Friday, April 20, 2018



Mystery Cambridge University student wins ‘best bum 2017’ and praises her ‘a**e and thighs’

A STUDENT known only as Vita has taken out “best bum of 2017”. She puts her success down to her “considerable a**e and thighs”.



THIS is the voluptuous winner of Cambridge University’s ‘best bum’ 2017 award — who admits she has a “considerable a**e and thighs”.

The undergraduate — named only as ‘Vita’ — believes her win over far slimmer entrants is a victory for “body acceptance”.

Her saucy winning shot, leaning naked against an oak tree, won 24.32 per cent of the vote among readers of The Tab student newspaper.

“I don’t have the most athletic figure and I have quite a considerable arse and thighs,” she said.

“It says a lot about how far the world has come in body acceptance.

“I have worked hard to accept my body. I wanted to prove that to myself by doing something I wouldn’t usually do.

“I didn’t even expect the photo would be in the top 10 — let alone be the winner.

“I’ve never been so proud of something like that. I’m probably more proud of that than getting into Cambridge.”

Vita only decided to enter the competition when her friend — a professional photographer — asked her the night before.

She said: “During the shoot, it was so cold and my feet were wet. You can’t notice in the photo but the photos were taken near a football pitch during a football match.

“I don’t think they saw us — we would have noticed if they had noticed us.

“It was also next to the train line and every time a train was about to go by, the photographer threw my coat at me to give me some modesty!”

She took victory by a one per cent margin ahead of second place ‘Virginia’, who polled 23.08 per cent with a similar pose in a tree.

Now Vita’s curvaceous derrière has become a star on campus with friends commending her for her boldness.

She said: “Everyone who has seen my photos has been so positive. I have seen comments online saying that I’m fat but I’m going to ignore the trolls.

“I know there are comments saying that Cambridge students are ‘snowflakes’ and not working but I think it’s sad and narrow-minded to call us that!

“It’s an old-fashioned point of view — I’m going to focus on the positives.

“I can understand why they would concerned but at the same time everyone was young once and quite a few people see their a**e!”

Vita added: “When I told my mum, I was really worried because she’s quite conservative but she thought it was hilarious!

“She even showed the photo to my old teachers and they thought it was hilarious too.”

SOURCE






Scotland: Pupils urge their school chaplain to quit in row over gay marriage

Hundreds of names have been added to a petition by pupils at Carnoustie High School, Angus, against the Rev Mike Goss. The petition demands that the school break its ties with Mr Goss, accusing him of being against gay marriage and claiming that he has stated his dislike for the LGBTQ+ community.

Mr Goss, the minister of Barry Parish Church, described the petition as lies and said that the allegations were potentially actionable.

He has offered to meet the LGBTQ+ community at Carnoustie High to discuss their concerns.

SOURCE






South Australia's trial of England's year one phonics check shows why we need it

The proposal to introduce a phonics check - employed in schools in England towards the end of year one - into Australian schools has created considerable controversy. It has been said it would prove stressful to young children and is unnecessary, because phonics is already taught adequately in most Australian schools as part of the literacy curriculum.
Read more: Explainer: what is phonics and why is it important?

The South Australian government commissioned a trial of the utility of the phonics check last year. The results allay many of the reservations about the check and confirm the need for its introduction.

The phonics check consists of 40 single words children read aloud to a teacher. There are 20 real words and 20 "pseudo words" - all of which can be read using phonic decoding. The pseudo words are included because they can't be read from sight memory and are a purer test of phonics ability.

The headline data on student performance shows the majority of children in Reception (the first "foundation year" of school) and year one found the test items difficult. The average number of correctly read items was 11 out of 40 for Reception students and 22 out of 40 for year one.

Given the phonics check is designed for students in year one, it was expected Reception students would score low. This confirms the wisdom of the SA Department of Education and Child Development's decision to expand the trial from the original design (Reception only) to include year one. But the year one performance was also low relative to their counterparts in England and the expectations of their teachers.

