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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Pronouns in maths exams

315 replies

OhWhatFuckeryIsThisNow · 13/06/2022 20:19

I scribe for GCSEs. Today was aqa maths, calculator paper. Now maths textbooks and exams have long done diverse names in the examples, eg, Sarah and Rashid are making cakes...Dafydd is planting a garden, Safira is buying rope. You get the drift. This year though I’ve noticed that gender neutral has been introduced. So Kai is making a cake, they use 50 grams of sugar. One could say that making the questions genderless is ok, and maybe so if it was consistent. So there was they their, he him and she her. A few of my fellow sribers said that their candidates were confused by the wording of the questions (especially the they/theirs, the kids thought there were more than one person being talked about). I was talking about it with the maths teachers later and all of them said why can’t it be Student A, student B? And especially why cant the exam board be consistent?

OP posts:
Clymene · 14/06/2022 19:37

How many times will Lee get sexually assaulted in school if she identifies as non-binary vs cis?
a) Lee will get assaulted 3x more if she identifies as cis
b) Lee will get assaulted 3x more if she identifies as non-binary
c) Lee will get assaulted the exact same number of times because sexual predators don't care about girls' pronouns.

PurgatoryOfPotholes · 14/06/2022 19:28

Beth's mother has a court order to make her available for access to her dad EOW. Beth's dad has been two hours late to pick her up the last three times. Beth's mum rang him up to give him a bollocking last time.

How late will he be to pick up Beth this weekend?

TeenPlusCat · 14/06/2022 19:23

I've another one.
Toyah is in foster care. She is 8 years old today. She has lived in 14 different homes to date.
a) What is the average time she has spend in each home, to the nearest day
b) Estimate using your own lived experience how many hours of therapy she will need as a teenager

There are so many topics that are patently not suitable to use as exam questions despite them being 'lived experience'.

PurgatoryOfPotholes · 14/06/2022 19:17

Wondered if anyone else was somewhat irked by that sweeping statement. I did my GCSEs with girls who'd been married off at 16. Should their lived experience of child marriage been included in the maths questions?

IamAporcupine · 14/06/2022 19:15

2022 - Colour the rectangle with blue/pink if you identify as a boy/girl, respectively. If you are NB, use yellow.

Pronouns in maths exams
TeenPlusCat · 14/06/2022 19:14

reflect lived experiences ?
Courtney knows that if her Step Dad drinks more than 16 units of alcohol he is likely to sexually abuse her. He has already downed 5 cans of larger at 2.5 units each.
Should she
a) run away
b) lock herself in her room
c) take the Es from Jaxon in question 1
d) it's OK he's no where near 16 units yet

Clymene · 14/06/2022 19:08

Examining boards should use language that reflects the variety of lived experiences of the times, and schools, colleges etc should prepare their students adequately.

Jaxon has 7 Es. Sharmila and Jayden want one each, Rishi wants one and a half and another 2 to give to his friends later. How many Es does Jaxon have left after sharing with his friends?

Charlie is simping on Emily. Emily thinks Charlie is peng but is scared to tell him. How many times should Emily like Charlie's insta posts to let him know?

PurgatoryOfPotholes · 14/06/2022 18:58

suggestionsplease1 · 14/06/2022 18:02

Have you read my responses in this thread at all? I think you'll find I have addressed all your points. I support students with additional needs to achieve maths qualifications amongst the many other things I do and I receive outstanding feedback for my approachability, thanks.

Do you.

Or have you just been hurriedly googling about it?

Because I find it stretches the bounds of credulity that someone who actually teaches on any longterm basis would think that because examining boards aim to set clear questions, it happens. Every couple of years there is an error in a paper, or a question that meets with widespread disbelief.

I don't care whether you think you are approachable, because the evidence shows that in whatever capacity you teach maths, you have extremely limited experiences of diversity. In yiur own school life as a teen and in your adult life now, you either have no contact with asylum seekers and so on, or you consider them less important than including imaginary enbies.

Your own reading comprehension is also highly selective. You have just replied to a fellow poster by singling out G as not worthy of concern, but you didn't care about the autistic student or the student who was the opposite of G and so got distracted because of that.

Bloodyel · 14/06/2022 18:54

Kai has 200g of shaky self esteem
How many facts would it take for Kai to lose all of their self esteem?

NotKevinTurvey · 14/06/2022 18:54

suggestionsplease1 · 14/06/2022 15:31

It unfortunately likely highlights the failure of the OP's school to adequately prepare their pupils for exams. But now they know, so they can take the right steps going forward and practice questions that follow a similar format.

Or they can drop the fashionable nonsense and return to using he or she, which would be easier.

It’s what I do.

TeenPlusCat · 14/06/2022 18:51

Examining boards should use language that reflects the variety of lived experiences of the times, and schools, colleges etc should prepare their students adequately.

