Four things Captain Scott found in Antarctica (and one that found him)

On an icy theme still...see this article here

"Found in the tent alongside their frozen bodies were 16kg (35lb) of fossils, a meteorological log, scores of notes, and rolls of film taken by Scott himself.

The dying explorers thought these too valuable to jettison, even though lightening their load could have played a part in the life and death struggle after weeks of travelling in temperatures below -37C (-35F)."

Lets celebrate our boys!

'What we need, she says, is to celebrate what makes them boys and help them to understand the things that don't come naturally to them. That means getting them outside more, particularly as space gets squeezed in urban schools. “Not letting boys be boys is not only detrimental to them but also to girls, many of whom become overcompliant with what is considered ‘good' behaviour and could do with a shove outdoors to take more risks,” she says. “I certainly wish that had happened to me.” '

[From a 2008 article in The Times
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article4288100.ece]

As someone who tried very hard in my early days of parenting to 'gender neutralise' my boys, only to find out I was trying to bend the forces of nature, this quote feels very true.

So, let's celebrate our boys!

David Dimbleby says TV fills in for history lessons

See here BBC News Tuesday, 9 March 2010

' History programmes on television are filling in the gaps in children's knowledge of the subject, says veteran BBC presenter David Dimbleby.

In an interview in the Radio Times he said the treatment of history in the curriculum had been "less impressive". Dimbleby said the popularity of TV history documentaries showed people had a genuine interest in the cultural heritage of the country.

Dimbleby is currently presenting the Seven Ages of Britain on BBC One.

In a question and answer interview in the Radio Times, the broadcaster said: "The success of Seven Ages and and other programmes - by Andrew Marr, Simon Schama and David Starkey - suggests to me that there is a great and perhaps growing interest in our history.
"Maybe we are filling in the gaps left by the less impressive treatment of history in the school curriculum."
Dimbleby also defended the presentation of history programming by non-academics.
"There is a place for the specialist, of course, but there is a place too for the broadcaster with a general layman's curiosity and interest," he said.
"Neither should exclude the other."... '

I don't know what history is taught in schools these days, but what I've seen of the accompanying key stage resources it seems to be pretty limited. We record masses of tv documentaries, primarily - but not exculsively - historical ones. And for the most part they are informative and interesting. Not all are enjoyed by the kids, but the ones that they do enjoy really give them a taste for all things historical.

Documentaries we've been watching recently :
'Seven Ages of Britain' (BBC)
'Industrial Revelations' (Quest),
oh and I've just recorded the start of the new space documentary series: 'Wonders of the solar system' which also looks fab.
And we are revisiting the series 'The 1900s House' and 'The 1940s House', thanks to the loan of DVDs from a friend (thank you !).

I don't like to be smug but...

...'Schools are churning out the unemployable'

according to The Sunday Times, February 21, 2010

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7034975.ece
[Apologies to all those who send their children to school, but I AM going to have a smug Home Educator moment. I deserve it. I earned it. Just bear with me while I make rude signs to Mr Badman et al. and his cronies while quoting from the article...]

"...Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, put it bluntly. Too many children have been leaving school after 11 or 13 years of compulsory education “without the basic skills to get on in life and hold down a job”. He said 5m adults were functionally illiterate and 17m could not add up properly. “On-the-job training” cannot act as a “bandage or sticking plaster” for “the failure of our education system”.

A CBI survey revealed that literacy and numeracy were not the only problems.
More than 50% of employers complained that young people were inarticulate, unable to communicate concisely, interpret written instructions or perform simple mental calculations...

...The DWP has made it clear: work is where the inflated claims for our state education finally hit the buffers. At every stage we have a system in which the expediency of politicians and the ideology of the educational establishment take precedence over the interests of pupils.

