Sexodus?!?

[Jenny A]

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I think that the article is way overblown, but there's bits of truth in it. Over-prescription of Ritalin is rampant. I volunteered in classrooms when my girls were in elementary school and saw many boys on Ritalin who I would consider just normal boys. And the multi-activity teaching style wasn't very conducive to helping kids concentrate either.

At the high school level, sex ed here is very explicit. I'm pretty sure my girls have a better theoretical knowledge of sex than their grandmothers. And that education includes much worry about sexual violence or even just peer pressure to have sex. The male is always portrayed as the assailant. The classes include role-playing attempts to get kisses or more and it's the girls' job to say no. Isn't that lovely, the boys get to be turned down after being instructed to ask?

College entrance (we are in the midst of that process) is more mixed. Girls now make up a slight majority in the liberal arts in colleges and selective colleges are looking for boys interested in English and History. But the STEM programs just drool over girls with the desire and aptitude to study in the sciences. My younger girl isn't a junior yet and she's already getting college recruitment mail, for that very reason.

We've got a board full of guys in their 20s and 30s here. Is it that awful?

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In the UK academic sector we have a thing called 'Athena Swann' which actively promotes & rewards the employing of women in science I know this first hand because my fiancé is one of those women, but she also happens to be a bad-ass at microbiologyso go figure.

Her lab is almost exclusively female now. I can think of 6 men out of 30 staff who are male. Naturally they've won an award from Athena Swann at her University for all the women they employ. I've always thought of positive discrimination as still discrimination, but there you go.

Well, so you always thought right then. Positive discrimination is still discrimination. And if the results are 6/30 in favor of positive discrimination, it doesn't look very positive to me. Ugly would be the word I'd use.

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I was a substitute teacher for about 3 weeks, before I nearly had a breakdown and had to quit. The kids were evil, really ferociously horrid. They had no idea how to behave, no respect for anyone.

WOW!!!
3 weeks?!
Imagine what permanent teachers have to go through?
Or could it be that they were particularly nasty knowing you were "just a temp"?

Interesting. I didn't find aiding to be that bad. I taught great books twice weekly to a portion of the class for a few years, and I did a fair amount of one-on-one math, reading, and spelling work. I saw less disciplined classes in some ways like noise level, but more rather than less sensitivity to each other than I remembered growing up.