
Does this coven of bloodsuckers have any redeeming features whatsoever?
Does this coven of bloodsuckers have any redeeming features whatsoever?
Tanya Plibersek, Australian Labor’s Shadow Minister for Education, has just been reaching out to the media. Plibersek has objected to the low ATAR sufficient for school leavers to gain entry to a teaching degree, and she has threatened that if universities don’t raise the entry standards then Labor may impose a cap on student numbers:
We [should] choose our teaching students from amongst the top 30 per cent …
This raises the obvious question: why the top 30 per cent of students? Why not the top 10 per cent? Or the top 1 per cent? If you’re going to dream an impossible dream, you may as well make it a really good one.
Plibersek is angry at the universities, claiming they are over-enrolling and dumbing down their teaching degrees, and of course she is correct. Universities don’t give a damn whether their students learn anything or whether the students have any hope of getting a job at the end, because for decades the Australian government has paid universities to not give a damn. The universities would enrol carrots if they could figure out a way for the carrots to fill in the paperwork.
The corruption of university teaching enrolment, however, has almost nothing to do with the poor quality of school teachers and school teaching. The true culprits are the neoliberal thugs and the left wing loons who, over decades, have destroyed the very notion of education and thus have reduced teaching to a meaningless, hateful and hated profession, so that with rare exceptions the only people who become teachers are those with either little choice or little sense or a masochistically high devotion to civic duty.
If Plibersek wants “teaching to be as well-respected as medicine” then perhaps Labor could stick their neck out and fight for a decent increase in teachers’ wages. Labor could fight for the proper academic control of educational disciplines so that there might be a coherent and deep Australian curriculum for teachers to teach. Labor could fight against teachers’ Sisyphean reporting requirements and against the swamping over-administration of public schools. Labor could promise to stop, entirely, the insane funding of poisonously wealthy private schools. Labor could admit that for decades they have been led by soulless beancounters and clueless education hacks, so as much as anyone they have lost sight of what education is and how a government can demand it.
But no. Plibersek and Labor choose an easy battle, and a stupid, pointless battle.
None of this is to imply that Labor’s opponents are better. Nothing could be worse for education, or anything, than the sadistic, truth-killing Liberal-National psychopaths currently in power.
But we expect better from Labor. Well, no we don’t. But once upon a time we did.
Tanya Plibersek has announced a new Labor policy, to offer $40,000 grants for “the best and the brightest” to do teaching degrees, and to go on to teach in public schools. Of course Plibersek’s suggestion that this will attract school duxes and university medal winners into teaching is pure fantasy, but it’s a nanostep in the right direction.
In this WitCH we will again pick on the Cambridge text Specialist Mathematics VCE Units 3 & 4 (2019): see the extract below. (We’d welcome any email or comment with suggestions of other generally WitCHful texts and/or specific WitCHes.) And, a reminder that there is still plenty left to discover in WitCH 2 , WitCH 3 and Tweel’s Mathematical Puzzle.
Have fun.
Update
Below, we go through the passage line by line, but that fails to capture the passage’s intrinsic awfulness. The passage is, as John put it pithily below, a total fatberg. The passage is worse than wrong; it is clumsy, pompous, circuitous, barely comprehensible and utterly pointless.
Why do this? Why write like this? Sure, ideas, particularly mathematical ideas, can be tricky and difficult to convey; dependence/independence isn’t particularly easy to explain. And sure, we all write less clearly than we might wish on occasion. But, if you write/proofread/edit something that the intended “readers” will obviously struggle to understand, then all you’re doing is either showing off or engaging in a meaningless ritual.
An underlying problem is that the entire VCE topic is pointless. Yes, this is the fault of the idiotic VCAA, not the text, but it has to be said, if only as a partial defence of the text. No purpose is served by including in the curriculum a subtle definition that is not then reinforced in some meaningful manner. Consequently, it’s close to impossible to cover this aspect of the curriculum in an efficient, clear and motivated manner. The text could have been one hell of a lot better, but it probably never could have been good.
OK, to the details. Grab a whisky and let’s go.
What a TARDIS of bullshit.