“Perpetrators of CSE are usually male but may belong to any socio-economic, ethnic group or culture.” Is this statement true or false?

[Brokenness]

This question was part of the assessment at the end of an online course for school staff about child sexual exploitation. I selected "true", which was marked as incorrect. Of course perpetrators can be female, but I'm not convinced that "usually male" is untrue.

I think this is in part what happens when people care more about being right on than about being right as in technically correct. Combined with that odd thing where you can't say that men do a bad thing more than women do even if every single statistic supports your conclusion because reality is "sexist".

How clumsy to lump two questions together

Something that I've found out since doing this unplanned homeschooling is the dire standard of the kids' textbooks. So much of what they're given makes no sense whatsoever - whoever is writing these textbooks can't parse a sentence or use grammar correctly. (I'm not an expert myself, but I would hope that I could construct a sentence clearly enough that a child could understand the gist of it, at least).

Many years ago I contributed a few lessons for textbooks, and the standard was extremely high. Disappointing to see that it seems now to be hastily slapped together 'exercises' that the kids are supposed to pretend to understand and the teacher doesn't seem to care if they understand or not. Useless busywork and box ticking.

Sorry, /tangent.

We used to publish in-house (LA team) and I was the designated editor (and poet, but that's another story) so I could stand by our products. I was English editor (and contributor) for some online and print resources, to.

Commercial educational publishers push authors for photocopiable resources or consumable workbooks because the money is in repeat purchases. Worksheets are anathema to me and I never would or did produce them. Doing my own bit of home education recently, I realised that my pupil (KS2) had no idea of setting out numbers on a lined page or even on squared paper. Turns out it was because at school they have workbooks with designated spaces for the answers to go in.

I recently bought a children's book on the periodic table for my own curiosity and urge to learn (I'm not a scientist) and was shocked to learn that columbite is apparently "...named for the country of Columbia." I have Colombian family members and know how to spell Colombia. A few seconds on a search engine showed there is no link between Colombia and columbite at all. I did alert the author and publisher and there was some email traffic which amounted to: "We're busy and sometimes we make stuff up and nobody notices." It made me doubt everything else in the book.

Children deserve better. They deserve the highest standard of writing and editing because they are not usually in a position to know when they are being fed rubbish.

Throw the worksheets away and use the learning content imaginatively. Rant over. 😉