Ah that's where you're going wrong @suggestionsplease1 .
Examining boards should use clear formal language and standard English. They don't write questions in northern dialect, or cockney rhyming slang. They should write questions such that they are clear and understandable; using a mix of pronouns is not clear nor indeed in any way necessary, especially in a maths exam.

noblegiraffe · 14/06/2022 18:49

I support students with additional needs to achieve maths qualifications

Which resources do you use to support them to access questions with gender neutral pronouns?

I’ve never seen an exam question that uses them and you’ve suggested that it’s a failing on the part of the school and teacher if they haven’t prepared them for this, so I’m curious as to your approach.

suggestionsplease1 · 14/06/2022 18:45

MsAwesomeDragon · 14/06/2022 18:27

I haven't seen the paper, but I do teach a set of year 11s who would mostly find this a very difficult question to understand. If I'm absolutely honest then I'll tell you that my class would probably not have been able to answer that question no matter what the wording was, because they find all maths extremely difficult.

But, of the pupils I teach who are a hopeful grade 4 level I have: A (lovely boy, autistic, finds maths difficult mostly because of the words)will have tied himself in knots trying to figure out who the second person is, it will have bothered him for the rest of the exam so I hope it was near the end. B, C, D and E will have ignored it, probably won't have even noticed. F will have spent the rest of the exam trying to decide if that person is non-binary and what they might look like (because F is easily distractible down tangents). G is likely to have had a mental rant about political correctness gone mad and how is ridiculous that anyone would care about pronouns (because G is an aggressive, homophobic young man, we've done our best to educate him out of it, but his whole family are aggressive homophobic racists) G will have wasted a lot of time in his maths exam mentally ranting, rather than attempting the questions he can have a go at.

So in my small class I have predicted several responses to using they/them as gender neutral pronouns, some of which disadvantage the pupils in the exam. Why was that necessary?

Because there is a limit to what might be considered reasonable adjustments.

It sounds like at least one of your students might have become fixated on a character who had an unusual (to them) sounding name and this could have caused them to waste time 'mentally ranting', as you put it, on that. This being the case is not a justification for the examining board to turn round and say to each other 'Ah well, we better not use any unusual sounding names. Lets just stick with Bob and Ann' because we have a student G here who might get thrown by this.

Examining boards should use language that reflects the variety of lived experiences of the times, and schools, colleges etc should prepare their students adequately.

MsAwesomeDragon · 14/06/2022 18:27

I haven't seen the paper, but I do teach a set of year 11s who would mostly find this a very difficult question to understand. If I'm absolutely honest then I'll tell you that my class would probably not have been able to answer that question no matter what the wording was, because they find all maths extremely difficult.

But, of the pupils I teach who are a hopeful grade 4 level I have: A (lovely boy, autistic, finds maths difficult mostly because of the words)will have tied himself in knots trying to figure out who the second person is, it will have bothered him for the rest of the exam so I hope it was near the end. B, C, D and E will have ignored it, probably won't have even noticed. F will have spent the rest of the exam trying to decide if that person is non-binary and what they might look like (because F is easily distractible down tangents). G is likely to have had a mental rant about political correctness gone mad and how is ridiculous that anyone would care about pronouns (because G is an aggressive, homophobic young man, we've done our best to educate him out of it, but his whole family are aggressive homophobic racists) G will have wasted a lot of time in his maths exam mentally ranting, rather than attempting the questions he can have a go at.

So in my small class I have predicted several responses to using they/them as gender neutral pronouns, some of which disadvantage the pupils in the exam. Why was that necessary?

Leafstamp · 14/06/2022 18:17

If anyone, OP?, can let us know the best address to complain to about this, I will write.

It's not on to make students wobble with their understanding of a question in exam conditions. And it's not on to have a question that clearly subscribes to an ideology in which not everyone believes.

Clymene · 14/06/2022 18:16

I don't care how approachable you are @suggestionsplease1. If you're telling children with learning difficulties that they just need to try harder or need more education to understand deliberately opaque language, then you're in the wrong job.

DeaconBoo · 14/06/2022 18:09

Why do you think an examining body would provide an ambiguous question?

At a guess, because they don't believe the people who are telling them they found it ambiguous?

suggestionsplease1 · 14/06/2022 18:02

PurgatoryOfPotholes · 14/06/2022 17:25

LOL!GCSE Maths is a compulsory subject. Up to it? LOL! They all take it unless extremely special conditions apply and they keep retaking it in subsequent years until they get the Holy C/Grade 4. That means 15 year olds who can barely read, 15 year olds who cannot do questions like "the rectangle has a perimeter of 26cm. Sides A and C are 8cm long. How long are sides B and D?" (real example). Then there are the kids who speak English as an additional language, such as asylum seekers. I know a man who arrived here as a teenager, in secondary school. Incredibly intelligent and a fluent English speaker now, but you wouldn't know it from his GCSE results. The only one that actually indicates his level of ability is his maths GCSE, because at that point in time, papers focused on the maths. That was a good thing. It is also a good thing when it means teenagers who aren't fluent in English go on to study A-level MathsYou've said some weird things in this forum, but this takes the biscuit. Maybe you were top set for GCSE maths, but you clearly weren't top set enough and approachable enough that kids from the bottom set for maths asked you for help. Maybe this is why you don't know about them. Maybe you should stop obsessing about being a trans ally, and allow other marginalised groups to have a place in your life.