We have children who can barely read and write scoring high marks in their Sats because it makes the school, and therefore politicians, look good. We have exam boards competing to offer the lowest pass mark because it allows heads to fulfil their GCSE targets. We have pupils pushed into easy subjects at A-level — which excludes them from applying to a top university — because it benefits the school. And we have universities that offer a 2:1 degree, as the IT company director put it, to “anyone who bothers to sit down and take the exam”. "

Truth is stranger than fiction

Don't you just love weird news..?

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20091105/tod-back-from-the-dead-man-attends-own-f-870a197.html

Back From The Dead: Man Attends Own Funeral

A bricklayer who was thought to have been killed in a car crash shocked his grieving family by showing up alive at his own funeral.

Relatives of Brazilian Ademir Jorge Goncalves, 59, had identified him as the victim of a Sunday night car crash in the southern state of Parana, police said.

As is customary there, the funeral was held the following day, which happened to be the holiday of Finados, when Brazilians visit cemeteries to honour the dead.

What family members did not know was that Mr Goncalves had spent the night at a lorry park talking to friends over drinks of a sugarcane liquor known as cachaca, his niece Rosa Sampaio revealed later.

He did not get word about his own funeral until it was already happening Monday morning.

The bricklayer then rushed to the funeral to let family members know he was not dead, a police spokesman in the town of Santo Antonio da Platina said.
"The corpse was badly disfigured, but dressed in similar clothing," said the police spokesman.
"People are afraid to look for very long when they identify bodies, and I think that is what happened in this case."
Mr Goncalves' niece added that some family members were not sure the body was that of the bricklayer.

"My two uncles and I had doubts about the identification," she said.

"But an aunt and four of his friends identified the body, so what were we to do? We went ahead with the funeral."

The body was correctly identified later Monday, the police spokesman said, and has already been buried in another state.

A serious case of "Excerptitis": please define and analyse, using full sentences. Marks will be deducted for incorrect spelling and grammar.

Just found this from earlier on this month:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6819979.ece


An obsession with “excerptitis” in primary schools means young children rarely read a whole book, research suggests today.

A quarter of primary school children read just one complete book a year in the classroom, and do not discover the endings of classics such as Treasure Island or Goodnight Mr Tom.
Instead they are frequently given passages or “bite-sized” extracts of books to read. The survey found that one in eight primary school teachers had never read a whole book with their class.
A lack of time caused by the pressure of squeezing many subjects into the curriculum is thought to be to blame.

Michael Rosen, the poet and former Children’s Laureate, said: “I think of it as an illness called excerptitis. The consequence of excerptitis is boredom. We have bored thousands of children and put them off reading. I mean, what a tragedy.

“This research shows that in thousands of classrooms children are not reading books or talking about books, I think it will shock the public that so few whole books are being taught in class.
“There are going to be children who will only be taught about three or four books as part of their literacy education in the whole of their primary careers. For the thousands of children who don’t read books at home, it is a travesty. That’s three books they might have come across in the whole of their infant lives.

“The idea that children can’t manage whole stories or whole books is a nonsense,” Rosen added. “No extract in the world has the power of books. Extracts deny children the meat of the story.”
The survey of more than 500 primary staff and 1,000 parents of schoolchildren was commissioned by Heinemann, an educational publisher. It claims to be the first wide-scale research into the use of whole books in literacy teaching.

Researchers said that, if the findings were extrapolated to all primaries across the country, it would mean 600,000 children would never read a book in class with their teacher. More than 1.1 million would study only one whole book a year.

Teachers said books not finished in class included The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Roald Dahl’s popular novels.

Half of teachers could think of at least one occasion where pupils were left ignorant about the narrative of a novel, because teaching the whole book was not a priority in class.

Almost 85 per cent said children missed out on finding out “what happens next” because they did not read a whole book.

Three quarters of teachers said children’s “reading stamina” and concentration levels were being damaged by the lack of whole book reading.

Nearly two thirds of teachers feared the absence of teaching literacy using entire books could turn children off reading. One in five said they had seen evidence of this already, with many believing there was a greater negative impact on boys.

State primary classes were almost twice as likely to not finish a whole book as their independent school counterparts - 13 per cent compared with just eight per cent in private schools.

