Inner Geek

There’s a small autistic boy living in my head who can get very excited about things that no one else would be interested in. Occasionally, he will get fixated on something and I have to remind him that that thing is a waste of our time. Sometimes, I humour him for a bit to see where it goes but as he is only about seven, he’s unlikely to discover anything important.

Don’t get concerned. I haven’t had a childhood filled with recurring trauma that has caused me to develop multiple personalities as a coping mechanism, it’s just an observation about educational development.

The first time I named him (Fred) was when I was at the arcades with my children, a friend and her children. We were playing a horse racing game, where you had to bet on the colour of the horse that would win. My son and I were very interested in this game. We were both looking for patterns. He was only about 5, so he gave up before me.
“I could stay here all day, record the results and make bar graphs and pie charts,” I told my friend who looked at me with a look that said, ‘I’m glad you’re my friend but...seriously?’
I explained that it was Fred speaking.
She rolled her eyes.

Fred was formed during one long hot summer when I was seven. My mum was particularly tired that year,  having just recovered from a gall stones operation that caused an almost fatal infection. She had just enough energy to keep suggesting things we could do to stay out of her hair. Most of these activities involved data collection and looking for patterns. She was a very smart woman, my mum. She worked out that if she asked us to count types of birds that visited the garden, or the different coloured cars we could see from our bedroom window then it could last a significant amount of time. If she added a pattern to look for then it could take all day. Fred loved those days. Most seven year olds love their days.

That year was never repeated and so I didn’t develop my skills and grow up to be a statistician. The following summer I had started to play the flute but it was all about bike rides with picnics in the country and card games when it rained. The year after that was poetry and backgammon and the year after that we made magazines.

Obviously, I was very glad of Fred when I went to University. My classmates were all wandering round with a stunned expression, complaining that they had taken Psychology because they were interested in people and liked writing essays. No one had warned them that there would be so much maths. Fred was happy to be able to extend his skills. Chi-squared distribution became his new best friend. He wanted to sit in the garden and hypothesise that blackbirds would visit at 11am and 3pm, collect the data and then use his new found tool to see how well his hypothesis fitted.

Fred is quite a happy chap at the moment. Every day at 4.45 he turns on the TV to watch the daily briefing. He frantically notes the figures in his nature inspired notebook. Then he puts the figures into a spreadsheet and makes graphs. He compares his graphs to the government graphs. He makes theories and can’t wait for the data to unfold to see if his theories are correct.

Fred thinks that we will be in lockdown for a while yet but he is only seven, so maybe we should take the predictions of scientists and statisticians who developed their skills a bit further.

Exam results and statistics

Statistics worry me when it comes to exam results. Somehow, they take away the individual acheivement. On A level results day someone tweeted a link "everything you need to know about this year's A level results." I clicked on it and saw stats that compared subjects, schools and gender but it didn't tell me how incredibly hard my son had worked or how disappointed he was with a mark on one of the papers. 

Today, the GCSE results came out and the director of Teach First posted this tweet.

I was confused.

Why does it matter that when you group the GCSE population by gender, girls do slightly better than boys?

I asked and he seems to think it's a huge problem and that something needs to be done about it. He might be right 

but again, I find I'm worried by statistics.

I'm always worried about any statistics that divide the population by their sexual organs. Men and women are the same species and the spread of good exam results crosses the sexual divide. If all girls got the top grades and all boys the bottom grades I would agree that there is a problem. I asked if he would be so concerned if the statistics were grouped by eye colour. I mean if they analysed the results again and discovered that blue eyed children did 10% better than brown eyed children would that be a concern? I also suggested that in this year's group the girls might have been 8% smarter than the boys.  He asked me if I thought that girls were genetically smarter than boys, which was a bit tricksy. Of course that is not what I was saying, quite the opposite, in fact. I think there is no genetic difference between boys and girls intelligence and that we need to stop pitting one gender against the other as if life is some huge male/female war. 

 Was he suggesting that blue eyed children will be 10% better because of genetics? If so, that is dangerously close to the idea of an Ayrian super race but that's a different argument. We could group children by a preference for red or green or whether they like tomatoes or if they have a tree in their back garden and one group will statistically outperform the other group because that's what happens. Not one person would suggest seperate schools for tomato eaters, as they have done to solve this 'boys underperforming' problem.

I understand the rhetoric. I've been around long enough to have heard the theory that schools are letting boys down and I agree there are boys who would learn better in an outdoor environment or benefit from starting school a year later or be removed from the temptations of the female form to a single sex establishment, where they could just bully each other to be better.

I wonder if the outrage would be as huge if the difference was the other way round?

And does it matter anyway? Girls do better in school: men get all the top jobs. Maybe girls work harder to get better exam results because they have to. If exams were weighted in favour of boys I suspect the girls would just work even harder because their opportunities are more limited without the top grades.

There is so much division of men and women in society and this happens from birth. Schooling isn't going to change much if we refuse to believe that both sexes are equal and keep using statistics to compare them.