Have you read my responses in this thread at all? I think you'll find I have addressed all your points. I support students with additional needs to achieve maths qualifications amongst the many other things I do and I receive outstanding feedback for my approachability, thanks.

titchy · 14/06/2022 18:02

Why do you think an examining body would provide an ambiguous question? These papers are proofread multiple times by multiple people to ensure clarity before being approved

If that was the case there would never be errors or typos - but these occur every year.

But it is perfectly possible to phrase questions without any ambiguity.

Agreed. So why wasn't this one then?

Clymene · 14/06/2022 18:01

A few of my fellow sribers said that their candidates were confused by the wording of the questions (especially the they/theirs, the kids thought there were more than one person being talked about).

PurgatoryOfPotholes · 14/06/2022 17:59

suggestionsplease1 · 14/06/2022 17:56

Why do you think an examining body would provide an ambiguous question? These papers are proofread multiple times by multiple people to ensure clarity before being approved.

If there is a genuine concern that the phrasing was ambiguous and could lead to errors of calculation I will quite happily write in with you. But it is perfectly possible to phrase questions without any ambiguity.

I think we should all return to this thread when you can get hold of the paper in question and post up the questions that are concerning you so we can see what we are actually dealing with.

She thinks that because of the evidence it has happened, as given in the OP (Opening Post). Some children with disabilities meaning they were entitled to a scribe, reported confusion about a GCSE paper.

It is right there.

Blimey, you should empathise more with children who have difficulty understanding text. Suppose you were being marked on comprehension now?

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 14/06/2022 17:57

nepeta · 14/06/2022 16:30

The hidden purpose behind these changes in language is to make it so that a person being forced, perhaps, to give preferred pronouns who then chooses "she, her" is automatically assumed to identify with femininity, not with her actual biological sex.

The former identification is likely to enforce sexist stereotypes about what being a woman means, the latter simply states one mostly observable fact (that she is biologically female) and tells most of us (except for extreme patriarchal religions or anti-feminist groups) nothing about that person's abilities, basic character, or preferences. So the latter makes the liberation of women feasible, the former pretty much closes us out of that option.

When 'they' is added to the list of pronouns, what is also added is the idea that only 'they' are not strongly clinging to traditional sex stereotypes and traditional gender roles for women and men. This is very bad for feminism, women's rights, and, as is evident in another recent thread here, even the history of female role models now often posthumously transed.

All this is the hidden underbelly of the gender identity ideology. It is built on exactly the same rigid sex/gender roles as extreme patriarchal views, with the one exception that some are allowed to jump from one box to another, in theory, but in practice women can only do this by modifying their bodies and by taking hormones.

The nonbinary option only works as long as most women accept being called women, because female people identifying as nonbinary only do that in relation to the vast numbers of women who are not (yet) doing that.

Brilliant post, @nepeta.

PurgatoryOfPotholes · 14/06/2022 17:56

suggestionsplease1 · 14/06/2022 13:06

No. They might do pure maths at postgraduate level if that was the right way forward for them.

I would hope they would receive support which enabled them to achieve more general maths qualifications first, but of course individuals can have vastly differing profiles of abilities.

Well, he or she had better get more general maths quals first, otherwise the post-grad won't be happening.

As it happens, I can lay my hands on someone just like Titchy describes. Special educational needs, and very spiky academic profile- brilliant at maths, but not so much other things. Due to heavy intervention, special accommodations and so on, he was nursed through to A-level subjects, where he could specialise and avoid all the areas he can't do. And thenceforth to a degree. And now he has a job and pays tax, btw. The investment in this distressed, disabled teenager paid off for him and the country.

But it was integral to this that he got the top grade in his relevant GCSE subjects. That got him a place on his A-level courses, even though he didn't have 5 GCSEs at grade C or above. Then university admissions were willing to ignore that he had fewer than 5 GCSEs at grade C or above after personal discussion.

suggestionsplease1 · 14/06/2022 17:56

DeaconBoo · 14/06/2022 15:47

Anyone else finding it hilarious that someone apparently thinks if they provide enough examples of questions where "they" isn't ambiguous, that will prove that there cannot exist any such questions that are?

Keep going please, I love seeing TRA logic hard at work.

Why do you think an examining body would provide an ambiguous question? These papers are proofread multiple times by multiple people to ensure clarity before being approved.

If there is a genuine concern that the phrasing was ambiguous and could lead to errors of calculation I will quite happily write in with you. But it is perfectly possible to phrase questions without any ambiguity.

I think we should all return to this thread when you can get hold of the paper in question and post up the questions that are concerning you so we can see what we are actually dealing with.

Clymene · 14/06/2022 17:53

Oh @PlattyJubes that's awful. Teenage years are bad enough as it is without adding an extra layer of complex new ever-changing rules into the mix.