Please or to access all these features

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:
sanluca · 14/06/2022 17:49

All Suggestions is demonstrating is the willingness to exclude people from society. And for what? So Suggestions can be a good ally and have warm fuzzy feelings?

Gender ideology is all about excluding people in favour of a sacred caste.

MercurialMonday · 14/06/2022 17:46

Clymene · 14/06/2022 17:25

IIRC, suggestions is in Scotland. Which explains her haziness about GCSEs.

I knew Scotland doesn't do GCSE and I knew that there'd been some odd things cropping up in schools but I didn't think it was that bad up there.

Fuck knows why though - some of the stuff in my DC welsh schools coming from Welsh Government has had me concerned.

whataloadabullocks · 14/06/2022 17:37

I said it upthread, I'm going to say it again: WHY?
the exams are talking about fictional characters therefore why not use he or she?
There is absolutely no reason to introduce ambiguity by using 'their' or 'they'.

PlattyJubes · 14/06/2022 17:31

@Clymene - my heart goes out to your DS. My DD who is NT struggles to keep on top of all the pronoun changes within her friendship group. She's never been particularly confident or outgoing but is now reducing contact with her peers for fear of being humiliated by them for "misgendering". It breaks my heart too because I can see her withdrawing from friendships because that's easier.

I dropped her off at a Biology revision lesson earlier today and we had been discussing this thread. As she left the car I said "do they admit to biological sex being real in Biology?". She said "don't say that or you'll get assaulted". The saddest thing is that I couldn't tell if she was actually joking.

When DD was born, this is one thing that was completely off my radar of things to worry about for her future. I don't know how we have ended up here but it makes me extremely sad and extremely angry.

PurgatoryOfPotholes · 14/06/2022 17:25

suggestionsplease1 · 13/06/2022 20:35

If a student is capable of GCSE maths I am sure they are capable of comprehending how they/their might be used in this way.

Students at this age are very familiar with pronouns being used to reflect an individual's preference, and the grammar of the sentence will be sufficient to establish singular or plural with no impact to calculations.

Consistency is a weird thing to bring up; it's not like the entire population only consistently use 'they, their' for themselves so why should a maths paper pretend they do?

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.

Clymene · 14/06/2022 17:25

IIRC, suggestions is in Scotland. Which explains her haziness about GCSEs.

TheElementsSong · 14/06/2022 17:16

You have to be a special kind of person to take an autistic teenager to court.

As being copiously demonstrated on this thread.

MercurialMonday · 14/06/2022 17:16

My DD's maths teacher should be teaching her maths, not indoctrinating her in gender ideology. Maths is a subject where clarity matters, and exam boards have no business in setting questions using confusing pronoun combinations for no good reason, and misgendering made up people is not a good reason.

I completely agree.

I did wonder if suggestionsplease1 was from USA - it's seems to be much more normal/common to have ideology and politics shoved into random subjects there.

I think there's some war ongoing in some states - who educational system varies- between right and left with text books at the moment completely ignoring the entire country educational attainment slowly sliding down international tables.

suggestionsplease1 also seem to know nothing about GCSE's or teaching for GCSEs- though they seem to know little about common SEN issues either and they claim to work in that field Hmm.

Clymene · 14/06/2022 17:05

I'm also upset @TeenPlusCat. My autistic DS has already been berated by some of his classmates for forgetting thwt Phoebe who last week used she/her pronouns is using they/them ones this week. And that David is no longer David but Davina even though he looks exactly the same as he did last week.

I'm honestly scared for him, especially when I think back to that poor teenager who was taken to court and fined because he misgendered a PCSO. You have to be a special kind of person to take an autistic teenager to court.

mrshoho · 14/06/2022 17:02

Thank you @nepeta . You have eloquently written just what it it that is so wrong about enforced pronouns and gender identity for Women.

Good point about The Plain English Campaign. I would be very interested in their view of these language changes.

Clymene · 14/06/2022 16:57

@nepeta 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

TeenPlusCat · 14/06/2022 16:51

I feel really quite upset by @suggestionsplease1 complete intransigence to even consider that using language designed to obfuscate will be confusing to some kids, and that it is all the fault of the schools.

My DD's maths teacher should be teaching her maths, not indoctrinating her in gender ideology. Maths is a subject where clarity matters, and exam boards have no business in setting questions using confusing pronoun combinations for no good reason, and misgendering made up people is not a good reason..

I really feel the Plain English Campaign needs to start complaining about the destruction of pronouns in general and the loss of the word woman on the NHS websites.

titchy · 14/06/2022 16:45

A student who is capable of the English language processing required for these sentences is capable of understanding the use of pronouns in this problem, as it is a lower level language processing cognitive demand.

Listen to yourself. There are posters on this very thread who are telling you very clearly that for some disorders using 'they' is NOT a lower level cognitive demand.

