When, why, and how did classroom learning start being unsuitable for boys?

I've heard it mentioned as a given quite a few times in quite a number of places (examples off the top of my head: this and this) that boys are ill-served by the traditional classroom model of school. Apparently they find it way harder than girls to sit down, sit still, listen, pay attention, read, write, buckle down and do their work, etc.

But there's a great big neon blinking question mark here that I haven't seen addressed or even mentioned anywhere: the traditional classroom model, complete with sitting, listening, paying attention, and diligently doing work, dates back to when school was for boys only. Off the top of my head and limiting myself only to Anglo-Saxon culture (because that's the only one I have pertinent information from off the top of my head), I know that the traditional classroom model was around in the UK in the middle ages, because the Catholic church used it (at Oxford and elsewhere) to train boys up to be priests.

So when did this model, which was originally conceived for a male-only context, become unsuitable for boys? Why and how did this happen? If someone could figure this out, maybe we could address it or undo it.

Open Letter to panhandlers

Dear Toronto panhandlers:

A number of your have recently been approaching me as though you're about to ask for directions, only to ask me for money. You're going to have to stop doing this, because it's going to ruin our city.

I totally get that innovation is required in tough economic times, but you're going to have to find something else. If you keep approaching people like you're asking for directions, we're going get desensitized and start ignoring genuine direction-askers on the assumption that they're just panhandling. (I, personally, have gotten about twice as many panhandlers as genuine direction-askers in the past month.)

We don't want to be the kind of city where people don't stop to give visitors directions, but we do have a limited tolerance both for being asked for money and for being tricked. Please, for the good of the city, leave the asking-for-directions body language and related conceits to people who are genuinely asking for directions.

Severance pay poll

From this article:

A study by Barry Fisher, a prominent employment law mediator, found that courts have awarded an average of 2.6 months' notice per year of service to employees who have been with a company for just two years. This means that on average, an employee with two years' service receives over five months of notice on termination.

Then later:

A written contract could limit the entitlement for a two-year employee to as little as two weeks, for example.

(Bolding mine.)

This is completely inconsistent with my corner of reality. I would feel very fortunate indeed to get over two weeks, and five months (for any tenure of employment) is unheard of. I have seen a number of collective agreements for different professions and different employers, and they tend to hover around one week per year of employment.

So my question for anyone reading this: are these number for severance pay (five months being typical, two weeks being characterized as "as little as") typical/normal in your corner of reality?

Anonymous comments are welcome, you don't have to identify yourself or your profession, but please indicate if you are outside of Canada. (You don't even have to say where, just that you're outside of Canada.)

Public Health message we need: stay home sick even if your illness isn't H1N1

Some members of the general public seem to be getting the idea that the public health message that you should stay home sick because of H1N1/swine flu means you should stay home if and only if you have H1N1.

I'm not a health professional or anything, but shouldn't people be staying home sick no matter what they have? If you're sick, your resistance is down so your body won't be as able to fight off any flu that might come its way. If you go to work with a common cold and spread your cold around the office, you'll have a whole office full of people who are less able to fight off any flu that might come their way. But if you stay home for a day and sleep your cold off, you aren't just avoiding weakening other people's immune systems, you're making your own immune system strong again.

If this line of thinking is valid, I think the public health people need to emphasize that you should stay home sick even if you don't have swine flu!

Debt ratios

Thomas Walkom on Canada's deficit.

I'm not quite knowledgeable enough to comment on this or any other theory of paying off national debt. (I do have opinions, but they're generally based solely on my experience managing my personal finances.) However I think it's interesting to compare these debt ratios to what they would be if they were an individual's personal debt. Again, I don't know enough about managing a nation's finances to know if this is a valid comparison, but it's interesting so I'm blogging it.

This year's federal deficit is expected to represent just 3.7 per cent of Canada's gross domestic product

So let's assume you're an individual who earns $50,000. (Q: Why $50,000? A: It makes the math easy and is close to Canada's household average.) So suppose in a given year (after several years in the black) and in response to a legitimate and temporary problem, you spend more than you earn to the tune or 3.7% of your salary. 3.7% of $50,000 is $1,850. (Aside: the great advantage of blogging over translating is I don't have to circumlocute starting a sentence with a numeral.) So one year you spend $1,850 more than you earn. Not a huge problem. You do need to pay it off, you probably want it in a credit instrument with a better interest rate than a credit card, but you'll be fine. If you have a Good Job, you'll make it up in raises in the next year or two.

Nor is Canada's total national debt (the sum of past government deficits) dangerously out of whack. At just under 30 per cent[...]

So you make $50,000, and your debt is 30% of that. 30% of $50,000 is $15,000. Again, not a huge deal. You do need to pay it off, you do need a payment plan, but basically all you have to do is stick with your payment plan. If it's good debt, it's barely even a problem - if it's your mortgage, you're golden! If I had a mortgage that was only $15,000, I'd be dancing!

