Intelligent, articulate, focused
Freelance journalist Jill Foster says:
Just off phone to one of the brilliant schoolgirls who wrote the ‘Can we have single-sex toilets back please?’ letter to Sunak. Wow.
Intelligent, articulate, focused, can spot gender BS from 100 miles. Oh lads, you thought you had problems with some pesky middle-aged women…
Possible testimony on the side of “they did write the letter themselves.”
When I was in high school I routinely had marks deducted from papers I had written for arts classes, that didn’t normally involve a lot of writing, because according to those classes’ teachers there was no way a teenager could have written them. I wasn’t necessarily a fantastic writer, just had a style that was unusual within the groups of students those teachers were familiar with; if those teachers had asked my other teachers about my writing, or asked me directly about the content of what I’d written, I don’t know that it would have been an issue.
All that is to say: I’m glad someone actually spoke at least once with at least one of the girls before assuming they knew anything about her capabilities.
Damn ibbica, whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty??
ibbica, I had similar experiences. One teacher (7th grade?) interrogated me at great length over a stupid single-paragraph essay, even telling me I could keep an A grade for it if I admitted I cheated as long as I stopped plagiarizing going forward. She’d even brought to the interrogation a story I’d written my previous year at the school that she thought was of much poorer quality and thus demonstrated I probably couldn’t have written the essay. I had written said essay in just a few minutes during recess in front of friends and told her she could talk to them, and they could tell her they’d seen me start with a blank piece of paper and write it without looking at any other sources. She eventually gave up but seemed unconvinced.
More annoyingly in 5th grade we had to write a haiku, and a substitute teacher who didn’t even know me thought mine was too good, so likely plagiarized, so gave me 0 points. When the regular teacher came back the next day she changed it to a perfect score.
Always nice to get rewarded for good work by being accused of being a cheat…
The letter in this case does not to me seem beyond the abilities of bright 15-year-olds. I’d think most high school freshman honors English students could write at this level or higher.
another one who got crap as a kid for being smart and/or learning quickly.
When I was in 8th grade, my grade school instituted ‘effort’ grades. They were to be a measure of how much effort a student put into learning the material in class. They would be combined with our performance grade (how well we did on homework and tests and such) to produce our ‘total’ grade. They sold it as a way to help the students who didn’t do so well, as a way to reward them for their effort trying to learn. And something about boosting self-esteem. Our teacher decided our ‘effort’ grade. So, we could lose an A grade in a class if our teacher decided we didn’t put enough effort into learning the material, even if we learned the material super well (for example 97-100% on everything).
Apparently, they didn’t care about the self-esteem of the smart kids. It felt to us smart kids like we were being punished for being smart, for learning quickly, for the fact that learning came easily to us, something we were born with, had no say in. Oh, they would tell us that they didn’t think we were cheating. That they understood that learning came easily to us. But we didn’t put in enough effort. So we had to ‘prove’ that we earned the A by putting in more effort. In other words, we had to do extra credit. This was particularly annoying in math class. Once a particular lesson was learned, the only effort needed was that needed to move a pencil around making marks on the paper. Oftentimes, for us smart kids, that would be before finishing the assigned problems. But, in order to ‘prove’ effort, we had to do more problems than what the teacher assigned. The assigned problems for a lesson were a subset of the problems presented in the math book. The one time the teacher got this extra work stuff right was when she has us smart kids do a lesson in the math book that she had the rest of the class skip.
I remember more than one instance of a kid who did not do very well on a homework assignment giving the teacher a sob story about how much effort the kid put into doing the assignment and the teacher accepting the story. Then, later on out on the playground the kid bragging about fooling the teacher about how much work the kid did.