Michael Morpurgo, the children’s author, said: “When a book is written, it’s written whole.
“The point of a book is that it should be fun, it should be exciting, it should tell you more about the world around you, it should open your eyes and open your heart, it should make you joyful, it should make you sad - and you can't get this from just taking little snippets from it.”

Classic books remembered most fondly by parents in the survey were Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Hobbit, Stig of the Dump, Swallows and Amazons, and Watership Down.

Legal power to dictate exam content (article)

Yet another interesting article about the education system...

'Ed Balls seeks power to dictate what textbooks GCSE and A-level students must study'. The Guardian, Thursday 19 March 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk:80/uk/2009/mar/19/education-ed-balls-books

"The schools secretary, Ed Balls, is seeking a new legal power to dictate the basic content of every public exam in England, in a move that would give him or any future secretary of state the right to decide which books children must study at GCSE or A-level.

The law would allow the government to set "minimum requirements" for qualifications. One senior exam board source said it would give ministers "mind-boggling power" over exams if it got on to the statute books.

Opposition MPs will attempt today to remove from the apprenticeships, skills, children and learning bill the clause that gives the secretary of state control of basic qualifications content. Guidance published alongside the bill says it could be used to specify "which authors' works needed to be studied for someone to gain a GCSE in English".

Ministers insist the power would be exercised only as a last resort, to preserve the teaching of Shakespeare, for example, if there was a suggestion it should be scrapped from the curriculum.

The bill will break up the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority into Ofqual, an independent exams watchdog, and a smaller Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA) responsible for qualification design. Announcing the move last year, Balls said it would protect the exam system from political interference, as Ofqual would be independent of ministers while the QCA is answerable to them.

But the contested clause, which has gone unnoticed in the sprawling bill until now, has raised concerns among exam boards and opposition MPs, who fear it will in fact strengthen ministers' ability to interfere with the exam system for political gain.

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat education spokesman, said: "What is taught in schools should not be dependent on the whim of some here today, gone tomorrow politician. And the idea of Ed Balls or Gordon Brown determining which parts of history children are taught, or which books and poems they should read, is a rather frightening one.

"This revelation simply serves to highlight that while the government is pretending to be creating a more independent system of qualifications, curriculum development and oversight, what is actually happening is that ministers are retaining huge powers to meddle in both what is taught and how standards are measured."

The parliamentary committee scrutinising the bill is due to debate the clause today. Ministers promise that the power would be used only in "exceptional" circumstances, and that the law makes it explicit they cannot interfere in grading, assessment or structure of exams.

In a letter to the Liberal Democrats, dated 14 March and seen by the Guardian, the schools minister, Sarah McCarthy-Fry, insisted the effect would be to limit their interference and protect the exam system. A memorandum of understanding is promised, to set out exactly when ministers could use the power.

However, exam boards fear that the measure is too broad. Bene't Steinberg, head of public affairs at Cambridge Assessment, the parent company of the exam board OCR, said: "Cambridge Assessment believes that teachers and academics are the best people to decide what goes into a qualification. However, if politicians must keep their hands on the levers of qualifications, this clause needs checks and balances. The government has explained that it will only use the power in exceptional circumstances and in line with a defined process. We don't see why that should not be put into the act and made law to protect future generations."

McCarthy-Fry said: "There is currently nothing in law to stop ministers intervening on anything in relation to qualifications so, by establishing an independent regulator of qualifications that is accountable to parliament, ministers are actually putting limits on the influence they can have.
"Ministers will rightly have no role in grading, assessments or standards. They will only use powers with regard to the curriculum in exceptional circumstances - for example, intervening to ensure Shakespeare remains a core part of what our children learn." "

"Not how intelligent is the child but rather how is the child intelligent?"

Interesting article...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/08/abolish-league-tables-seldon

Soulless schools cursed by league tables and dominated by "formulaic" exams are squeezing the lifeblood out of education, leading headteacher and political commentator Anthony Seldon will warn tomorrow.

