There have been a lot of studies recently where the findings were so obvious you wondered how they managed to get a research grant for it in the first place.But every so often you stumble upon a study where the findings were not as you might have predicted.
Intelligent girls and boys are much more likely than average to take illegal drugs like cocaine, cannabis and ecstasy when they grow up, a study has found.
Scientists think they do so in part as a “coping strategy” to avoid bullying from their peers, and partially because they find life boring.
The effect is more pronounced in girls than boys, with those exhibiting high IQs as children more than twice as likely to have tried cocaine or cannabis by the age of 30, as those of lower intelligence.
The effect in boys with high IQs is also marked, with them being around 50 per cent more likely to have done so by that age as their less intelligent former classmates.
A team at Cardiff University analysed data from almost 8,000 people born in one week in April 1970, who were enrolled at birth in the ongoing British Cohort Study, which follows participants through life. All these children had their IQs tested between the age of five and 10.
Drug use, as reported by the participants themselves, was then recorded at 16 and 30 years of age.
At 16, 7.0 per cent of boys and 6.3 per cent of girls had used cannabis. This minority had “statistically significant higher mean childhood IQ scores” than non-users, according to the authors of the report, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
The authors noted: “Across most drugs (except amphetamine in men), men and women who reported using in the past 12 months had a significantly higher childhood IQ score than those who reported no use.”
They concluded: “High childhood IQ may increase the risk of substance abuse in early adulthood.”
Well that explains it – no wonder why I’ve never taken drugs!
Occupational Health and Safety have gone mad! They have decided to take control of school monkey bar wrung by monkey bar wrung. They have hatched a plan so conniving and out of control, that Principals have reached out for their white flags in despair (only to find out that white flags are a violation of OH&S, because someone might get poked in the eye by the stick).
Below are 5 nonsensical examples quoted in today’s paper of health and safety gone mad:
1. Teachers are expected to put on masks, surgical gloves and gown to apply Band-Aids to students!
2. Schools must have 5 different types of first-aid kits. These kits must be regularly monitored.
3. Staff must undergo regular hearing tests and the results are recorded on their files.
4. Schools must identify all sources of ultra-violet light radiation.
5. Students are banned from bringing their own liquid paper or sunscreen to school.
And don’t get me started with these new boring playground designs, custom-made so that children wont even get a scratch. They are dull and absolutely unfair to children who instinctively want to climb and swing at recess. No one wants to see a child hurt themselves, but get over it – it happens!
If we provide an environment without risk, we are essentially providing an environment without reward. Schools will flourish when the best interests of kids, teachers and parents are paramount and the fear of lawsuits isn’t a stumbling block for a vibrant and fun-filled educational experience.
A recent study into bullying may have fond that online bullying isn’t as prevalent as regular bullying, but it is still early days.
A new study entitled Teens, Kindness and Cruelty on Social Networks confirms much of what we already know about cyberbullying. Most kids aren’t bullied and most kids don’t bully either online or off.
In fact, the study–conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project for the Family Online Safety Institute and Cable in the Classroom–concluded that “[m]ost American teens who use social media say that in their experience, people their age are mostly kind to one another on social network sites.” Nearly seven in ten (69 percent) of teens said that peers are mostly kind while 20 percent said peers are mostly unkind with 11 percent saying, “it depends.”
Fifteen percent of teens say they have been the “target of online meanness.” When you include in-person encounters, 19 percent say they’ve been “bullied” in the past year.
These numbers track very closely with previous scientific surveys on bullying and cyberbullying. The largest source of bullying (12 percent) was in person, followed by text messaging (9 percent). Eight percent said they had been bullied via email, a social networking site or instant messaging and 7 percent were bullied via voice calls on the phone. Girls are more likely to have experienced what we typically call “cyberbullying,” while boys and girls are roughly equal when it comes to in person bullying.
Online bullying may be less prevalent but it is arguably more damaging. It is generally accepted that since online bullying invades the victim’s home (traditionally a place of comfort and safety), it has a much more powerful effect. Another reason that online bullying is potentially more oppressive is that there can be many more bystanders and participants online. Facebook bullying can be shared between hundreds rather than just handful of kids in the schoolyard.
And let’s not kid ourselves. Bullies don’t discriminate between mediums. A bully doesn’t throw their weight around in person and then become an angel online. Bullying is bullying, no matter what the medium. The experts are telling us online bullying is not the major form of bullying that some believe it to be.
I was hoping that since there hasn’t been a great deal of coverage about childhood eating disorders recently, that the numbers suffering this serious disease had dwindled.
Doctors at the Westmead Children’s Hospital in NSW have told the ABC that child admissions for eating disorders, particularly anorexia, have tripled in the past decade.
Children as young as eight are being admitted, some of whose lives are at risk.
