -> lift the girls up
Girls outperforming boys -> see, girls are naturally better

Similarly, girls get more second class degrees than boys, less firsts and thirds -> we have to help girls get more firsts.

My old university’s outreach officer asked me to support exactly this last year, a program to get women to get more firsts. She didn’t understand my point when I asked if it was also going to try to get women more thirds.

The other request was to support a program to get more women into physics. There are more graduate women overall than men and, again, she didn’t understand why trying to equalise numbers in one of the rare male-majority subjects was problematic.

Equality of Opportunity is desirable, equality of outcome is a travesty!

Les79

pinkshoes wrote: »

Saying that, I teach a subject where our girls do far worse than boys, so I run a girls only club at lunch for those that struggle. I aim tontarget specific kids who refuse to ask for help in class. I do allow boys to come though if they ask why it is girls only and really want to come!



There is a statistical significance in their data and they NEED helping to bridge the gap.

I feel somewhat silly asking you this question (as you appear to have a mathematical background of some sort), but have you actually run a relevant statistical test on the data?


Have you sat down one night, gathered all of the scores of your students and run maybe a t-test or a chi squared and gained a confidence/p-value to reject the null hypothesis of there being no statistical difference between the performance of boys and girls in your class (or indeed the wider school)?


Fair play if you have like (many teachers are thick as pig poo and wouldn't, though I only have circumstantial evidence on that!), but in my experience most people "guesstimate" the statistical significance. Sometimes the actual reason is "confirmation bias", where you have some sort of preconception about girls (and how they struggle at a certain subject) and thus "overstate" the significance.


Also, i'm not a fan at how "political" schools are; sometimes it isn't about adding value to a child's education, nor is it about empowering those to achieve more, but instead more about working with very specific subsets more closely to increase the average grades for the purposes of things like better ofsted ratings, higher pass rates, brownie points for addressing "equality buzz topics" (like, for example, the stuff about gender equality RE: females doing the rounds and how good a school will look if they "address" that disparity; failing to mention the detriment of the OTHER gender in the process!).


I actually don't have anything against your method PER SE (and I think the OP and co are quite "stuffy" in that respect), but I think that you would benefit from holding at least one comparable session for males only (and maybe a third for mixed genders). But hey ho, your classroom and your rules

theoretica

ArcticRoll wrote: »

The problem is that by your own words you only offer help to the girls in the class and make the boys have to argue/justify their inclusion. I'd find that very hard to defend regardless of how good intentions are.

Are you honestly saying that none of those who are struggling in your class are boys? It would be quite an extraordinarily neat gender divide.

Isn't your job to help all your struggling students rather than deciding you prefer to only help the girls?

Imagine your child was struggling with maths and there were additional classes in order to support children struggling with maths but you find out your child has to plead to attend because the teacher arbitrarily decided they're only interested in helping children struggling with maths if they're one particular gender.

Honestly don't get the difference between this and what you're doing. Of course you're right to identify those who require additional support but I don't think deciding from offset that if a pupil possesses a penis you don't offer additional support, I don't think can be justified at all.

Also you said before that boys can come if they really want to - so you clearly do have boys in your class who have also identified that they need additional support. As their teacher isn't it your job to identify that for them as opposed to try and discourage them from seeking it which it appears you are.

Sometimes the point is that different people are struggling for different reasons - if you try to lump everyone who is struggling together and help them at the same time and in the same way you are not doing the best for any of them. A lunch time session only for pupils who need one particular type of help seems very reasonable, particularly with other help available at other times.

Les79

theoretica wrote: »

Sometimes the point is that different people are struggling for different reasons - if you try to lump everyone who is struggling together and help them at the same time and in the same way you are not doing the best for any of them. A lunch time session only for pupils who need one particular type of help seems very reasonable, particularly with other help available at other times.

With the key part of your post being the fact that you didn't mention either gender....

theoretica

Les79 wrote: »

With the key part of your post being the fact that you didn't mention either gender....

I didn't - but there are a lot of studies on gender in the classrooms and attitude issues which girls are far more likely to develop than boys. There will be boys with similar problems, which I would expect an experienced teacher to recognise, but it would not be unusual in my experience for a class to have quite a few girls but no boys with a particular need.

ArcticRoll

theoretica wrote: »

I didn't - but there are a lot of studies on gender in the classrooms and attitude issues which girls are far more likely to develop than boys. There will be boys with similar problems, which I would expect an experienced teacher to recognise, but it would not be unusual in my experience for a class to have quite a few girls but no boys with a particular need.

Don't girls regularly out perform boys in GCSEs?

It seems to run counter to the idea that it's generally the girls that need more support. Or maybe it's because girls don't have to fight to get additional support but they perform better.

I return to my central point that if you found out your child was struggling in a subject and had to argue their case to receive additional support routinely offered to other students in the class - whether that be based on gender, race, height or anything else, you'd be fairly annoyed.

As a teacher surely you offer extra support to anyone who needs it. Not decide that you can get extra support, but only if you're a girl. It immediately creates a hostile environment for anyone who isn't a girl to even ask for help. If I witnessed a fellow male pupil in my class be forced to justify why he deserves additional support offered to girls in the same class, and what's more only being given it if he eventually convinces teacher to let him to to something called 'Girls only club', my reluctance to ask that teacher for extra help myself would be extremely high.

theoretica

ArcticRoll wrote: »

Don't girls regularly out perform boys in GCSEs?

Not in the subject Pinkshoes is teaching. Would you refuse appropriate help to people in one subject because they are doing well in another?

ArcticRoll

theoretica wrote: »

Not in the subject Pinkshoes is teaching. Would you refuse appropriate help to people in one subject because they are doing well in another?

It's not me who's refusing appropriate help, it's Pinkshoes who runs 'Girls only' clubs.