In England, student performance is reported against a "threshold score" of 32 out of 40. For the past two years, 81% of year one students in the UK achieved this score. Only 15% of children in the SA trial achieved at this level.

According to the trial evaluation report, teachers and leaders observed:

students did more poorly than expected, across the board. Numerous respondents reported feeling surprised and disappointed by the results based on students' known reading abilities and results on the Running Record.

This is a clear indication existing assessments in these SA schools were not providing an accurate measure of students' decoding abilities.

The distribution of scores in SA was very different to the distribution of scores in England. In SA, student scores were distributed on a bell curve. English student scores are skewed to the right of the distribution. This means most children in SA scored around the middle, whereas most children in England score at the higher end. In many English schools, 100% achieve the threshold score.

Four ways South Australia's phonics check was different
The phonics check trial in SA employed exactly the same word items used in England in 2016. But there were methodological differences in how the checks were conducted in SA and in England, which may cloud the comparability of the results obtained.

The sample. In SA, the group of 4,406 students in 56 schools who participated in the trial was from a self-selected sample of schools who volunteered. In England, all schools are required to administer the check annually. So, the SA sample may not be truly representative of the state as a whole, let alone of students Australia-wide.

The font. Teachers raised the issue that the font used in the check was different from the standard font used in SA schools. But by the end of year one, children will have encountered many different fonts in books and elsewhere. It's unlikely this will have been a major factor influencing performance on the check.

Timing. In England, the check is given to students about a month before the end of year one (after nearly two years of initial instruction). But in the SA trial, the check was given earlier, in term three. The SA students had about a term less to learn letter sound correspondences, and this needs to be kept in mind.

The "stopping rule". More significant was the decision to advise teachers to discontinue testing once a child had made three consecutive errors. This stopping rule has the potential to deflate scores on the check, because students who had been stopped might have gone on to answer few more questions correctly. The evaluation report also found the stopping rule was not consistently applied. It's unlikely many children failing three items in succession would be able to achieve the threshold score of 32 items out of 40.

A stop rule is not part of the standard conditions used in England, although teachers do stop children if they are struggling. As many as 41% have been found to do this.

Students liked it

Teachers and leaders in the trial reported all students responded positively, including struggling readers, and they were engaged and interested. There were no reports of anxiety or stress for students. Teachers "universally" commented that students "loved the one-to-one time with the teacher".

Teachers and school leaders were overwhelmingly positive
The feedback from teachers and school leaders was encouraging and positive about all aspects of the administration of the check and the information it provided, including:

the sufficiency of training and support materials

the ease of administration

the length and duration of the check for young students

the engagement and effort of the students, and

the usefulness of the data it yielded on student reading abilities, for the purposes of guiding instruction and for identifying and supporting students who "may otherwise be slipping under the radar".

The phonics check was reported to be a "good eye-opener for teachers", and widely seen as complementing rather than duplicating existing assessments.

What should happen next?

In spite of the differences in methodology compared with the phonics check in England, it's unlikely their combined effect could account for such a difference in performance between the two. SA's results suggest there is little room for complacency about the state of phonics teaching in SA.

Almost all teachers in the trial said they taught phonics using either synthetic or analytic methods, reflecting the claim that Australian teachers already teach phonics. But there was no information to verify that phonics teaching is systematic or explicit, and these results clearly suggest they don't teach it well enough.

The SA trial of the year one phonics check has been an important initiative. The evaluation report will be a valuable guide to changes that need to be made for a state-wide implementation.

Even more significantly, the trial has provided strong support for implementation of the year one phonics check across Australia. Or, at the very least, for other states and territories to conduct similar trials. It supports the findings of the expert panel for the Australian government, and has validated the arguments of advocates that the phonics check gives teachers vital information about decoding skills not gained from other systemic assessments, and is neither burdensome for teachers nor stressful for students.

SOURCE





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