The 21st-century obsession with teaching "facts" harks back to Thomas Gradgrind's utilitarian values in Dickens's Hard Times, he will say in a hard-hitting lecture to the College of Teachers. The result is a system that stifles imagination, individuality and flair.

In an extraordinary indictment of the national examination system, Dr Seldon, master of Wellington College and biographer of former prime minister Tony Blair, will claim that we are forgetting the very purpose of education. "Many parents, many teachers, will recognise it. Schools need to be liberating places, but it is very hard to do it with the utter throttling, choking straitjacket of the national examination system curriculum," he told the Observer

In Britain, he advocates a severe cut-back of external testing and examinations, which he claims have increased because of a lack of trust of schools, heads and teachers.

One option would be banishing national external exams until the age of 18, as they do in the United States. He also argues that GCSEs and A-levels, should be "swept away" in favour of exams, such as the International Baccalaureate, with its primary years, middle years, and diploma-level programmes.

Schools are "dancing to Gradgrind's drum-beat of facts, facts, facts more than ever", he will say in his inaugural lecture on his appointment as professor of education to the College of Teachers. And the spectres of the Victorian Gradgrind and his unimaginative but aptly named schoolteacher, Mr M'Choackumchild, still "strut the classrooms of the world".
School authorities, schools and teachers are now valued for one thing alone: their success at achieving exam passes, says Seldon, who introduced happiness classes to Wellington College, one of Britain's leading public schools. "We have embraced dullness and so close are we to it, we do not even see what has happened," he will tell the college.

He will also criticise faith schools, claiming "all too often they have narrowed, not opened, children's minds and hearts".

In Britain, universities wield huge power over the sixth-form curriculum, yet do not encourage students to stretch themselves beyond their A-level requirements, he will allege. "A tutor of admissions at an Oxford college recently admitted to one of my colleagues at Wellington: 'We are not looking for broad-achieving and rounded students at this college. In fact , we are not rounded people ourselves.' "

University and school teachers are not themselves to blame, he will argue. But, he will add, the rigid system is having a negative impact on pupils and university students: "They are showing more signs of depression, eating disorders, self-harming, and alcohol/drug abuse, than at any point in recorded history. But they also have better resources, more computers, better buildings, and more money in their pockets than at any point in their history.

"What has been lost? Why has affluence and knowledge not brought us wonderful schools and remarkable universities?"

He will claim that schools have concentrated on a very narrow definition of intelligence: the logical and the linguistic, at the expense of cultural, physical, social, personal, moral and spiritual intelligence. He will add that we should be asking: "Not how intelligent is a child but rather, how is the child intelligent?"

Seldon will argue the case for bringing back playing fields, placing orchestras and music at the heart of the curriculum, and offering dance, physical exercise, outdoor adventure and challenge to everyone.

League tables are "the biggest curse", and have inflicted more damage on British education than anything else, he will claim. The well-being of students needs to be taken "far more seriously", and school sizes should be cut.

"Dickens's message is as timely and urgent for us in 2009 as it was in 1854," Seldon will argue. "It is that soulless, loveless, desiccated education damages children for a lifetime. Education should be an opening of the heart and mind. That is what education means; it is this, or it is nothing."

He will conclude: "Walk on every head teacher, inspector and every local and central bureaucrat who has squeezed the lifeblood out of education."

Clause 152 - do you want everyone to know your business???

I've been alerted on one of the home ed email lists to Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill, which appears to give the government exemption from the Data Protection Act and will allow them to share data without restriction. Although Jack Straw has been wavering about it, and there are suggestions it may be rewritten/diluted, it seems like a dangerous thing to have clause 152 at all.