I don't know if there are different issues when we're talking about national debt, but it's an interesting way to put impossibly large numbers in perspective.

Wanted: cap-sleeved or short-sleeved v-neck fitted t-shirts

I'm looking for cap-sleeved or short-sleeved fitted v-neck t-shirts. Solid colours (black, red, etc.), longish in keeping with current fashion, not loose and flowy, for the specific purpose of being worn under sweaters like how you'd normally wear a cami.

(Q: Why not just wear a cami? A: They don't cover my armpits and I don't much want to have to hardcore wash knit sweaters after every wear.)

Anyone know offhand of anywhere that currently has something like this in store? (Not places that "should" have them, not "Oh, you can get that anywhere", somewhere where you've seen them with your own eyes so I don't have to run around and shop.)

Analogy

There's a school of thought that if you're renting, you're completely throwing your money away. I don't feel that way. I think I'm getting my apartment in exchange for my rent. Yes, I have to keep paying for it, but I also have to keep paying for food and utilities and toilet paper. But some people from this school of thought have told me that it's a waste to rent since I do want to own a condo someday, and I should buy something - anything - so my money is going into building my own capital. I prefer to live in the most optimal conditions possible even if I have to rent for longer before I can afford to buy, but people from this school of thought think I should buy something - anything, anywhere - and I can always move or upgrade later when I can afford it.

Here's an analogy for that line of thinking:

"You're wasting money taking those birth control pills! After all, you do want to have children someday. So you don't have enough money or a big enough home or a partner who's interested in parenting any children you might pop out? No biggie, you can always get those later."

Currently wondering

This idea came to me in the context of Walmart, but I'd imagine it could also apply to other big businesses.

Some people boycott Walmart. I wonder if it would be more damaging if, instead of boycotting, they instead shopped at Walmart but only bought loss leaders, in as copious quantities as they could tolerate and get away with. Never buy anything the company would make a profit on, just things they'd lose money on.

I can think of about half a dozen arguments each for and against this approach.

For Python fans

Live Monty Python Q&A at 9:00 pm! Click here!

Dog etiquette question

If a dog clearly consents to me petting him - like it was totally Mr. Puppyface's idea in the first place - should I still be asking his human's permission?

Open Letter to Toronto media

Dear Toronto and Toronto-based media:

I'm sure we can all agree that the Toronto Sun is very good at sensationalism. No one does it better. And everyone knows this - people who want sensationalism go straight to the Sun.

So why don't we leave all the sensationalism to the Sun and their affiliates, and the rest of you can focus on sensible, intelligent, nuanced reporting and commentary? Everyone will be happy that way.

Things They Should Invent: journalistic ethics addressing people who only skim the headlines

Several times recently I have seen situations where people who are normally quite sensible have just skimmed an article or caught a glance of a headline without absorbing the whole thing, and then have taken away only the sensationalism of the headline or someone's spin on the issue, without a sense of the situation as a whole. I know, it happens to everyone sometimes, it's happened to me.

But the reason I'm concerned is because I can think of more than one case where a normally-sensible person caught only a glimpse of the issue filtered through a generous helping of spin, and as a result took or recommended political action that is detrimental to me personally. They're hurting me, and the situation they think they're addressing by doing so isn't even true. It's like if your dentist drilled a perfectly healthy tooth because he misread the x-ray.

I can't blame people for not reading every article in depth - I certainly don't read everything - but it's extra frustrating because when it's an issue that affects me I do read every article in depth and seek out alternate interpretations and primary sources, but the people who were less diligent still have the power to hurt me. (The obvious suggestion at this point is to educate people, but I don't know going in who, if anyone, is going to end up hurting me through ignorance.)

I wish journalistic ethics required constructing articles and television features so that you only get facts if you just glance at it, and you have to focus and pay more in-depth attention to get spin and opinions.

Haute couture

The stuff you see on the runway in fashion shows looks completely irrelevant to me. It's way out there, it's intended as an artistic vision but isn't intended for people to actually wear in real life (or at least not in my little corner of real life).

I was recently looking at some old Life magazines on Google Books, and they showed pictures of runway fashion shows from the 50s. The clothes there didn't look irrelevant. They looked like perfectly cromulent 50s fashion. I wasn't around in the 50s, of course, but extrapolating from tv/movies/pictures, they looked like stuff people would actually wear in real life. They were "outfits", not "get-ups".

I wonder if people in the 50s would agree with that assessment? Did those outfits actually look like outfits to them, or did they, for reasons I can't imagine, look like crazy runway fashion get-ups to the typical 50s viewer?

And if they did look like real clothes for real life, when did runway fashion stop applying to real life?

Flu "season"

"Flu season" is October to April, inclusive.

That's seven months! How can that call that a season? That's...the majority of our lives!

