Keep up your fantastic work Otokonoko; a brilliant mind and may I say [after having read most of your posts on OLO] you are a broadminded and non-judgemental person for a teacher [some in my family and their friends] - am trying to say here that you think outside the square/the norm.

Your students are exceptionally lucky to have had you as their teacher!

we are unique,Otokonoko
I think that a major problem has emerged, in that so many of the schools say they provide "excellent" education, when in reality they don’t.

This now extends right up to universities, where 30% of foreign students applying for permanent residency could not pass the immigration department's standard test for English. That is after they had completed a degree through an Australian university.

The lack of standard testing has lead to an overall decline in the quality of education. However standard tests have been opposed by the teachers union.

In the area of male teachers, there should be more, but I don't believe too many men would want to be in a system where there is no performance pay. Nearly every industry has bonuses or performance pay except education, and I can’t imagine too many men wanting to be in a system that does not reward hard work. However performance pay has been opposed by the teachers union.

In the area of role models for boys, they are very easy to find, but too many teachers are unwilling to point them out, because they believe it could disadvantage girls. And the teachers union of course has opposed programs to improve boy's education.

The teachers union has also opposed every single state and federal government that have been elected by the public for many years.

Time is fast running out for Australia. Other countries are fast catching up to Australia in education, if not going well ahead of Australia.

Eg. only 3% of QLD students received the top marks in a science test. 40% of Honk Kong students (almost half) received top marks in the same test.

In future years we will not be able to compete with Hong Kong and many other countries. All we can do is sell them coal.

Boys are not "in trouble" except insofar as the State refuses to acknowledge that boys are different to girls and they have a right to express that difference.

I have previously related my experience in the Qld Education system when a teacher decided that my boy must have ADHD because he wasn't sufficiently engaged by her inferior pedagoguery and so "misbehaved". she made him sit in the back of the class. She must have thought all the other boys had ADHD too, because there wasn't a boy seated in the front half of her classroom. She wanted him medicated to compensate for her lack of ability (and I suspect a dislike of males) and it took all my efforts to ensure that didn't happen. The next year he had a young male teacher who was very interested in boys' education and his results soared. It took an exceptional teacher to make the standard curriculum accessible to boys. He is one of only 3 male teachers in a school of nearly 800 students. The other two are the sports teacher and one of the deputy heads, neither of which have significant classroom duties. there are also 2 or 3 male grounds staff and no females. the school is plastered with the ubiquitous "girls can do anything" stickers, but there is a strange absence of any kind of positive message for boys, just lots of prohibition notices directed at such heinous crimes as running in the playground and climbing the trees in the playground.

We live in a society in which any traditional "female" traits are praised and encouraged, but traditional "male" traits are demonised, except for the one that says "respect women", which is enforced willy-nilly, with no concomitant demand that men be respected.

The simple fact is that the plight of boys is but a symptom of a far larger problem, which is that the feminist-inspired "social construction" of our society is ignoring the needs of half of the community. Orwell pointed out what happens when the pigs get control of the farm...

The fact is the school system encourages conformity to whatever the agreed flavour of the day doctrine whether it be gender policy or education style.

There is some merit to single gender schools and some disadvantages. The advantage is that some of that boy behaviour is more accepted and not judged alongside girls who are by nature different. The disadvantage of course is that in real life girls and boys have to interact, the problem is in catering to one particular gender over another.

Mixed schools but with gender differentiated classes might be the solution so there is interaction in some fields such as drama and during playtime. Some food for thought in any case.

Victoria Point SHS (on Brisbane's southern bayside) offered gender-differentiated classes - they may still do so. It received a lot of attention and, from what I can tell, worked quite well. From my understanding, the main subjects - English, Maths, Junior Science and the Junior Humanities, PE, etc. were split by gender, while in senior some of the subjects offered combined classes. This enabled boys to do those less-popular subjects (catering and textiles, for example) and girls to do the same (think metalwork, etc). Lunchtimes were opportunities for socialisation, as were the subjects where boys and girls worked together. I think it was (is?) a great idea.

Sorry folks,

Some split classes work, others make no difference. Nothing works as well as financial rewards. Teacher's pay has to be connected to student outcomes and performance.

Never has it ever been known that something progressively gets better and better unless the people involved were gaining financially from it.

So ultimately teachers have to be paid according to results.

A teachers job is to teach, and if student marks continue to stagnate or get worse, teachers get no more pay rises.