Teaching boys and cultural diversity

A typical English schoolboy or puce faced comedy posh wanker...?

Teaching boys in single sex classes has many merits especially in languages as it takes the little tossers out of class and allows the girls to thrive and generally prosper. Yes, indeed there are some arguments for single sex education. In Sleepy Town-sur-Mer the Very Big Man has stipulated that in tertiary and higher ed at least, all classes should be mixed much to the wailing dismay of both sexes who generally loathe it as the only members of the opposite sex they generally know are from the closest recesses of The Family around which everything revolves. They have not the slightest suggestion of an idea of how to speak to one another, indeed they are told not to in case they get pregnant or something in which case the elder brother will have to take some kind of honour vengeance using long sharp knives and swords which glint in the sun...perhaps. So they naturally self-segregate (like primary school kids do), never mix thus reducing any hope of  pair or group work. A real pain as a teacher if the group is skewed towards one gender. Occasionally though you do get given a single sex class usually when there is an orphan in the group who then gets shuttled off to another class when this happens the dynamic changes immensely - everyone relaxes opens up and is generally happier with no more of The Horror of The Other which renders both genders pant wettingly speechless.

 

English boys...well the sort I taught

• Fidgety
• Feral haircuts and sprouting bumfluff.
• Spots based on value packs no-brand biscuits, fizzy pop masquerading as breakfast / lunch / dinner
• Scratchy and itchy - based on aforementioned junk diet and putridly poor hygiene.
• Perpetual erectile discomfort caused by being congenitally teenage and consuming copious amounts of specialist one handed material on the net at 3.00 am...it was in The Mail so it must be true
• Repulsive gag inducing odour of seeping sweat (see all of the above)

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• Repulsive gag and reflux inducing use of industrial pollutant Lynx to fail to mask aforementioned suppurating seeping sweat.

• Excellence in the manufacture of fast flying sharp nosed model planes
• Thumping one another hard to cover up sexual identity confusion
• Olympic standards  in non-syllabic communication
• Creative insults (your mum, gay, wankah etc)
• Insecure homophobic comments (are there secure ones?)
• Great skills at sopping spit balling
• Disrespectful of teachers, parent(s), alleged friends, and self
• Hates foreigners - despite one in five (or something) being part - 'foreign' and trying to sound Gangsta.

Education? Why bother? There are so few -  even shittily paid - jobs at the end of it all anyway? 


Sleepy part of Gulf (but only in all boys classes)
 

• Fidgety - which they cannot ever be among girls who inspire all sorts of evil and depravity and must therefore be covered up
• Scratchy (surreptitious fear ridden comedy stiffies being constantly slapped down as they don't go with pre-medieval nonsense belief systems)
• Beautiful moulded, hair and sculpted trimmed beards showing a careful balance of machismo and religious devotion and piety.
• Clear skin based on plenty of  fruit and veg owing to a sad lack of value brands
• Excellent mosque and religious based personal hygiene hammered home by fear of relgious damnation and death by slow spit roasting for the teensiest morsel of stray and bedraggled toe jam
• As there is rightly a fatwa banning Lynx our boys use lots of musk and frankincense based oils and skin fresheners. Nice it is too.
• Shit at anything kineshetic creative subjects are not taught as they get in the way of religious devotion...
• Never violent or touchy ... in class anyway.
• Mono-syllabic and unfailingly polite in English as teachers are hugely venerated objects of respect placed upon gleaming sun flecked pedestals of marble and gold.
• Creative insults in Arabic (not that I can understand and they won't tell me but I suspect your mum is NOT in the repertoire)
• Attitude to LGBT? Stone to death and get a few virgins in reward
•  (Question I have yet to ask my Omani friends - what if the virgins are boys?)
• What's a spit ball?
• Foreigners? Ah yes, horrid poor people with their ...oh hang on they do all the hard, unpaid dirty dangerous frequently life threatening work don't they? Also mainly brother Muslims who do it. Just saying...
• Westerners - Indian whisky and Filipina sex workers. Confused feelings of either jealousy or hatred or both. 

Education? Why bother I'll get a cushy government job with a big house and pension as the unelected  government needs to keep us all onside to avoid a Syria style spring.

The Lynx Effect

Predictably, the weather is post shitty August warm and the BSF rooms wonderfully air-conned - except for our neglected runt of an unwanted slightly embarrassing department now officially less sexy than bloody Supersitition according to national stats. Yes, what nonsense. Faith schools abound and an understanding of world fairy tales creeps up the scale of GCSEs - little wonder we continue our decades long plummet down the lime scaled toilet disregarding knowledge, critical thinking and reason along the way down the path to modern 

The Wise Head doesn’t like our department very much , doesn’t think it’s important enough to get a makeover, not that it under-performs, well not  too much anyway but it just ain’t sexy and down with the kidz not least as they have to think and apply themselves and therefore with fulsome encouragement from their parent(s) who aren’t very good at thinking or applying themselves either (evinced by their inability to flee the inbred areas of the county)  they drop it mentally before they even arrive at Big School...so yes the Wise Head is right absolutely correct why waste resources on us...?

By way of mild digression my good friend The Architect tells me 10% of windows in a building must be able to be opened as a paltry minimum. That’s what we’ve got which is really conducive to a fine learning environment  in a classful of pubing  teens bleeding sweat, hormones, BO, stale fungoid halitosis and worst of all Lynx, from those of their pores that remain unblocked by the fat and grease from the industrial burgers and kebabs on which they forage as part of their natural healthy diet (St Ritallin's is a Healthy Eating School according to the numerous stickers we have)...and of course they are still too coy to take a shower after PE which really doesn't help. Coupled with the underlying elements of underclassness many will only have limited access to clean clothes as the dole money is spent on lottery tickets, dog food, booze, fags and drugs. Well, I read all about the underclass and listened to our beloved PM's orations about Broken Britain in a month old  Daily Mail in back Expatland once so it must be true.

Regardless,  I’m sure the last government would have got Nanny in to question the health and safety aspect of working in such primeval conditions which surely amount to some kind of bio-hazard about which the Unions have been noticeably recalcitrant in mentioning unlike in the old days when there would have been a walkout. Or is that wishful false memory on my part? Anyway, having been overseas and spoilt by having such basic things as aircon and students with more class and money to be able to afford decent French fragrances, I had forgotten quite how much of an eye-blistering smack in the nose teaching can be.