Posts by melissayoong
Gender-Neutral Teaching
April 23, 2014
In my previous post, I invited students to consider if social pressure to conform to idealised forms of masculinity and femininity could be affecting their classroom behaviour. Yesterday, at a workshop on Gender-Neutral Teaching, I turned the spotlight to ourselves as teachers, with particular regards to the attention given to male and female students as …
Gender in the Classroom
March 18, 2014
A few students had recently brought up the topic of boys’ underachievement in education, particularly the role of feminism in contributing to the issue. Many studies have found that other factors, such as ethnicity and social class, have a more significant impact on educational attainment than gender, and while the debate about this is very …
Reading Between the Headlines and Getting the Plot (Part 2)
October 18, 2013
In my previous blog post, I had emphasised that being effective readers requires more than merely understanding words – the ability to identify the writer’s implicit beliefs and bias is also very important. I once read an article in the “women’s section” of a local newspaper where the writer stated as fact that women “always …
Reading Between the Headlines and Getting the Plot
September 23, 2013
Whenever I ask my students what they understand by the term ‘read’, they often equate it to vocabulary comprehension – in other words, if I understand most of the words in the text, I can read well. However, this is a flawed assumption since reading also entails, among other things, the ability to discern the …