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Girls swept the board in national curriculum tests for seven-year-olds, beating boys in every paper – reading, writing, speaking and listening, maths and science. The biggest gap was in writing, where one in four boys failed to reach the standard expected, compared with just 13 per cent of girls.

if you encourage discussion in class, you have to be prepared for your students to arrive at conclusions that are unpalatable to you.

When I started, largely out of exasperation, to investigate the educational research literature for myself, I was pleasantly surprised to find there was some genuinely useful and scholarly work out there, which recognised the demands of different subjects and even admitted that university lecturers aren't all workshy and stupid... It's a shame that this better stuff doesn't seem to have fed through into the generic courses that most institutions offer. My personal advice to anyone starting out as a university teacher: find a few colleagues who take their teaching seriously (there are almost certain to be some in the department) and ask them for advice; sit in on their classes if possible; remember you'll never teach perfectly but you can always teach better; and close your ears to well-meaning interference from anybody who's never actually spent time at the chalkface!

Magueijo's could acknowledge that some people teaching these courses are genuinely concerned about improving teaching, and they need academics' help in designing better courses that do so. Sotto's side should acknowldge that however much they talk about how important teaching is (as if they discovered this, and academics did not know), they are not listening to the people attending their courses if those people feel utterly patronised and frustrated at the waste of their time. If academics treated their students like educationalists treat their student academics they'd be appalling teachers. A simple course allowing us to learn from a video of our own lectures would be immensely useful. Instead whole empires of education have developed that need to justify themselves and grow, so they subject us to educational jargon and make us write essays on the educationalist's pet theory.