How ignorance/closed-mindedness works

I've blogged this story before: When I was in about to start Grade 9, my then-best friend called me up and said "We have a problem. The Grade 9 gym teacher is a lesbian!" That's basically how my homophobia worked at the time. I hadn't ever heard homosexuality described or spoken of as anything other than a problem or a shame, and it didn't occur to me to question that. Because everyone was talking about it like it's something bad, I unthinkingly assumed it must be bad.

I think that's how a significant quantity of ignorance and closed-mindedness works. You only ever hear of things spoken of a certain way, and perhaps it doesn't occur to you to question the underlying assumption.

The solution, which I don't know how to execute, is to encourage people to question the underlying assumptions. This is tricky, because you don't want to come on too strong and put them on the defensive. For example, you might have noticed an ongoing theme in my blog that bugs are yucky and puppies are cute. My personal neuroses aside, this is an automatic reaction that a lot of people have. When I write blog posts with the underlying assumption that bugs are yucky or that puppies are cute, the vast majority of people accept those givens. If someone wanted to convince people that bugs are cute and puppies are yucky, they couldn't just outright say it because people's automatic reaction would be "WTF?? You're insane! Get this looney away from us! Save the puppies! Kill the bugs!" It's such a shocking attack on what we dearly hold to be most basic truths that our reaction would be violent and visceral. To make it work, the pro-bug anti-puppy lobby would have to sort of plant the seed of a suggestion and let it grow until people feel that they have come to realize independently that bugs are cute and puppies are yucky.

So, when faced with ignorance and closed-mindedness, we have to somehow figure out how to plant the same seed of questioning heretofore-unquestioned assumptions. I don't know how to do that.

(But don't go around breeding bugs and exterminating puppies please, okay?)

Things They Should Invent: construction materials that make bugs infertile

I'd love to make all the bugs in the world die, but that would probably throw off the ecosystem a bit, so I'll settle for just not having them come into my home.

I've previously come up with the idea of making everything (walls, floors, ceilings, doors, windows) poisonous to bugs, but the problem is then they'd also probably be poisonous to humans and puppies.

So here's the next best thing: add something to all construction materials that makes bugs infertile on contact. They don't die, but they can't reproduce. So eventually darwinism kicks in and all the bugs that would dare enter human space have died out?

Q: But wouldn't it make humans infertile? A: I can't say for certain, but I think bugs reproduce vastly differently than we do, so it's quite conceivable that there's something out there that would make bugs infertile without affecting human fertility.

People should listen to me

Me in June:

[Why do we need] a private-sector consultant from Alberta in the first place? We're a rather populous province with a good number of post-secondary institutions - why isn't the necessary expertise available in Ontario? Why doesn't the Ontario public service have the expertise to implement government policies? Does this happen often? Should we perhaps be working on developing the expertise in-province?

Ontario Auditor General Jim McCarter just a few days ago:

While external consulting expertise is clearly required on a project of this size and complexity, we found in some cases a near-total reliance on consultants, especially at the ministry. We noted instances where consultants were influential in hiring other consultants, sometimes from their own firms and sometimes at rates much higher than we considered appropriate; and some remained on extended contracts for years at a time.

From an operational perspective, relying too heavily on consultants can be costly. Consultants are generally a lot more expensive than employees, and when they finish a project, they leave, often taking with them the expertise needed to maintain and operate the system they helped develop.

Why are people allowed to write laws when they can't accurately express their intentions?

Reading about the legal challenge to the laws surrounding prostitution, it seems apparent that the intention of the legislation was to prevent people from being forced/coerced/exploited into prostitution, without getting people in trouble for being prostitutes.

We can all wrap our brains around that concept. Even if we don't agree with it, we can easily grok what's being described. Even if you believe that all prostitutes are being forced/coerced/exploited - even if it turns out that in reality every single prostitute in the world is being forced/coerced/exploited - we can still conceptualize the theoretical difference between being forced/coerced/exploited into prostitution and willingly engaging in prostitution. It isn't a particularly difficult concept. (Just like how we can conceptualize the difference between a horse and a unicorn even if we don't believe in unicorns.)

So why can't they write the law to reflect these intentions, rather than making fussy and arbitrary rules about living off the avails and bawdy houses?

This happens quite frequently. They raised the age of consent to 16 in an alleged attempt to stop the sexual exploitation of minors, rather than writing legislation against the sexual exploitation of minors. I recently heard of a school that required students wearing uniform kilts to wear hosiery underneath to stop students from wearing the skirts too short and flashing their thongs - rather than just making a rule against flashing their thongs. They recently made age-specific changes to Ontario driver's licences to stop people from driving around with cars full of drunken screaming idiots, rather than making rules against driving around with cars full of drunken screaming idiots.

We can all conceptualize the nuance of the specific behaviour that these rules are trying to stop, and we can all see how the legislation as written doesn't precisely reflect the intentions, it just sort of generally correlates most of the time.

So why don't we demand competence from our legislators? Why are we, as a society, allowing people to write legislation when they can't clearly articulate their intentions?

Polar bear: "OMG, PUPPIES!"

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