Randomness Guide to London

Because usually when people are talking about the problem of BOYZ in the educational system and under-achievement, it is all about defeminising the curriculum and catering to their masculine needs and so on.

Well this guy, 'who shaves his head and has an East End accent' is, I suspect, secretly Basil Fotherington-Tomas: Boys will be boys? How schools can be guilty of gender bias. Too many teachers think boys can’t do as well as girls, says the teacher on a mission to change attitudes.

There’s a ‘boys will be boys’ attitude that plays into a narrative that says boys produce more testosterone, and that’s why they fight and punch, that’s why they don’t sit quietly in lessons, that’s why they’re harder to control, that’s why we have different expectations about what they can do.” But the hormone system is much more complex than such a binary reading reveals; and for every study that links bad behaviour and testosterone, there’s another, says Pinkett, that suggests it’s more about environment than biology. “The ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’ philosophy neglects two key facts: firstly, that there are more similarities than differences between the sexes, and, secondly, that our brains are plastic and changeable, especially during the early years.” What teachers have to get past, he says, is the belief that if a boy doesn’t comply, doesn’t hand in homework or is misbehaving, that it’s because he’s male. “We need to stop ourselves: because maybe whatever is going on isn’t, after all, because he’s a boy. And it’s that realisation that can free pupils from stereotypes, and give them the chance to do what everyone wants, which is truly fulfil their potential.”
....
There’s a danger of treating boys differently and patronising them, says Roberts. “So, for example, you’ve got a boy you think doesn’t like reading, so you decide to pander to his love of football and give him a book about that to read. But in narrowing your expectations, you’re narrowing his. It’s the same with, for example, teaching boys about Shakespeare by concentrating on the sword fights or the fighting: it’s like we’re hoodwinking them into learning, and it doesn’t work. What we need is a big shift in ethos: too many teachers believe boys can do less, they don’t think boys can succeed as well as girls at school. I don’t think it’s about watering it down: it’s about having high expectations for boys as well as for girls.”

The content being taught is also relevant, and connected, of course, to everything else. “The English curriculum is unfairly and disproportionately dominated by men, and many of them are deplorable men like Macbeth and Dr Jekyll. And Dickens: a lot of his writing is unsavoury. So we need to challenge that in school, and we need to think about issues around sexist male behaviour and violence in the texts they’re reading.”

Go, guy!

I know there's probably entirely justified concern about what information Facebook is gleaning about people who use it - and even if my use of it is pretty minimal it would still be problematic to give it up when there are people in my life who do use it as their primary means of contact.

But I have been lately been given to wonder exactly how granular and detailed is the information that is gleaned, and, okay, I daresay my adblocker is blocking ads so I'm not seeing these anyway, and I've gone into the ads settings and turned off just about everything that might be deployed to advertise things to me -

Which hasn't stopped, once or twice over the past weeks, sponsored advertising posts popping up in my timeline WOT, but after I have spent some time clicking to hide these, the hint appears to be taken...

But, anyway, in the wholly Point Thahr: Misst stakes, when I go into Settings/Ads/Preferences/'Advertisers', and find a whole swathe who come from 'contact list added to Facebook', they are 99.9999 recurring US-based, most of them realtors, with a tiny sprinkling of health-related organisations. And I go through, and I delete them, or at least remove them from view, and wonder Y O Y? how pointless is that? given that my location is one of the few bits of public-facing information available?

Or is this a subtle misleading? and in fact I am being bombarded with subliminal wombattery, because their algorithms have noted that what I post is mostly wombats? and I am being lulled into a false sense of security?

What I read

Finished A Duke in Disguise - I thought the early sections dragged a bit, or maybe I am just a bit impatient of that particular kind of UST going on and on. But pace did pick up. Also title is a little bit misleading as he's not so much in disguise as unknowing? Also some slight improbability given what we learn about the hero's sexual experience... But, on the whole, the usual page-turner.

Catherine Dain, Luck of the Draw (1996), still waiting on replacement copy of Dead Man's Hand, no 7 in the series.

