Following on from ‘Bill’s New Frock’ by Anne Fine: An Interesting Survey

 

 

2nd Class, Room 6 have just finished a novel

by Anne Fine called ‘Bill’s New Frock’.

 

In it, the main character, Bill wakes up one morning

to find that he has changed into a girl overnight.

 

The story is interesting in that Bill observes

how boys can be treated differently to girls.

 

Following on from reading ‘Bill’s New Frock’

2nd Class, Room 6 did an interesting exercise

about the jobs that men and women do.

 

First they listened to the following story:

 

‘One fine Monday morning,

a parent and child were walking to school.

Suddenly there was a screech of brakes

and an enormous thud.

 

A car and a motorcycle had collided.

The driver of the car got out

and went to see if the motorcyclist was OK.

 

Two guards came and an ambulance.

The ambulance driver drove quickly

and brought the motorcyclist to hospital.

 

The doctor and nurses did their jobs well

and the motorcyclist made a speedy recovery.

 

The children were asked to draw a picture from the story.

Then they were asked whether

the people in the story were male or female.

 

Though it is probably of note that there were

sixteen boys and twelve girls in the class that day,

the results were interesting.

                                                                                         Considered by the children to be:

 Character in story                             Male               Female             
 Child  8  20
 Parent  7  21
 Car driver  21  7
 Motorcyclist  26  2
 Guards  26  2
 Ambulance Driver  27  1
 Doctor  25  3
 Nurse  0 28

 

When the class talked about this afterwards,

they agreed that they had met female doctors,

and guards and male nurses.

 

Teacher sees a little change since she first

did this survey with an all girls class

twenty years ago. On that occasion the data

looked like this:

 

 Character in story                             Male               Female             
 Child  0  30
 Parent  0  30
 Car driver  24  6
 Motorcyclist  29  1
 Guards  29  1
 Ambulance Driver  29  1
 Doctor  29  1
 Nurse  0  30

 

She wonders what the survey would look like

in twenty years time.