Like other articles on childhood anorexia, fingers are pointed to the media when it comes to metering out the blame:
The head of the hospital’s adolescent medicine department, Susan Towns, suspects the media is to blame.
“Media portrayal can affect the development of body image in young people and this can happen at a stage and an age where children and adolescents aren’t able to conceptualise things in a complex and abstract way and they can take these messages in a very concrete way,” she said.
Whilst I don’t like blaming the media for everything. I couldn’t help but reflect on the damning study conducted in Fiji, where they found that within three years of introducing television cases of eating disorders among children rose significantly.
The Harvard Medical School visited Fiji to evaluate the effect of the introduction of television on body satisfaction and disordered eating in adolescent girls.
In 1995, television arrived and within three years the percentage of girls demonstrating body dissatisfaction rose from 12.7 per cent to 29.2 per cent.
Dieting among teenagers who watched TV increased dramatically to two in every three girls and the rate of self-induced vomiting leapt from zero to 11.3 per cent.
Just when you thought that respect for girls and women was on the marked improve comes yet another reminder that things are not what they seem:
During the 2010-11 school year, 48 percent of students in grades 7-12 experienced some form of sexual harassment in person or electronically via texting, email and social media, according to a major national survey being released Monday by the American Association of University Women.
The harassers often thought they were being funny, but the consequences for their targets can be wrenching, according to the survey. Nearly a third of the victims said the harassment made them feel sick to their stomach, affected their study habits or fueled reluctance to go to school at all.
The survey, conducted in May and June, asked 1,002 girls and 963 boys from public and private schools nationwide whether they had experienced any of various forms of sexual harassment. These included having someone make unwelcome sexual comments about them, being called gay or lesbian in a negative way, being touched in an unwelcome sexual way, being shown sexual pictures they didn’t want to see, and being the subject of unwelcome sexual rumors.
The survey quoted one ninth-grade girl as saying she was called a whore “because I have many friends that are boys.” A 12th-grade boy said schoolmates circulated an image showing his face attached to an animal having sex.
In all, 56 percent of the girls and 40 percent of the boys said they had experienced at least one incident of sexual harassment during the school year.
After being harassed, half of the targeted students did nothing about it. Of the rest, some talked to parents or friends, but only 9 percent reported the incident to a teacher, guidance counselor or other adult at school, according to the survey.
In my view there are two main reasons for this disturbing set of figures:
1. Schools have become hamstrung when it comes to access to appropriate and effective consequences for infringements such as bullying and harassment. Call the parents? No big deal. They gave up long ago. Suspensions? Nowadays you get a suspension for talking out of turn. Suspensions have lost their impact because they are metered out out too readily. In the end, no punishment given seems to come close to matching the crime.
2. Schools have been notorious at turning a blind eye to incidents. I am not talking about all schools, yet in truth, plenty goes under this category. Teachers have been taught not to get emotionally involved with their students. The result being, an emotional distance which inhibits the teachers capacity to pick up on these things, Teachers must have enough of a connection with their students (within the obvious professional parameters of course), as to notice when things are not right with their them. They are intrusted to look after their students and must do so by being proactive. Kids are told from an early age not to dob on a classmate. If teachers wait around for things to get reported to them, they will miss the opportunity to intervene and change a potentially abusive situation.
We must expect schools to be proactive with harassment. They must be able to use tough and uncompromising punishments and show enough of an interest in students as to detect a problem before it gets completely out of hand.
You know you’ve messed up completely when the father of the child you’ve named your legislation after publicly denounces it.
The legislation, called “Matt’s Safe School Law,” was named after Matt Epling, an honor-roll student who killed himself at the age of 14 in 2002 after being assaulted by anti-gay bullies at his school.
The draft law, which passed the state Senate with 26 Republican votes against 11 Democratic votes and now advances to the lower house, includes language inserted before the vote that says the bill “does not prohibit a statement of a sincerely held belief or moral conviction” of a student or school worker.
Activists say that the provision gives bullies license to prey on other students — especially those who are gay, lesbian or transgender — and, at least as important, gives bystanders who should be trying to stop bullying an excuse not to intervene.
The real story here is not the amendment which undermines the whole essence of the legislation, but it is the value of the legislation to begin with. The essence of this legislation is to “push each school district in the state to write their own anti-bullying policy.” Australian schools have been mandated for some time to have their own anti-bullying policies. These policies are wonderful at preventing schools from being targets of litigation. They can simply point to their vague and fickle policy and ward off most lawsuits. But when it comes to its ability to prevent bullying behaviours it has been completely useless.
Bullying legislation has never and will never have a marked impact on bullies and bullying behaviour.
In the name of Matt Epling and all others who have been subjected to malicious bouts of bullying, stop pretending to do something and actually devise something that actually works!
There is a huge difference between hugging someone because they are your friend and sexual harassment. It is not hard to distinguish one from the other.
Friends hugging innocently in the playground in no way prevents schools from punishing children for sexual harassment.
