Feminising and masculinising primary teaching: a critical examination of the interpretive frameworks of male primary school principals in Hong Kong

Over the past two decades, the feminisation of primary school teaching has been identified by the media and government officials in Western countries as an important contributing factor to boys' academic problems. This panic, which has been criticised by feminists as a backlash and a form of recuperative politics, has promoted the development of research into gender and education, particularly studies related to the gendered culture of primary schools and on the masculinities of male teachers. However, male primary principals remain relatively under-researched in the literature, despite the importance of their structural position and increasing concern over the masculinisation of school leadership. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion by critically analysing the interpretive frameworks of 12 male primary school principals. The findings reveal not only the complex, contradictory and at times culturally specific gendered discourses that some male principals employ, but also their feminising and masculinising effects on the school workplace and leadership.     

Where are all the typical numbers — 2

In this two-part article, we are trying to discover patterns in the decimal digits of numbers between zero and one. In Part I we started showing that each digit occurs with frequency 1/10. We reduced the problem with the help of Borel-Cantelli Lemma and Markov inequality to show certain sums of integrals are finite. In this concluding part we bring in an essentially new ingredient and conclude the proof.     

Sir alfred bray kempe — An amateur kinematician

A short biography of A B Kempe is followed by discussions on his contributions to mathematics in general and kinematics in particular. Kempe’s theorem, mechanisms for generating exact straight line, for rectilinear translation, palgiograph, angle trisector and focal mechanisms are presented.     

Sundials: Ancestors of our clocks

This article deals with the timekeepers of the past, the sundials. Apart from discussing the structure of a few common sundials, we point out the reasons for the variation between sundial time and the time shown by mechanical timekeepers.     

Mach’s principle

The underlying idea in Mach’s principle is that the origin of inertia or mass of a particle is a dynamical quantity determined by the environment, in particular the rest of the matter in the universe. In this article, we discuss the role of this idea in the Brans-Dicke theory of gravitation and the Hoyle-Narlikar cosmology.     

Israel Moiseevich Gelfand (1913–2009)

In this homage to the late I M Gelfand, we try to give an overview of some of his contributions to the theories of Banach algebras in general and C*-algebras in particular, and briefly elaborate on the celebrated Gelfand-Naimark-Segal construction which gives a way of passing from positivity-preserving linear functionals to representations on Hilbert space.     

Dawn of science

What was remarkable about the most misunderstood medieval scientist’s discoveries was the way he arrived at them — by direct observation.