I think my first encounter with the word “feminist” was around sixth grade, when a friend of my older brother told me that if I ever wanted a boy to like me, I best not join Feminist Club when I reached high school. At the time, I took his advice seriously. He, a cool high…
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Last year, a group of students from the University of Sydney Wom*n’s Collective began teaching workshops on feminism to high school students under the brand fEMPOWER. We began the workshops after one collective member shared her experience of coming to university with very little understanding of feminism, outside of what was offered by the…
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I always used to groan about how pointless high school seemed. I spent countless hours analysing what the red room meant in Jane Eyre and learning maths that I still haven’t used in everyday life. But there was something we didn’t learn, that I’d only heard briefly used and out of context until university, that…
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It was a young art teacher. Or was it a student teacher in geography class? It could have been his biceps half-hidden by navy t-shirt sleeves, or those tight skirts she paraded around in (did she even wear underwear?), or maybe it was something about his stubble that made you imagine it grazing across your…
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Suspected Islamist gunmen have killed at least 27 students and a teacher in a boarding school in the Mamudo village in the northeast of Nigeria. Survivors are being treated for burns and gunshot wounds. Some of the school’s 1200 students fled into the nearby bush to escape the gunmen. Information is scarce at this…
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I imagine being the “crème de la crème” sounds tantalisingly delicious to children of an impressionable age. For one, foreign words to young ears always sound exotic and important, for another, it is the sort of phrase likely to be picked up from an adult, and most children wish to be older than they are,…
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If you’ve finished your high school education, one thing you probably wouldn’t have asked for more of in retrospect is court room drama. No matter how you go about it, there’s no real beating around the bush to be done on this one: year twelve is a rather monstrous experience. This is maybe why we’re…
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Whenever I tell people now that I didn’t have the best time at high school, they make a weird sort of face and say, ‘What was so bad about it?’ They dismiss my painful memories as melodrama; they don’t believe for a second that life was really as bad as I say. Someone even said…
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We used to call it the f-word. The formal took over the whole year in year 11. It was all anyone talked about, the only thing anyone was planning for. And for a lot of girls, it was a source of constant panic. * I was lucky that I had a long-term boyfriend, so I…
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