Here are some of the articles:


'http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/feb/28/convention-modern-liberty-information
'Clause 152 must go. A clause in the new coroners and justice bill will allow the sharing of your personal information. Write to your MP now'

http://www.cockspiracy.com/

' 1. Summary
Buried among the numerous complicated and controversial provisions of this legislation is a single clause, clause 152 in the first draft of the Bill, which is a profound threat to privacy, liberty and the rule of law. It is enabling legislation that converts the Data Protection Act into a machine for massively increasing the dealing by government in information of all kinds. It is designed to allow ministers to use a fast-track regulatory procedure to sweep away
data protection, human-rights considerations, confidentiality, legal privilege, and ultra vires when they would stand in the way of any use, acquisition or dissemination of information in pursuit of departmental policy. The availability of broad data-sharing along these lines would be a profound change in the way the country is governed, potentially altering the function of almost all other legislation. It should not be introduced at all, but certainly not without proper public debate. There has been no such debate. It would be a disaster if the “information sharing order” (ISO in what follows) were to be successfully smuggled
through parliament in this manner.'

So please write to your MP! I've just emailed mine and it was surprisingly easy (I think it's the first time I've contacted my MP about ANYTHING!) You can find out your MP and email them through http://www.writetothem.com/.

This is the letter I wrote to my MP:

"I am writing to you to convey my extreme concern over clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill. I refuse consent to having my information, taken for one purpose, arbitrarily used for any other purpose.

I ask you to work to prevent this clause being passed and to vote it off the bill. "

I'm sure others could do a much better job, but mine was short and sweet cause I knew otherwise I'd never get around to writing it.

'How secondary schools stop kids being creative...'

This little article makes interesting - though not surprising - reading. I expect a reasonably intelligent person would find similar creativity-crushing influences in a primary school if they knew what they were looking for.

About 4 years ago I read an article by an author/researcher who believed that the restriction on weapon/hero/adventure play in nurseries and schools was stifling boys' creativity. When I discussed it with someone at the time, they thought it was a total overexaggeration. I'm not so sure; I remember the time when my nearly-5 year old ds1 decided to stop drawing aeroplanes after one of the private nursery staff told him he mustn't draw guns on it. Considering he'd barely lifted a writing implement until a few months previous, it was such a frustratingly annoying thing and my heart went out to my little boy.

Anyway, back to the article in the blog title...I've snipped a bit of the original, to give the gist of it:

'How secondary schools stop kids, especially boys, being creative - by a top children's author' The Times Online 9 Febhttp://timesonline.typepad.com/schoolgate/2009/02/how-secondary-s.html


"To be creative, you have to be wrong most of the time. Unfortunately, being wrong doesn’t go down very well at school. In fact, I think creativity is being educated out of kids when they get into Secondary School, and it’s a big problem....

...I often get the impression that teachers are drawn to the ideas from their girl pupils, whereas the imaginative world of the boys seems mysterious – sometimes even dangerous. I can sympathise with teachers who are afraid to be seen to be encouraging violent thoughts. But most boys’ imaginations run most quickly to two extremes: the violent and the absurd. I happen to think that’s exciting, but teachers seem to want to foster creativity within certain ‘safe’ parameters. Creativity is not safe.

I would love to see, in the context of an English lesson, the classroom transformed into an environment which rewards wacky, crazy-stupid and yes, even sometimes violent ideas. Until it is, boys’ creativity will continue to be ‘educated’ out of them at the upper end of Primary Schools and the lower end of Secondary Schools. And they will continue to give up on reading..."

Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud! (until you have to scoop it out of your washing machine)

If you thought it was only hippos and pigs who have a natural affinity for mud, think again.
And no, don't ask about the state of my car...

But, hey, they're having fun! All that fresh air and exercise and space for creativity and exploration. Just think about all those poor school children in their neat uniforms sat down, being slowly and painfully tormented by the literacy hour [Yay, time to have a smug home educating mother moment] .

But I don't suppose their mothers have to have to scrape the grit out of their washing machine drum before they go to bed. And yes I scraped quite a lot out last night.

