Location, Location, Location

Reports appeared all over the press in the UK this week in connection with the fact that OFSTED - which I believe stands for the Office for Standing in the way of Education - have stated that children are being denied the chance to take part in geography field trips, and that as a result geography is in decline in England's schools as growing numbers of pupils abandon a subject they find "boring and irrelevant".

One key way to make lessons more exciting is through field trips, Ofsted said in a report. But teachers often decide not to take pupils on expeditions

In an extremely outrageous and stereotypical statement, Karl von Stubbings, Professor of Sexist studies at UCL stated that "...we all know that the staff sex imbalance is particularly stark in primary schools. The figures from the Department for Children, Schools and Families show that in 2008 just 15 per cent of primary school teachers are men, down from 20 per cent in 1986.

This fact combined with research undertaken by psycho-biologist Qazi Rahman, of the University of East London, which concluded that: -

"Overall, men are better map readers, and by quite a big margin."

Even with practice, most women can only improve their performance slightly.

This is because men and women navigate in different ways. Men take a bird's eye view of their journey to get an overall sense of where they are going, whereas women break it down into bite-size chunks, navigating in relation to where they are at the time. This is why women turn maps around to match the direction they're facing, and use landmarks to find their way.

Professor von Stubbings stated that his conclusion was that the reason why geography results are falling is not that female primary schoolteachers don't take their pupils on field trips, they do....it's just that they can't find their way back!!