Oddly enough

No comment: Item spotted in a teacher's union contract in Connecticut: "Teacher shall make two (2) comments per student per subject, per report card, per marking period. One (1) of those comments may be `no comment', if a second comment concerning the student in the opinion of the teacher, is inappropriate."

Forgotten skills: Research at the University of Florida has shown that while men are more confident that they can remember where something is, women are in fact better at finding it. "To say that when it comes to memory, women have more skill than confidence and men have more confidence than skill is a simplistic way to put it, but we found it to be true in this study," said psychology professor Robin West.

Literary prejudice: The San Francisco Board of Education is considering a proposal that would force high-school teachers to include in the curriculum seven books by non-white authors for every three traditional classics by white writers. Among books considered inappropriate for the San Francisco school population are Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which is accused of having an "economic bias" in its categorisation of people based on their class, and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which is said to have a bias against Afro-Americans.

Gay Swedes: Umea University is to become the first in Sweden to offer a course in gay history. History lecturer Svante Norrhem said that his department had noticed an increasing demand for such a course. "Gay and lesbian studies are quite an important subject in the Netherlands and some US universities, but no such course exists in Sweden," he said.