Flipped Homework

  1. Read the essay question. Then watch the video and make a list of ideas you can use for this essay:

In most science courses at university, there are significantly more male students than female students.

What is the reason for this? What could be done to balance out the numbers?

Are Women Bad At Math?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqLz5WGITjc

transcript

  1. You can also take note of any interesting new vocabulary (5-8 expressions) you’d like to use in our discussion in class. Make sure you’re writing down whole collocations (chunks). For example: science-based careers are dominated by men

  2. Read the two essays and answer the questions:

Problem & Solution. Cause & Effect

The point of flipped homework on this course is to get Ss to mine for specific ideas in the sources we’ll be assigning - which is why we give them the prompt first, and then ask them to work with the source. You may want to explain it to them so they’re more intentional as they watch or read the source.

We’ll also be asking them to read the sample essays at home to save class time. This course only uses IELTS Liz samples because they’re not bad, but also not perfect with a view to achieve the following goals:

Here’s some extra reading you may want to do before the class to be able to ask some advanced follow-ups on the topic of gender disparity in education and workplace.

The first one is a ridiculously sexist, holier-than-thou article that gets it terribly wrong from the standpoint of IELTS (and common sense) because it implies that women in STEM choose to have victim mentality. It also uses false equivalence, which is one of the deadly sins of writing (it suggests that a male teacher essentially has the same experience as a female scientist and ignores a lot of the underlying factors of how differently the outliers (in this case - people of different genders) are perceived and treated in male- and female-dominated fields). You can use this article with really advanced students to talk about the nature of poor arguments :)

I’m a Male Teacher Surrounded by Women. But Please Don’t Call Me a Victim of Sexism

There is also a mention of quotas - something that IELTS is curiously quite interested in. Here’s a topic that usually proves to be really challenging for most Ss:

Many high-level position in companies are filled by men even though the workforce in many developed countries is more than 50 percent female. Companies should be required to allocate a certain percentage of these positions to women.

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

and an article that has some really great ideas for it:

https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/4178-gender-gap-workplace.html

Facing the Gender Gap in the Workplace

Pro tip: we should disagree that companies should be required to use quotas to hire more women, and argue in favor of other ways for companies to hire and retain female employees, so that they could get promoted to those top positions (this is a Best Way essay - more on that later!).

90 min (relatively fast-paced)

2 min

<aside> 🛫 What are we going to do today?

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In today’s class we are going to:

At the beginning of the class, I like to give Ss a brief overview of what we’re going to do - this helps remove the cognitive challenge of uncertainty, and give them a sense of control (and maybe something to look forward to).

You may want to talk them through it or just ask them to read this section to themselves.

I sometimes also ask Ss at this stage about how they felt about the source / the topic to set the mood for the discussion that’s about to follow.

8 min

<aside> 🧨 Warm up

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  1. Are you good or bad at Math? Why do you think that is? How has it affected your adult life?
  2. Is it true that boys are generally better at Math than girls? Talk about your experience and observations.
  3. What is the problem with labeling certain areas of knowledge as ‘feminine subjects’ and ‘masculine subjects’?

The point of this stage is to refer to Ss’ actual lived experience. This discussion should be quite informal at first, and become more neutral as you progress to question 3.

In the first class of the course, you may ask Ss to reflect on this to explain to them what this part of Writing Task 2 questions means:

…include any relevant examples from your knowledge and experience.

This sounds a bit confusing when Ss learn that they cannot write things like ‘when I was in high school, I was better at Math than most boys’ in their essays.

We can use this warm up activity to teach them about abstraction (making points that would hold true for a big group of people) - for example, you can’t say ‘I personally did this and that’, but you can say - ‘most young professionals / young women these days’, and the same goes for their observations on boys’ and girls’ aptitude for Math.

In question 3, try to guide them towards making the following points:

20 min

<aside> 🗣 Let’s discuss!

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Why Are Women Bad at Math?

transcript

  1. Are they? :) What really is different about boys’ and girls’ experience in Math classes at school?
  2. What made this stereotyping pervasive?

