Am I overreacting to this teacher’s comment?

[queenkettricken]

I’ll start by saying that I’m a teacher myself -primary. My daughter is in year 7 at high school and today her personal development teacher was talking about stereotypes. He mentioned the stereotype that English women go abroad on holiday, get really drunk and sleep with lots of men.

I’m shocked by the reference to sleeping with lots of people and want to email the school but honestly don’t know if I’m overreacting. I teach in UKS2 and cannot imagine touching on this subject even at the very end of year 6.

Should I accept that this is high school and that stuff like this is ok? Or am I right to be shocked that my 11 year is being exposed to this.

The WHOLE POINT of a lesson about stereotypes is to explore why stereotypes are wrong, unfair, ignorant and prejudiced! You can’t teach kids about stereotypes without mentioning negative/unfair/offensive ones as examples.

That. And also echoing those saying that it's parents like OP that are leading to teachers leaning the profession

If course she does. She will have had sex education at school by year 7.

I think this is exactly the right age for schoolchildren to start touching on challenging misogyny, without going into too much graphic detail. Young boys are going to be exposed to the manosphere around 11-14 years old, and it is vital that these views are opposed. If teachers (or indeed parents going by this thread) are not allowed to talk to them about it, then Andrew Tate and his acolytes will get there first.

Ok
And what does he want 11 year olds to say?
How would they have enough information to discuss this?

To an 11 year old?
You want 11 year old girls discussing why that stereotype is harmful?
How would they have enough maturity, understanding, and context to answer that?
What are they supposed to say?
'Sir, I don't think all British women sleep around on holiday? They shouldn't tar us all with the same brush sir'.

You kinda need to have enough understanding of the stereotype being discussed don't you think?

Something to consider OP, is if you contact the school against your DD’s wishes then you run the risk of her not coming to you again; at the moment she obviously feels comfortable talking to you so you have to consider if this is something worth jeopardising your relationship over.

I always had an open and honest relationship with my mum and told her something once in year 7 but NOT because I wanted her to do anything about it but because I just wanted to talk it through / understand it (up until that point, she was the person I could always do that with) but she went against my wishes (I was crying about it too) and contacted the school and you know what? I never went to her again after that because I couldn’t trust that she’d respect my boundaries so that was pretty much the end of our open relationship because I started keeping things to myself from that point on. In the grand scheme of things, it was a pretty trivial issue too but the end result was that I didn’t go to her about the more serious things which was more detrimental in the long run.

Now obviously as a parent, you have to act in your child’s best interests for their own good / safety (regardless of their feelings) so you need to weigh things up and decide if this is one of those time and if it’s a hill you want to die on.

If she is upset maybe speak to her tutor or head of year. It is a sterotype and perhaps was chosen to stir up debate around challenging such stereotypes. I would hope it wasn't presented as an opinion however whether 11 or 12 year olds would appreciate the difference I don't know.

Bit young for that kind of comment, I get the point about stereotypes, but it would have worked better with older kids.

Having said that, don’t think it’s worth making a fuss over. Your child will hear all sorts of things now at secondary school and you need to start picking your battles.

It’s a bit of a clumsy example for year 7 but I wouldn’t complain - it’s not that bad!

I think people have hit the nail on the head with the point that the kids don’t have the maturity to discuss that stereotype (which I think he made up) or even to decide whether drinking or having casual sex is “good or bad” in their own minds, or even to imagine what it means in a real way. But it sounds awfully like he’s implying that “sleeping with lots of men” is bad/gross which is problematic in itself.

And yeah my original point that bringing up sex with 11 year olds in a non sex related class is just creepy. I worked with 16 year olds for a while and even then I was trained not to let the conversation go there/to steer it back if they mentioned sex as it wasn’t appropriate/necessary and presumably was felt to be a safeguarding concern. I don’t trust this man.

I agree. I can imagine that comment triggering a lot of trouble for the girls in itself at that age. As if there was not enough misogynistic bullying and harassment at secondary school as it is.

