Friday Hoyden: Dagmar Berne
[image from National Pioneer Women's Hall of Fame] As a teenager, Dagmar Berne, of Sydney, was sent by her widowed mother for a “good education” in a private school, Springfield Ladies’ College. The curriculum included such traditional “ladies’ accomplishments” as deportment and needlework. Discontented, she eventually convinced her mother to allow her to leave school [...]
More from the Minister for Patronising Minors
Shorter Julie Bishop: Oh, you poor dear children, isn’t it terrible that political activists have hijacked your Rock Eisteddfod with anti-war messages when I know how much nicer everything would be if you performed something cheery?
Pell draws lines
The great tradition of religious tolerance in Catholic parochial schools in New South Wales is under fire. Many thousands of children of all faiths have been educated in a system often chosen by parents due to a complex perception of superior education outcomes rather than as a response to the promulgation of faith within the [...]
Saturday Three: Health Successes, Virtual Gudjal, and CDEP Cessation Silliness
[Image credit: FPWA, via ANTaR] ANTaR, Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation, is an independent network of organisations and individuals (mostly non-indigenous) working in support of justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia. Check out ANTaR’s Success Stories in Indigenous Health. From the foreword: Not so many reports highlight the good news [...]
So, is it OK?
crossposted at Feministe Jessica, Amanda, Twisty and Violet Socks (and Melissa too!)have all written about this article: Is it OK to Demand Anal Sex?. The picture accompanying the article is odiously twee and threatening simultaneously, and as virtually every respondent noted for starters, when is it ever OK to demand any kind of sex? (The [...]
Whose real world?
Posted by Helen. Where I live, our kids have five weeks holidays from just before Christmas to the end of January. They have two weeks off in April, two in July, and two in September/October. I’ve run out of fingers, so that’s eleven weeks. A full-time employed adult will have four weeks annual [...]
Rearranging accessibility: more on invisible disability accommodations
I wrote a post a while ago titled Stop and think: invisible access for invisible disabilities. It was a personal narrative of some of my experience with chronic fatigue syndrome. In it I mentioned a couple of accessibility problems that I had encountered repeatedly. So I thought I’d go into a bit more detail about [...]
Rape Resistance more effective than Rape Prevention
Because victims can’t prevent crimes, so “prevention” strategies targeting potential victims are selling a crock. Crime prevention programs only work insofar as they persuade offenders not to commit crimes, which is a whole other story (one that is hardly ever discussed regarding rape because the media makes rapists “disappear” from case reports through the way [...]
A middle-aged woman with a hammer
makes teenage boys very twitchy. All I had to do was hammer in one nail into the timber frame of a prop for the high school musical on the weekend and I had a helpful young man offering to do it for me. I declined at first and hammered in the next nail but he [...]
Australian linguistocide, and antipodeal approaches to aboriginal education
I have a Google News alert set up for, among many other things, the word “aboriginal”. Yesterday, two contrasting stories dropped into my inbox. First, ABC News (Australia) reports that it’s indigenous people’s own darn fault if they’re unemployed and sick, because they don’t talk proper Queen’s English. They’re just like those pesky ghetto-forming immigrants, [...]
Bragging on the offspring
The tigling just received a HD+ for her first long narrative assignment in English this year, a story about old age. I think I have a parent-crush on her teacher for writing this evaluation: Beautiful work [tigling]. Mrs Wentworth is a vivid, fully realised character who instills a sense of curiosity in the reader. I [...]
Teachers and performance rates of pay
Pavlov’s Cat has an excellent post that lays out clearly and simply why attempting to shoehorn the complexity of educating children into some objective scale to grade teachers and pay them accordingly is ideology gone wild. More good posts about Julie Bishop’s flawed plan at: Road to Surfdom: Julie Bishop report to the Headmaster’s Office [...]
A parenting wake-up call
It’s always been my philosophy to provide both my kids with a comprehensive sexual health and safety education to supplement the already good school program in NSW. My parents did that for me, and it made me confident about demanding conversations about contraception when required, etc. It’s a good thing. But it was a lot [...]
For my friends in academia
Parody student evaluations for Socrates, from the Chronicle of Higher Education: Hemlock Available in the Faculty Lounge Socrates is a real drag, I don’t know how in hell he ever got tenure. He makes students feel bad by criticizing them all the time. He pretends like he’s teaching them, but he’s really ramming his ideas [...]
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