Ok, back to smugness (while I'm on a roll ...). Got our storm kettle working AND managed to boil a pan of milk on the top to make hot chocolate. Ok, so this was in the back garden and I could have just used the microwave, and the milk was full of ash because I blew in the hole in the bottom and loads of ash came out (ho hum), but this was FIRE! Crackly smokey sort of stuff that gets in your eyes and makes you smell like a Guy on bonfire night. And you can't poke stuff in a microwave (well, not with the same crackly smokey dangerous satisfaction and it's certainly not advisable to poke it with a metal fork unless you want to create your very own miniature firework display).

I don't think having a storm kettle will help our attempts at minimalist travelling. Whereas we used to just go out with a flask of hot choc and some cups (and a sack of other unrelated stuff which I wont list but would have fed/clothed/entertained a football team), today we went out with the storm kettle, a bag of dry kindling (it had been raining), a tabloid newspaper (to burn, not read), a tin of soup, a tub of hot choc, a tub of dried milk powder, a couple of cup-a-soup packs, plus a pan, tin opener, matches, cups, bottles of water, cloths to wipe everything over afterwards AND a camera and spare batteries to photograph the kettle in action. All I needed was a tent and a sleeping bag we would have been set for the weekend!

Do you reckon Ray Mears keeps all his gear under his shirt. Perhaps that's why he looks like he's built like a brick outhouse? Wonder if he's got a storm kettle stuffed up there..?

________________________________________________

Just been reading this with regard to the latest government consultation...
Have included an excerpt, (possibly not the best bit, but read the whole thing for yourself)

28 January 2009 The coming war against Home Schoolers

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/01/the-coming-war-against-home-schoolers.html

"And as long as it was just a matter of a few retired hippies and eccentrics keeping their young at home, which it was until very recently, home schooling didn't matter. But what is happening now is that many parents are taking their children out of state schools because a) they are being horribly bullied in anarchic classrooms and playgrounds and b) they have begun to notice that many of the schools aren't teaching them anything much anyway. - despite years of propaganda, stunts, gimmicks, 'specialist status', absurdly glowing OFSTED reports and allegedly improved (but fiddled) exam results.
If all the plumbers in your area were no good at fixing leaks, and kept flooding your kitchen, you'd teach yourself plumbing and do it yourself. The results couldn't be worse. Why not take the same view with schools? Why not just keep them at home and do a better job yourself? Of course this is impossible for couples who both trudge out to work every day. But one way or another there is now a significant minority of households where this isn't the case, where homeschooling looks like a serious option and may take off. I suspect the left-wing establishment want to nip it, hard, in the bud. Though of course I'm not prejudiced, and will wait with interest for the report."

Ok, more stuff to blog about but it's getting late and I'm too tired to continue with this displacement activity (perhaps I should try sleep instead?)

False Leg Found Under Alton Towers Roller Coaster

Some things are just too strange not to acknowledge...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/h

False leg found underneath ride

"The owner of a prosthetic leg found beneath an Alton Towers rollercoaster is being sought by the amusement park. The leg was just one of many bizarre items found near The Corkscrew, which is to be dismantled after carrying 43.5 million people since it opened in 1980. "

Word confusion

Conversation between dd1 and ds2:

ds2: that's not fair
dd1: why?
ds2: if you say you wont do something unless I do something then that's whitenail.
dd1: eh?
ds2: whitenail! Don't you know anything?!
dd1:what's whitenail?
ds2: you know! Whitenail

and so on...



I was confused too. It took me about 10 minutes before I realised what he meant was 'blackmail'!

And on the subject of child conversations, the kids and I were talking about all sorts of stuff on the way to my osteopath appointment. Ds2 said in a loud voice 'Ooo that's the Private Shop, I know what's in there' and then leant over to continue the conversation in a whisper with ds1. He saw that I was eavesdropping and buttoned up. When I questioned him he just grinned and wouldn't tell me anything. I'm interested to discover what he thinks is in the shop. If he actually does know what's inside that shop then I want to know HOW he found out!! There are some things that 7 year old boys really shouldn't know!