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/ACtkExWEsumxiO7Cmcj_4LUJ-OPyIlfhKhnk0_-PlIg6A3q6XI1rv027_x5HZRrzhwDABAG-PgJohAzwOziXQuii3qoSblrm6xsSY8oo41PWuClgZvm8y3t_v0rMekde1l8P2gcdDr2Fy9quGSgDkg

  1. Why do you think the notions of raw, effortless brilliance and sustained hard work ascribed to girls and not boys? What is the consequence of this?
  2. Why do women leave or never enter the STEM field after getting a degree?
  3. What needs to be done to improve the situation? Who stands to gain from helping more women participate in STEM?

Here are some quotes from the video with target vocabulary that you may want to throw in as you go through the questions:

  1. What is different though is that girls express far higher anxiety levels about their math's performance. This is a result of girls getting influenced by societal notions reinforced by their teachers, peers and parents that they don't have a natural inclination or talent for math and science, usually regarded as boys' subjects.
  2. This stereotyping of men being naturally more gifted at math and science is pervasive. For the longest time, popular culture reinforced the trope of the genius scientist who is usually male, white and disheveled.
  3. A 2016 study found that people were more likely to ascribe light bulb moments of genius or effortless brilliance to male scientists, while they were more likely to attribute women scientists' success to sustained hard work.

*Note that this may not be your Ss actual experience - I’ve had many female Ss tell me they’ve never been discriminated against in their lives. This is actually amazing, and I always celebrate it with them because it means we have been making progress as a society after all :) At the same time, IELTS wants us to solve problems, so we can’t afford to say that something is not an issue anymore. Feminism has made some great strides, but regression is still possible (some troubling examples are the tradwives trend or the abortion ban in the US and some European countries), so we should be vocal about these concerns. This is a common objection among Ss (especially those who are more conservative), so you may want to talk to them about at some point at the beginning of the course.

  1. But it's not like women haven't been successful when they've pursued science and math, just that society has often failed to recognize their successes. Think Rosalind Franklin with the double helix, Margaret Knight, who invented the paper bag machine, and Ada Lovelace's computer programming findings.

And unfortunately, a hypermasculine hostile environment is the reality in STEM fields even today. For female students, not only is there a lack of role models, but they're far more likely to be subjected to harassment or bullying from their fellow students and faculty. Even in countries like the US and Australia that have managed to increase women's enrollment in STEM subjects in college, work cultures often make them feel like they don't belong. For instance, despite women getting higher grades in engineering courses than men, 40% of American women with engineering degrees either leave or never enter the field. But women around the world are beginning to question these biases that are keeping us out of STEM.

  1. ****To be able to create a scientific culture that is truly robust and expansive, we need to rethink how we conceive of scientific aptitude. Because it's not just bad for gender equality, but also for science itself. Scholars point out that as more women have entered fields like medicine, biology, primatology, it has actually expanded the general knowledge created in these fields, impacting not just what scientists choose to study, but the methodology they use to study it. So let's commit to making scientific inquiry and practice more inclusive, because science and society only stand to gain from it.

25 min

<aside> 🙏 Vocabulary: Gender Disparity in Education

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Topic-Specific Vocabulary

Use the vocabulary in the toggle below (click on the arrow to open it) to paraphrase the expressions in bold. You may need to change the structure of the sentence:

For example:

  1. Even in countries like the US and Australia that have managed to get more girls to study Math and Science > increase women's enrollment in STEM subjects in college, work cultures often make them feel like they don't belong.

Tell Ss that you’re now going to look at some vocabulary that they may want to use in their essays and Speaking pt. 3 answers.

Go through the example sentence together and ask Ss about the difference between the original phrasing and the paraphrased part. The answer is that the former is more informal and spoken and the latter is more formal and written.

Throughout the course, keep asking these questions - is it formal or informal? Would you say this or write this? even if the answer seems fairly obvious. It may not be obvious to your students, and even if they’re advanced enough to know the difference in theory, they need to increase their awareness of register and style because this is actually a huge contributor to the Lexical Resource score, and look at many different instances of formal and informal language to be able to use both variations appropriately.