c_cubed51

Far from it! I had accidently discovered a way to get my students to better understand the material they had to learn. I was a better teacher after the incident. But you are too brainwashed to understand this.

How I wish you would display the same indignation and righteous wrath over the 17,500 Americans who have been killed by gun violence so far this year, and the 34,000 who have been injured, many of them being life changing; and the 1600 kids under the age of 18 who have been killed by gun violence in your own country, as well as the 4300 who have been injured. That is a problem you can help solve, rowlf. You know what to do!

I suppose your post does demonstrate your ignorance, rowlf. The problem is that you still do not know what to do when you don't know what to do! Please go away and don't mess up this thread!!! That action on your part will be greatly appreciated.

Nah, Ursula, it just means you don't understand English. This part applies - "... and general chat about anything not covered elsewhere." I agree that the topic is not my cup of tea, but free speech, about which you bang on quite a bit, means that it was a legitimate post on this thread. I'm not unhappy that houseofnylon decided to hide it.

You're a bigoted, frightened idiot, Augustus. There are three reasons why anyone would be opposed to a trans person using the bathroom of their choice - prejudice, fear and ignorance.

Ruby's response reminded me of Constable Savage in the sketch below.

Back in the 1980s I once asked the woman who typed my thesis, in the days before word processers, (an American living in North London) how it could possibly be that Great Britain had managed to create a huge empire, when there were clearly so many idiots back home. She said, "All those with get up and go, got up and went."

Yes, it really does pay to be co-operative when dealing with the police. Here in NZ the country roads are long and narrow. Driving from Rotorua to Auckland on one occasion, I had been travelling behind a HGV doing 60km/h on an 80km/h road for about 30 minutes, before the road widened slightly at an intersection and I took the gap and passed it. A few moments later I saw flashing blue lights in my rear-view mirror and pulled over. The cop explained that it was illegal to pass at that point. I expressed my frustration. He picked up my South African accent and so we shot the breeze for about 15 minutes before he glanced at his watch, laughed and said I could go, as the truck was probably far enough ahead by now to no longer frustrate me. No fine, just a pleasant chat. And a timely reminder not to let frustration cloud one's judgment when driving.

Poor grammar and spelling. No useful contributions to this or any other topic. Go back and ogle the stockings, people!

Your answer called to mind in incident which occurred after I had stopped teaching and was acting as a teacher-aide to a young man with Aspergers Syndrome. A group of (female) counsellors from the Ministry of Education showed the class a video of a teenager party. I sat there, and thought to myself, "I wish I had seen this video when I was a teenager!" It commenced with a scene where the main character, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, is convinced by her friend to wear something more sexy to the party. Throughout the video, as the party heats up and the kids indulge in drinking alcohol (I can't recall there being any other drugs involved), numerous incidents occur when any number of this young girl's friends could have intervened and put a stop to the inevitable conclusion - she gets drunk and goes upstairs to sleep it off. An equally drunk young man comes in and has sex with her. I waited expectantly for the counsellors to ask an open-ended question, inviting the class to discuss how the tragedy could have been avoided. They didn't! They immediately launched into an attack on every boy in the class! They were all rapists by default. I've never seen anything like it. I was incensed!!! My response was to write this group of counsellors a long letter, explaining how they could have used the video to teach every student the dangers of using alcohol, without laying blame. They did not respond. To have a bigoted, closed mind when teaching vulnerable children is to be a dangerous person! And to think that this was sanctioned by the Ministry of Education was mind-boggling.

A nonsense thread! It's like using a jackhammer to kill a flea. A year or so ago, a member of our congregation removed her kids from the local school and started home schooling them, because she was opposed to the school authorities allowing the children who identified as trans from using the girls' loos, and feared for her children's safety! She asked me what I thought of this. I did a statistical analysis based on census figures and criminal statistics in NZ. I discovered that 0.8% of NZers identify as transgendered; that 94% of sexual assaults go unreported; that in 2022 the total number of reported sexual offences had been 1,785; that, based on this number being only 6% of the actual total number of sexual offences, the real total was just less than 30,000 cases. I could not find a definitive breakdown of sex offenders in NZ by sex, so to inflate the figures of possible sex crimes committed by trans men, I used the smallest percentage of sex crimes committed by cis men world-wide I could find and calculated that about 28,200 such crimes had been committed by cis males. This meant that at most, about 1,800 sex offences had been committed by persons of other genders. [Ignoring repeat offenders in this total.] I was then able to calculate that fewer than 5 of these 1,800 sex offences would have been committed by trans women! Across the whole of New Zealand. The chances of my friend's kids being molested in a girl's loo at their particular school were infinitesimally tiny! Her daughters are far more likely to be sexually molested by a family member or trusted friend in their own home, than by a random trans woman stranger who enters a public female restroom with the express purpose of molesting a cis woman, rather than simply to use the facilities and then leave!!! Fear not, Augustus, and all those who are as frightened as you are.

This calls to mind a cartoon I saw recently. A number was drawn in the sand. Two people were standing opposite one another, looking at the number. One saw a 6; the other saw a 9. Which of them saw the true number? The truth is often like that.

rowlf's assertion that he never asks questions that he does not know the answers to got me thinking ... and it called to mind an iconic moment very early in my teaching career. I had put a geometry problem on the chalkboard, which involved proving that a four-sided figure was a cyclic quad. As I stepped back, my mind went blank. What to do ... I shrugged my shoulders and admitted, "I don't know how to do it!" Immediately, a hand shot up. "Sir, this is how I would do it." I invited him to write his solution on the board. Another hand was raised. "Sir, this is how I would do it." Again, that boy wrote his answer on the board. A third hand went up, and a third solution was written on the board. That lesson transformed the way I taught. Instead of spoon feeding my students, I often pretended that I did not know the answer (and sometimes I genuinely did not!). As a result, the students learned more about the benefits of being able to solve a problem in three different ways, over being able to solve three problems, all in the same way. Several years later, when I was teaching a multi-cultural group of students, the approach produced some staggeringly innovative new solutions to old problems. This thread is an opportunity to share with us your iconic learning moment - the one which taught you something new and useful. I look forward to being educated.

As it's Christmas season may I suggest you ask your local clergyman what Joseph and Mary did when they heard a rumour that the awful King Herod, who was on a par with Yahya Sinwar, had issued orders that all the children under the age of two in Bethlehem were to be slaughtered. Would he/she be able to answer your question?

Your ignorance is on a par with that of KLSSSS, Augustus. Census data shows England and Wales are no longer majority Christian | CNN Matthew (note the spelling!) is also known as Levi in the gospels, and there is some doubt about the authorship of the first gospel in the Christian NT. He was almost certainly Jewish, or the gospel may have been penned by a number of authors. So, no cigar for you there either, A. Who Wrote the Gospel of Matthew - Scholarly Discoveries (bartehrman.com) And concerning John - John (Ἰωάννης / Ioannes in Greek) is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Yochanan (יוחנן). You can look up the rest yourself. There is some doubt over the authorship of each and every gospel in the NT.