You are not an expert. Others are. When experts tell you something disadvantages a group of children bloody well listen. Have some respect for their expertise.

nepeta · 14/06/2022 16:30

mrshoho · 14/06/2022 15:59

Hilarious but disturbing at the same time. That insistence on language change that has swept into so many of our organisations even though 99% of us do not believe in it or want it. Language does evolve over time but this is something else altogether. Notice how it's children and young people being targeted so militantly.

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.

mrshoho · 14/06/2022 15:59

Hilarious but disturbing at the same time. That insistence on language change that has swept into so many of our organisations even though 99% of us do not believe in it or want it. Language does evolve over time but this is something else altogether. Notice how it's children and young people being targeted so militantly.

Anactor · 14/06/2022 15:58

“What do you think is more cognitively demanding in terms of language processing in this question - the understanding that 'they' and 'their' refers back to Les, or information like "Each attempt is independent of any previous shot" / "they hit the target for the first time on the their third attempt" ?”

Well, if they’ve been revising probability of dependent and independent outcomes (and it was on the advance information, so they should have been) it won’t be the technical language of ‘independent’ or ‘first time on third attempt.’

Independent will tell them to keep the same denominator throughout, ‘first time on third attempt’ that they need to use a probability tree, third attempt that they need to multiply the probabilities of the ‘miss, miss, hit’ branch only.

Spotting that Les is a non-gender-specific name in English, so ‘they’ is the appropriate pronoun … that might be a problem. Students won’t have revised gender-neutral English personal names for any exam that I can think of.

The question very much assumes a particular cultural background.

DeaconBoo · 14/06/2022 15:52

Clymene · 14/06/2022 15:17

I'm just going to repeat part of the OP:

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).

So children with SEN told their scribes they were confused by the wording.

But this is not enough for gender zealots like @suggestionsplease1.

This whole conversation just underlines the cultish behaviour of TRAs. Who are ultimately prepared to throw vulnerable children's futures under the bus in order to advance their ideology.

And it really demonstrates why this has no place in education.

Exactly. Yet another case of "it doesn't happen, and if it does, they're lying/racist/old/ stupid".

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.

BotCrossHuns · 14/06/2022 15:46

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.

What steps would those be? If years of work with SALTs haven't managed to cure a child of a specific language disability, which includes difficulty with pronouns, tenses, categories vs elements, word order, etc. - how will practising a few questions of one type help them understand pronouns in a different context? Because somewhere else 'they' might mean two people, or an unknown entity. If you have this magic cure, then let us know.

Why are you so keen to include they/them? Do you have any evidence that non-binary children feel erased because maths exams don't use them as examples? Even if there are plenty of gender-neutral names they could identify with, or plenty of examples of groups of children with unspecified gender that they could identify with? Is this causing difficulty for them, to the point that this is the necessary solution? Or has someone else like you just decided that this should be the new way of writing? Because there obviously IS evidence that there are a number of categories of people for whom language and wording does cause problems.

noblegiraffe · 14/06/2022 15:37

It unfortunately likely highlights the failure of the OP's school to adequately prepare their pupils for exams.

No it doesn’t.

SigourneyHoward · 14/06/2022 15:36

The curious mix of hyper stretching and absolute entrenched immobility to avoid conceding a cm is a sight to behold.

Clymene · 14/06/2022 15:35

Wow, you really are coming across as quite the swivel eyed loon, @suggestionsplease1.

I will be writing to AQA. I don't want my children's school indoctrinating them in this crap so that they can pass their GCSEs.

suggestionsplease1 · 14/06/2022 15:31

Clymene · 14/06/2022 15:17

I'm just going to repeat part of the OP:

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).

So children with SEN told their scribes they were confused by the wording.

But this is not enough for gender zealots like @suggestionsplease1.

This whole conversation just underlines the cultish behaviour of TRAs. Who are ultimately prepared to throw vulnerable children's futures under the bus in order to advance their ideology.

And it really demonstrates why this has no place in education.

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.

nightwakingmoon · 14/06/2022 15:28

Unsexed not indexed 😂

nightwakingmoon · 14/06/2022 15:26

Still grammatically incorrect though, so why bother? Unless indoctrination is just more important to you than standardisation, clarity and correctness.

The trouble is, this is an ideology. Otherwise it wouldn’t be pushed so much by people who fervently believe it’s somehow “progressive”. But if you don’t happen to believe in gender identity ideology or that any people, let alone children, can mysteriously “identify” as imagined indexed beings, what purpose does it serve other than complete linguistic confusion?

If we all switched to “they” in every instance do you think it would really be some kind of genderless utopia of neutered beings wandering around without genitals? If not why on Earth would you think it “progressive” anyway? What purpose would it serve? @suggestionsplease1

(In any case linguistics as a discipline shows that when you erase one distinction in language people attempt to recreate it by inventing new descriptors that take its place - it’s a process called “grammaticalisation”, where if you lose part of a functionally semantic part of the language, then people “intensify” their usage to reinvent it again. So even if we all switched to “they/them”, people would then invent new sexed pronouns so they could specify sex. It’s gloriously fruitless, what the genderists are attempting to do.)