You need to use stereotypes on a lesson on stereotypes and it is the hurtful ones that make an impact.

if you are giving feedback which stereotypes would you prefer to be discussed?

Of course she's not listening to you. In her eyes you know nothing

My opinion is that the teacher was raising it as a stereotype......not necessarily as a "this is true and is what happens"

And then, I assume, the class discussed the danger of stereotyping

Why don't you leave it this time and see what happens

The trouble is, your daughter may not tell you anything else because you've made such a drama out of a sentence which may have been the start of an excellent class discussion

This.

Also the PP saying that it's VERY inappropriate for a male teacher to say this. There's a power imbalance here and he is introducing a very negative statement that affects half the class much more than the rest.

If he'd said a highly offensive racial stereotype no-one would be saying it's fine. It's only because it's women being denigrated that it's 'ok' according to some.

Whilst children at this age will know about the facts of sex they will not necessarily know about misogynistic offensive attitudes to women. Why is this male teacher introducing this idea into the minds of the boys and girls in this class?

It's possible to discuss how bad stereotypes are without using misogynistic examples that give bullying fodder to one half of the class at the expense of the other half. The half that are already suffering the majority of sexual assault and harassment in schools at horrendous levels.

It is entirely possibly to use mildly bad stereotypes - such as boys are better at some subjects and girls are better at others or boy babies should wear blue and girls pink - to discuss the impact without talking about sexual activity.

It's inappropriate for a male teacher to be talking about a group of women's sexual activity in a negative way even if he's then saying 'oh it's a negative stereotype'. No, that's not appropriate.

I will also note that it's this particular stereotype, or something close, that has been a contributing factor to many thousands of female children of OP's daughter's age in this country being raped and tortured by adult men and police and social services looking the other way. I seriously doubt this teacher has had time to explore the particular negative impacts of this stereotype and how it particularly affects girls in a short lesson.

The grooming gang survivors say it is still going on. There may be girl children in that class who are being sexually abused and told it's their fault for very much these reasons. That teacher can't know and he should not be using that stereotype for this reason alone.

With all the world of negative but considerably less harmful stereotypes to call on (people from the north wear flat caps, Scottish people are cheap) why did he go to this one?

Edited to add: By using such an offensive and shocking stereotype that many children in that class may not have been previously exposed to, I can guarantee the lesson has become about the shock some pupils felt on hearing this statement from supposedly a trusted adult in a position of power and not the point that these stereotypes are wrong.

Some days I feel really sorry for teachers. 🙄

Why would a male teacher decide to use a negative sexual stereotype about females alone in a lesson on stereotypes? Knowing that there may well be children in that class being abused.

Would everyone think it was ok if he'd made a racial slur then said 'this is a stereotype and it's bad'. Would people then maybe be questioning why he couldn't have used a different stereotype?

This thread is incredibly depressing.

Even though many teachers themselves have posted to say they think it is unacceptable?

I’m struggling to understand the issue, he was teaching about stereotypes and this is the stereotype. Is it you don’t wish sex mentioned in front of your child?

I honestly can’t see the issue at all,

You think he should only use positive stereotypes and that teaches kids?

I’m assuming @Boomer55 ia alluding to posters being judge, jury and executioner to this teachers career before even finding out if this actually happened in this context!

As long as he balanced it up with a similar vile male sterotype but i guess he didn't

But he was talking about stereotypes? He wasn’t saying it was true. The whole point of talking about stereotypes is to talk about the effect they have on others and how they can be damaging.

"That's pretty unfair"
"Not everyone acts the same"
"Why should a couple of bad examples be what everyone is thought of?"
"My mom/aunt/sister goes abroad on her own and she doesn't act like that"

It's highly likely he picked a stereotype about white Brits to avoid being accused of anything by using a stereotype about black or Asian people and considered this softer than one about disabled people

He might also have mentioned it in a string of different stereotypes whilst asking the class "do you think these are right? Do you think it's fair?"

He might have asked the class for examples of stereotypes and this one came up

English Lit classes will be hard if secondary school teachers are only allowed to mention sex within the context of basic biology and PSHE lessons