A 14-year-old Florida student who hugged his friend was suspended as a result of his middle school’s zero-tolerance no-hugging policy.
Nick Martinez said he gave a quick hug to his best friend, a female student, between classes, WKMG-TV reported.
The public display of affection was spotted by the principal of Palm Bay’s Southwest Middle School, which is 120km south-east of Orlando. While the principal told WKMG-TV he believed the hug was innocent, he brought the two students to the school’s dean, who penalised them with in-school suspensions.
According to the Southwest Middle School’s student handbook, students can receive a one-day out-of-school suspension for kissing, while students caught hugging or hand-holding are penalised with a dean’s detention or suspension.
The school’s strict policy stipulates that there is no difference between an unwanted hug, or sexual harassment, and a hug between friends, WKMG-TV reported.
What measures like this do, is transform schools which are already unnatural places for children and make them even more dreary and dictatorial. The irony is, that while bullying continues to be a major problem, you would have though that acts of friendship would be encouraged, not outlawed.
What’s next – banning students from complimenting each other?
It’s about time we started matching school bans on children by imposing bans on schools. I would love to ban schools from implementing rules inspired by political correctness gone wrong!
Even the best parents and teachers struggle to get kids doing menial tasks on a consistent basis. From making their beds to putting their lunchboxs back in their bag, it’s amazing how difficult it is to get children to be responsible for small yet important tasks.
That is, until an app was designed to assist desperate and exhausted parents:
You may find this shocking, but getting my 11- and 9-year-olds to do household chores is like pulling teeth. Rotten kids!
That may change now that I’ve got You Rules Chores on my iPhone. This clever new app turns household chores into a game, rewarding each kid a designated number of coins for each completed job. Whoever finishes the week’s chores first is the winner. (Of course, we all know who the real winners are: mom and dad.)
The app features cute graphics and music, and after a parent gets set up as the “referee,” each kid gets to choose an avatar (from only six available, alas).
How sick and utterly selfish do you have to be to name your beautiful children “Adolph Hitler” and “Aryan Nation”? What an absolute disgrace! These parents can’t understand why their children were taken away from them. It’s a shame that they haven’t as yet worked out that by naming their children after despicable tyrants and murderous regimes they are in fact scarring their children for life.
A COUPLE who named one of their children after Adolf Hitler should not regain custody of their three children, an appeals court has ruled.
Heath and Deborah Campbell’s three small children were removed from their home in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, by the state in January 2009, myFOXphilly.com reported.
The family drew world-wide attention after a store refused to decorate a birthday cake for their son, Adolf Hitler Campbell.
Adolf and siblings JoyceLynn Aryan Nation and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie have been in foster care since then.
The appeals court ruled last week that sufficient evidence of abuse or neglect existed because of domestic violence in the home. The court sent the case back to family court for further reconsideration.
A gag order remains in place and the parties refused to discuss the decision.
In January 2009, the Campbells told myFOXphilly.com that Adolf Hitler Campbell was just like any other three-year-old boy.
“It’s not like he’s growing up to be a killer or nothing like that,” said mother Deborah Campbell.
How dare they do this to their beautiful children! Sure, it is claimed that the children have been taken out of their parents’ custody because of domestic abuse and not because of their names, but what if there was no other reasons? Should the names be enough to warrant a claim of child abuse.
If these people want to continue rearing their precious children they better smarten their act. This includes thinking of more appropriate names for their kids … quick smart!
Today, my blog Topical Teaching, celebrates its very first birthday.
In the past 12 months I have witnessed probably the most difficult period for teachers in recent memory. From layoffs, to debates over tenure vs skilled teachers, it has been a period of great uncertainty. Teachers are facing great negativity by those that are looking for an easy target to blame.
Whilst there are a premium of poor teachers out there, there are also brilliant teachers in great supply. Teachers are not to blame for the state of our education system. There are other stakeholders that must lift their game as well.
In the past year the Facebook phenomenon has uncovered a potential danger for teachers. It is clear that teachers on Facebook must be extra careful to avoid controversy, as some have made very poor judgement calls that have cost them dearly in the end.
Teachers are also faced with an ever-growing bullying problem. From the classroom to cyberbullying, teachers have the important task of limiting incidences of bullying as best they can.
The rigours of standardised testing has also been a hot topic throughout the year. From cheating scandals to stressed out teachers the blasted tests are here to stay and the question is, are our students better for it?
Thank you to those of you who clicked on and contributed to my blog. I have really enjoyed sharing ideas and interacting with you. A special thank you to regular contributors, Margaret, Carl and Anthony for their loyalty and insight.
I hope, as I continue writing this blog, teachers get the break they so richly deserve. Teaching is a profession that attracts people who want to make a difference. We aren’t in it for the money or prestige, just the opportunity to help the students of today become the role models of tomorrow.
Topical Teaching 