to be totally bored hearing this same old trite trotted out

[curryfreak]

Get this all the time from parents of boys.
How difficult they are, how much more of a handful they can be in relation to girls, how much they eat in comparision to girls ffs,- who cares.
The one though, that has been in vogue for a while,(courtesy of daily mail headlines and the like) is how terrible boys are faring in the education system, and how these dreadful female teachers are feminising the poor little mites,- how they have no male role models, because there are so few male teachers (particularly in primary schools)
Yawn yawn yawn...
Simple facts are girls have been on the backfoot for years. Nobody gave a toss, when they were lagging behind educationally, and in some cases activly discourgaed from taking subjects which were considered male dominated.
Boys are having to wake up to the fact that their sense of entitlement is no longer acceptable.
So, thoughts.

Stayfrosty, I took it to be Southern rhyming slang for a noun.

From what I have read she just sounds aggressive and her arguments are ill thought and just designed to get people bickering and her input through the thread is just a bit of a wind up. But I'm not going to say the T word

however i have really enjoyed the posts and riposte.particularly the teaching discussions

YANBU - I make sure my ds wakes up every morning wth the knowledge that his sense of entitlement is no longer acceptable.

Sorry, I meant YABU. And did you really mean 'trite'?

Yabu and Curry u sound like a bit of an * (insert your own word of choice)... Others here have been interesting though

Yes I am a teacher, I love teaching and think most teachers are great. I do believe in being honest though and do not wear rose tinted glasses about the quality of an increasing number of teachers into the profession. I have interviewed and helped train many teachers over many years and have found the quality (as expressed through qualifications, enthusiasm, work ethic, communication skills, general knowledge etc) is on a downward not upward trend. The exception to this is in ICT skills where new entrants are very skilled.

Agree bamboostalks totally

this is were mn excels.ignore inane op,celebrate digression is always much more fun

oops kinda got off the subject a bit now eh?

Bamboostalks, I think that is a general problem and not just about new teachers. I have heard the same said about new dentists, new pharmacists and new beauticians. It seems to be a problem with the organisation of FE and HE.

dentist and pharmacist are graduate entry professions with cpd and beautician isnt - incomparable jobs

I was basing the comparison on the changes to FE and HE, which have some similarity across a very wide range of jobs that such institutions train people to do. I have just heard a lot of people in a variety of jobs complaining about people coming into their jobs having had inadequate training.

Maybe that has something to do with the far greater numbers of young people who go to university these days, bamboo?

Having a target of 50% of people going to uni is bound to have some impact.

As someone working in HE, I agree with MillyR.

The problem is that greater numbers of young people are going to university, but that doesn't mean more are capable of getting the qualifications.

This leads to either one of two issues, 1) dumb down the course, or 2) have greater numbers of drop-outs/failures. The second is not good finicially for universities, so whether we like it or not the first tends to be reality. Of course, this is dressed up as other things, but it is still a lot of dumbing down.

you seem v v v unhappy with your own gender curryfreak. maybe look into why that is before you come along spouting utter shite.

A possible solution is to stop pretending all degrees are equal and have a minority taking honours degrees and the rest doing ordinary degrees. I don't dare say anymore without name changing though, in case I am uncovered.

Oops, wine induced tiredness induced spelling errors . Of course I meant financially not finicially.

Problem is, even when women do start to make some headway in the senior professions, all that happens is that they are paid less than men.

Women in medicine used to be a minority. Now that around 50% of GPs are women, guess what? Female GPs earn either 13% less or £13k less than their male counterparts (sorry, can't remember which, it is one of them and I will check but not at 11.30pm).

So actually all this gender determinism rubbish about schools being biased in favour of girls (because of course boys used to do so badly in the 50s and 60s when they were expected to shut up, sit down and pay attention ) is irrelevant in the long term. MNers who are mothers of boys can rest asssured their boys have every chance of having an unfair slice of the pie just by virtue of being male, no matter how well girls do at school.

(Disclaimer - I am the mother of a boy, just don't particularly feel the need to somehow gain his success in life at the expense of his female peers.)

My boys are grown up and at uni now, but they were delightful,sweet, loving, caring, compassionate, clever and absolutely gorgeous when they were younger. As they still are. My DD is heading the same way. I've never complained about my boys, or my DD for that matter.

I think the thing about (and this could be a MASSIVE generalisation hahaha!) education of boys in the 50s/60s was yes they did have to be quiet and sit still but the school system was a lot more black and white in its expectations which tends to suit boys' prefered learning styles. Today things (classroom management/social issues) are discussed more openly within the classroom, discipline and the role of the teacher is a more of a grey issue with exceptions to the rule for discipline issues coming forward left right and centre. Although boys were expected to sit still and listen as they did - the classroom dynamic was a lot less distracting and more rigid in those days, perhaps suiting boys' learning styles more. I could of course be talking total nonsense (tis late now!).

I would hate to accuse you of talking nonsense, Stille (especially as your MN name is the only Christmas Carol I can remember in a foreign language ) but I'm not convinced it's true that strict discipline is better for boys than girls or vice versa. Good behaviour in schools with clear standards and sanctions is better for everyone, surely?

FWIW I moved from a school with lots of disruption to one that expected good behaviour when I was 14 and it was huge relief (the second was a girls' school, as it happens.

Stillenacht, I found that true for DS, and it was also the case for my nephew at a different primary school. The informality makes it easier to do the wrong thing, because the adults are not clear about what the rules are or what it is that the child is meant to be accomplishing.

There seemed to be a lot of time where they were told to just play but secretly an adult was following them around with a clipboard failing them on capacity or whatever. They would have done better if someone just explained capacity and asked them to demonstrate it.

Hopefully all this has changed over the past few years, as studies were showing that this unclear and informal style was widening social inequality.

I think of course that strict and fair discipline is right and proper for both genders but i think gilrs have a tendency to cope better with the more relaxed style of discipline and the consolidatory style which is sometimes used than boys...or again I could be talking crap! Just theorising really....

but talking crap while your name is making me think of a beautiful Christmas Carol, appropriately enough one always led by a boy soloist.