A few years ago I was working as a teacher of English as a foreign language.

Now my approach to the job is that the most effective way to learn a language is to be exposed to as much of the language as possible with the maximum level of non-language context to allow the student to understand without need for translation.

Consequently, I developed a set of lessons in which I taught material other than the language itself, so that the language was picked up as a sort of by-product of the lessons.

Now, by chance a group of eight students, which should have been mixed, was all girls. When I started my ten-minute explanation of the working of a four-stroke engine by drawing a schematic diagram, I was immediately interrupted with the question "We are girls, do you think we are interested in this?" Unanimously they were not, so I moved on to the next exercise.

Now the next time I had this group, I took a shirt out of my bag of props and began: "Last week you told me you were not interested in men's work, so today, we are going to look at women's work..."

Pandemonium. When I insisted on asking why some responsibilities should be classified as men's work but none should be classified as women's work, they tried everything to justify this sexism.

They were a bright lot, but the best they could come up with after nearly an hour was to deny that they had said what they had and that, in actual fact, they had merely stated that they were not interested in the working of an engine and that they were girls as two separate and unrelated propositions.

I just laughed.