And on a completely different subject, this is an interesting article I saw posted on a home ed email group. It's by Steve Biddulph. If you don't know who he is then just google it and you should find plenty of references!

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/a-childcare-lesson-from-canada/2008/01/18/1200620205875.html

"No Gender Differences In Math Performance"

Think boys are naturally better at maths than girls? Think again.

So how deep-rooted our gender stereotypes are within the education system? Are us parents as guilty as teachers of perpetuating them?

(See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080724192258.htm

for the full article)

No Gender Differences In Math Performance
Science Daily (July 27, 2008)

'— We've all heard it. Many of us in fact believe it. Girls just aren't as good at math as boys.

But is it true? After sifting through mountains of data - including SAT results and math scores from 7 million students who were tested in accordance with the No Child Left Behind Act - a team of scientists says the answer is no. Whether they looked at average performance, the scores of the most gifted children or students' ability to solve complex math problems, girls measured up to boys.
"There just aren't gender differences anymore in math performance," says University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde, the study's leader. "So parents and teachers need to revise their thoughts about this."
The UW-Madison and University of California, Berkeley, researchers report their findings in the July 25 issue of Science.
Though girls take just as many advanced high school math courses today as boys, and women earn 48 percent of all mathematics bachelor's degrees, the stereotype persists that girls struggle with math, says Hyde. Not only do many parents and teachers believe this, but scholars also use it to explain the dearth of female mathematicians, engineers and physicists at the highest levels.
Cultural beliefs like this are "incredibly influential," she says, making it critical to question them. "Because if your mom or your teacher thinks you can't do math, that can have a big impact on your math self concept." '

******************************************************************************

and, what I believe is the same story, as described in rather more detail in The Guardian:

Boys not better than girls at maths, study finds
Education Guardian
Friday May 30 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/may/30/schools.uk1

'Boys are not innately better at maths than girls, and any difference in test scores is due to nurture rather than nature, researchers suggested today.
According to new research published in the journal Science, the "gender gap" in maths, long perceived to exist between girls and boys, disappears in societies that treat both sexes equally. When girls have equal access to education and other opportunities they do just as well as boys in maths tests.
The research, led by Prof Paola Sapienza of Northwestern University in the US, investigated whether a global gender gap exists and whether it was the result of social engineering rather than intrinsic aptitude for the subject.
"The so-called gender gap in math skills seems to be at least partially correlated to environmental factors," Sapienza said. "The gap doesn't exist in countries in which men and women have access to similar resources and opportunities."
Researchers analysed data from more than 276,000 children in 40 countries who took the 2003 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) - the internationally standardised test of maths, reading, science and problem-solving ability.
Globally, boys tend to outperform girls in maths (on average girls score 10.5 points lower than boys) but in more "gender equal societies" such as Iceland, Sweden and Norway, girls scored as well as boys or better.
For example, the maths gender gap almost disappeared in Sweden, while in Turkey girls scored 23 points below boys in maths.
Average girls' scores improved as equality improved and the number of girls reaching the highest levels of performance also increased, the researchers found. In Britain, girls fared only slightly less well than male classmates, with female pupils scoring an average of 0.7% less.
The research also found a striking gender gap in reading skills. In every country girls perform better than boys in reading but in countries that treat both sexes equally, girls do even better.
On average, girls have reading scores that are 32.7 points higher than those of boys (6.6% higher than the mean average score for boys). In Turkey, this amounts to 25.1 points higher, and in Iceland, girls score 61.0 points higher.
Sapienza said: "Our research indicates that in more gender equal societies, girls will gain an absolute advantage relative to boys."

_________________________________________________________

I have loads of photos of this past weekend camping at the sailing club to upload, but it's late now. I'll hopefully get a chance to write about it all tomorrow. In the meantime, lots of unpacking to do and a few grubby children to get to sleep.

p.s. apologies for the formatting on this entry; I know the paragraphs seem to be squished up. Blogspot has decided for some reason to take out the spaces and lines that I put in...can't get my head around it, so will have to leave it for now.