However, while waiting, embarked on Dain's later series, Death of the Party (2000), which feature an amateur sleuth (actress turned therapist in LA) and found it very generic compared to the Freddie O'Neals: so DNF and that and the second in the series have gone into the charity shop bag. I suspect the other one of hers ('A New Age Mystery'), if I have it, I think it's somewhere about, is likely to be similarly disappointing.

Re-reads of Gail Godwin, Father Melancholy's Daughter (1991) and Evensong (1999), very good but although I felt I wanted to reread these, somehow not quite hitting the spot where I'm at at the moment.

On the go

A bit more of Charlotte Lennox, and pottering on with The Strange Case of Harriet Hall - I have sufficient curiosity to find out the resolution of the mystery, especially after the most recent plot twist, not to abandon it entirely, but it's not exactly an edge of the seat page-turner, so it gets put aside a lot.

Lara Elena Donnelly, Amnesty (The Amberlough Dossier #3), which turned up yesterday: as twisty as ever.

Up next

Dunno: maybe a bit more going through the crime shelves in a picky and critical fashion?

For the after-lunch session* at a day event of current practitioners. (I leave the exact field as an exercise for the reader, but no, I did not take dear Sid with me, I am large, I contain multitudes).

I believe the town in question has some notable attractions, but by the time one has got there, found the venue, had a much needed coffee, encountered the organiser, had lunch, strutted one's stuff, etc, one is more inclined to the not entirely straightforward journey homewards than flaneusery involving cathedrals etc. (Especially after getting up rather too early after a not entirely brilliant night's sleep.)

I will say that for a journey involving changing (both ways) at Cambridge, the Cambridge travel curse did not strike, perchance because the event itself was not there, and in fact, coming back I made an earlier connection than I could have hoped to the fast Kings X service.

Still exhausted.

*Or light entertainment element...

In an article in The Observer yesterday (it's part of a piece about sexism and women in advertising but my own interest in this particular remark is pretty much tangential to that) the following comment:

The work I find most damaging is that which sneaks sexism in under the cover of progress. The Fearless Girl sculpture funded by State Street Global Advisors is installed to stare down the Charging Bull in Wall Street. It was lauded as the definitive statement against inequality, but the concept itself is offensive.... [M]y main issue that it’s a little girl and the fight for equality is against women’s contribution being minimised, infantilised, made to feel small.

I'm not sure my own feelings are precisely about that but about the over-valuing of the girl, the young, the unspoilt, as well the cuteness/aaaawwwwww factor.

(And thinking of that, thinking of the virgin sacrifices for the Minotaur...)

And this may be me being An Old and A Curmudgeon, but representing female resistance thusly seems to me a bit coming from the same place as the 'getting girls into STEM' (or whatever) rather than thinking about the WOMEN who are already there, and the men who suddenly get very agitated about the condition of women when it's going to affect their own daughters (like that bloke whose identity I forget who had apparently never interacted with a person of that sex before and had apparently found his daughter floating in a basket of reeds down the river for all the sense one got that she had been begotten in a standard union. Or maybe done a Pygmalion and carved her from marble...).

This is probably not quite the same thing as the endless recurrence of lists of Fab New Novelists/Whatever Under 30 or Coming Young Things but honestly, sometimes one would like to see something about people who are finally making the breakthrough at more advanced years and maybe after a certain amount of failure and discouragement. But also places a premium on freshness.

Bread made during week: Greenstein's 100% Wholewheat Loaf, 50%:50% wholemeal/wholemeal spelt, v nice.

Saturday breakfast rolls: brown grated apple, made with half and half white and wholemeal spelt flours, and malt extract.

Today's lunch: venison steaks au poivre, i.e. rubbed with a cut garlic clove and then with crushed Bristol blend peppers with a few coriander seeds and left for a little while and then panfried; served with baby new Jersey Royal potatoes roasted in goosefat, padron peppers, and spinach done again according to the recipe in Dharamjit Singh's Indian Cookery: even without any added water there was a fair amount of moisture to cook off, but this is very tasty (butter, salt, ground ginger, a little sugar).