You’re packing up the moving van right now, aren’t you?

The news that your kids have already screwed themselves out of a fair shake (or maybe it’s their bratty older sibling . . . or was it your school days?) comes out of Britain, where researchers say teachers have a hard time seeing children as “good” when their reputation precedes them.

The kids who will have the hardest time, they say, are those whose bad behaviour seems indicative of their home environment. Bad seed anyone?

I can’t help but wonder if teachers’ instant judgment of those kids is based on the knowledge that a “bad” home life means the teacher won’t get support from the parents during the school year. The biggest gripe I hear from teacher friends are the parents who either stick up for their kids at all costs (even when the little brat is at fault) or the parents who haven’t a clue. In those cases, it’s the parents who make the teacher’s life miserable, not the kid.

I always found the bias worked more than one way. I was the over-achieving smarty pants, which every teacher expected my younger brother to live up to (he’s smart too – but in different ways). On the other hand, the childhood pranks of elder relatives engendered no endearment from certain older teachers in my small town.

Do you feel like your child’s teacher made up their mind about your kid before classes even started?

Image:Parents Connect

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If the kids don’t follow the guidelines…their parents may face a ‘court action’ and could be fined up to £1,000,  if they are a repeat offender. “Every parent will have to, as part of the admissions process, say they take on board the obligations in the Home School Agreement, and every parent will be expected to reaffirm that every year,” the school secretary Ed Balls said. “If other parents feel that the HSA is not being enforced against other parents they will be able to tell the local education authority,” he added.

They are putting responsibility of the kid’s behavior at school squarely on the parent, with the added bonus of being able to tattle on the questionable parenting skills of your peers.

Do you think that it’s out of line for the government to make parents responsible for their kid’s actions?

Source

New research based on that model, that looks at issues like dyslexia, can now predict that babies are prone to the condition and start early interventions that can lessen or prevent it in the majority of kids who would get it.

Central principles that are coming to light in this multidisciplinary approach are that learning is computational, social, and driven by brain circuitry. In regular person language, that means that babies can learn patterns far earlier than originally thought, that they learn far better from people than from technology, and that students who identify with their teachers learn better.

And many of the kind of things that help babies learn – reading to them, teaching them patterns (as simply as singing songs or playing with blocks), etc. are actually fun. I remember asking a woman I know who’s well versed in early learning how I could help my then-newborn baby learn better, and she told e something that’s stuck with me: “Talk, play, sing, every day.”

Sounds natural – and really pretty fun.

The study, conducted by the University of New England over 10 years and multiple countries, monitored 500 pairs of identical twins during their first three years of school.

By assuming that the children had the same basic genetic makeup and family situation, researchers found that the ‘teacher effect’ on the aquisition of literacy skills was no more than 8%.

In more good news for the Australian school system, not much variance was found in the quality of literacy instruction among teachers, and differences between schools were also shown to have a negligible effect on a child’s literacy levels.

A new study has found a significant link between beauty and grades, something everyone but the beautiful have long suspected.

In “Effects of Physical Attractiveness, Personality and Grooming on Academic Performance in High School“, forthcoming in the August issue of Labour Economics, University of Miami sociologist Michael T. French found that a student’s high school grade point average was influenced by the three factors in the title.
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What’s interesting is that even more helpful than beauty for girls (and boys, who aren’t helped that much by being good-looking) is personality and grooming.

A summary of the findings from Newsweek:

Physical attractiveness alone boosts GPA for both genders.
Nevertheless, physical attractiveness was a weaker predictor of grades than grooming (for boys) and personality (for girls).

That suggests that teacher bias plays a significant role in what grades students get. Teachers reward some physical and personality types and penalize others.

So how exactly do so-called “beauty premiums” and “plainness penalties” work? No time to find out. I’ve got to get the girls trimmed and tweezed and, if there’s time, practice demure smiling and gentle questioning and just being really, really nice. We’re Harvard-bound!

Okay all you teacher out there, don’t deny it! You dock the stinky kids just because.

Photo: NY Times

We should be so lucky.

The pamphlets drawn up by the National Health System are titled “Pleasure,” and promise “an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away”. According to the Daily Telegraph, it also says: “Health promotion experts advocate five portions of fruit and veg a day and 30 minutes’ physical activity three times a week. What about sex or masturbation twice a week?”

In some round-about so rubbishy it almost makes sense logic, the NHS folks say this is the way to discourage teens from having sex… by encouraging them to hold out for REALLY GOOD sex or doing it themselves.

I’m not against the latter – it seems substantially more realistic than abstinence. And have you ever met a teen boy who didn’t already spend hours in the bathroom (and teen girls too – but teen boys are generally much more open about it) with mum’s lingerie catalogue?

As for the former… who knows what good sex is until you’ve had some? So who’s to tell a teenager they aren’t having good sex until they’ve practiced?

On a good note, this does provide every kid with a little something Our Bodies, Ourselves forgot to share: empowerment in the bedroom. Just think – no more women faking it. In fact, if this kind of sex ed had been taught thirty years ago, Meg Ryan would never have earned her grandest moment on film.

Image: Mirror

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Education Seen As Key To Keep Indigenous Kids Out Of Jail
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Technology Lesson One: Teach The Teachers
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Celebrity Mothers Who Lose Weight Quickly ‘Set Bad Example’
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Three-year-old Girl Beheaded Over Land Dispute
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Taking Risks Is A Healthy Thing For Children
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“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t teach — teach gym!”

Why did I do this? Because the gym teacher had told my friends and I that we couldn’t cut through the gym in order to get to the canteen. I was 15, so cut me some slack.

Why am I telling you this? Because I think that in this particular case, I may have been on to something. (I stole that line from Woody Allen, by the way.)

A substitute gym teacher in New Rochelle, NY “got into a fight with an 11-year-old Westchester student over a dodgeball game, called him a ‘crybaby,’ and put him in a chokehold, New Rochelle police said.”

WOW. That’s about as messed up as it gets. (OK, I could think of worse things, I suppose. But still.)

When my son tells me about the stuff he does in gym class, I am quick to inform him that none of it could possibly be as bad as some of the things I had to do. For example: a game called “chicken”, wherein we were divided into two groups. The bleachers were folded up. Each group had to do whatever they could — anything they could — to keep the other group from reaching the other side. There was much wailng, gnashing of teeth and giving of wedgies. That same gym teacher used to refer to an Indian boy as “Mahatma” (as in Gandhi) and probably did other things that I’ve blocked out.

But as far as I can recall, no gym teacher ever put a student in a chokehold. Even in the bad old days of the 70’s and 80’s, choking students was frowned upon.

The teacher denies all of this, telling the New York Post that he was “attacked by a third-grader.” The student “has marks on his right arm from where the teacher grabbed him” but the teacher “contends the kid threw a punch” and he was only defending himself.

The incident occurred in front of witnesses, so hopefully the truth will be sorted out. If the teacher did what he’s accused of, he shouldn’t ever be allowed to teach again.

Source: NY Post

Image: Amazon