Pronouns in maths exams

[OhWhatFuckeryIsThisNow]

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It’s what I do.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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?

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'.

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?

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.

Ella lives with her mum and two brothers. She and her brothers get free school meals. Her mum budgets for 50p each to feed the family a day during the week and 75p at weekends which works out at £16 a week during term time.

Ella's school breaks up for the summer holidays on Tuesday and her brothers' school breaks up on Wednesday. How much money will it cost her mum to feed the family this week compared to term time? How much will it cost next week?

Love that, made me giggle anyway.

Just to say I'm pretty good with words, not so good with math, but the use of "they" as a possible pronoun or its original meaning (and no way to tell, as in no explanation that this time it's a pronoun, in the next q it's a plural) in an exam would send me spinning. I know cos of my age that exam papers can be mis printed etc. As a teen taking o then a levels I didnt know that exam papers could even be wrong. I would have spent far too long wondering , probably put two answers and then worried until the results what I might have done differently.
If it's not made absolutely clear, theres not much point including it. And im going to assume making it clear will be oh I dunno transphobic or summat.

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

It's only become our lived experience because the TRAs have taken every opportunity to cram it down our throats, and people have been silenced by the screams of Transphobe.

Now at last we are fighting back. What was wrong with "A student has...... How much did this student receive?"

I'm now frantically adding "preparation for gender neutral pronouns" to our scheme of work so that our students are prepared properly for next year.

Looking forward to seeing their lived experiences included. Most of the contexts used are far removed from anyone's reality. Don't think I've ever seen a lawn and pond in the shapes they are in maths exams.

I write maths exam questions (lower than gcse) for an international audience (lots of ESL).

We spend an insane amount of time on each question trying to ensure that it can only be interpreted in one way. We have a list of allowable names, and a list of topics to avoid (alcohol being the obvious). When we set a question involving the price of something it has to be plausible. I will quit on the spot if anyone suggests I use they instead of he/she - there is no way it will add to the understandability of a question.

we are supposed to be writing questions to test their maths skills not their English.

This.
There's a lot of self identifying as an expert on this thread (Maths, SEN), much of which has turned out to be in a classroom support role. Nothing wrong with that as long as you're clear about your professional boundaries and don't claim an expertise that turns out to be nothing of the sort.

I'm going to go out on a limb and hazard a guess that suggestions doesn't teach primary/secondary but is possibly in academia so doesn't have the practical insight of younger children with language challenges.

Maybe we should just ask some transgender students/NB-
We’d like to use “they” in some questions in sone exam questions as we know that some students use that pronoun referring to themselves.

Some people will find the word “they” confusing in a maths questions if there is only one name. This could be due to Additional Needs or because English is their second language and the student expects there to be more than one person. That doesn’t happen all the time but on some questions.

What do you think about the maths exams just using he/she and only “they” if there is more than one person?

We’ll also be thinking about other such as philosophy, politics and English exams and talk to teachers and lots of students including you about that as well.

Oh and can add to the question-
some people say that “they” isn’t or shouldn’t be confusing. As this is maths, not about grammar or language we would like to be cautious and assume it might be a problem. What do you think?

Given the compelled speech we are being told that we must accept, I guess we might as well go full-on Orwellian and just agree that sometimes two and two "are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane."