patrick.net

I've been disgusted with the educational research community as a whole, in particular the physics educational research community. They produce tons of filth left and right that is completely asinine. Keep in mind, I teach high school. That being said, I've stumbled across the most asinine article ever on physics.

https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-views/taking-pee-out-physics-how-boys-are-getting-a-leg
This suggests that there is another reason for young women and girls’ relative under-performance – and it must be one that specifically results in lower facility with projectile motion. The same sensitivity to environmental, socio-cultural factors and embodied learning that points to ball sports as a contributing factor leads us to look for other aspects of common lived experience that might lead male students to have a better understanding and increased mastery of projectile motion compared to females.

Like many parents of small (and not-so-small) boys, two of us (KW and DL) have observed the great delight young males take in urination, a process by which they produce and direct a visible projectile arc.

The fact that boys (and men) play with their ability to projectile pee is hardly contentious. Boys are trained to pee into toilet bowls with floating targets, a huge variety of which can be bought on Amazon; Amsterdam Airport Schiphol famously cleaned up its urinals by encouraging men to hit flies etched next to the drain; and Peeball is now a worldwide phenomenon.

Meanwhile, YouTube videos explain how to write your name in the snow with your pee; and the post-match celebration peeing antics of sportsmen are widely reported in the media. Indeed, the very notion of a pissing contest – furthest, highest, most precisely aimed – is a deeply embedded part of some cultures. Alexander Pope includes a pissing contest in his narrative poem, the Dunciad. Our own children describe a stepped wall behind their primary school that’s used by male pupils for competitive target practice. And a colleague who grew up in the Canadian arctic describes boys competing to see who could perfect the trajectory so that what ascended as liquid fell as ice crystals.

All this is experienced up to five times a day, so by 14, boys have had the opportunity to play with projectile motion around 10,000 times. And 14 is when many children meet formalised physics in the form of projectile motion and Newton’s equations of motion for the first time.