This one comes courtesy of frequent commenter, John Friend. It is an example from Cambridge’s Mathematical Methods 34.
It amazes me at times what does and does not concern some commenters. That’s not intended as a criticism. Well, it is, but it isn’t. And, it is. It’s complicated.
Rebecca Urban has a report in The Australian today (Murdoch, paywalled):
‘Warped lessons must be dumped’: Tudge
Education Minister Alan Tudge says the board of the country’s schooling authority must substantially rewrite its draft national curriculum, warning he will not endorse the proposed document amid concern student outcomes would be harmed. …
In the letter, seen by The Australian, Mr Tudge urged the [ACARA] board to seriously consider recent feedback from education experts, who have flagged concerns that the proposed changes amounted to a weakening of learning standards.
Continue reading “Alan Tudge Calls for a Rewrite of the Draft Curriculum”
Matt Taibbi has written the obvious but excellent article on American incompetence and mendacity in regard to Afghanistan:
Every image coming out of Afghanistan this past weekend was an advertisement for the incompetence, arrogance, and double-dealing nature of American foreign policy leaders. Scenes of military dogs being evacuated while our troops fire weapons in the air to disperse humans desperate for a seat out of the country will force every theoretical future ally to think twice about partnering with us …
The pattern is always the same. We go to places we’re not welcome, tell the public a confounding political problem can be solved militarily, and lie about our motives in occupying the country to boot. Then we pick a local civilian political authority to back that inevitably proves to be corrupt and repressive, increasing local antagonism toward the American presence.
Read the whole thing. And then scream.
Continue reading “RatS 15: Taibbi – Afghanistan: We Never Learn”
We don’t pay a lot of attention to ITE and education faculties. Our working assumption is that it’s all nonsense. So, unless something specifically Maths Ed-ish arises, or it looks like someone is about to start a promising war, we just leave them in peace to do their silly stuff. Sometimes, however, their stuff is so silly, a response is called for.
The following is a list of errors – and possible/arguable errors – in the draft mathematics curriculum. Commenters are invited and encouraged to suggest additions, and deletions.
By “error” we mean a statement or instruction that is factually wrong or that makes no logical/mathematical/everyday sense. Some of the listed “errors” are clear-cut, while others are less so. Of course the fact that a statement/instruction made no sense to us does not prove that it makes no sense; we’ve attempted to be fair, being tough on the improper use of technical terms while giving weird phrasings a good-faith pondering in context. Nonetheless, there may well be reasonable interpretations that we have missed. (Of course phrasing that is difficult to interpret has no place in a curriculum document, but that is a separate category of sin.) As well, it is not always clear whether to characterise a statement as an error or simply a really dumb idea, but we’ve tried to stick pretty closely to “error”, leaving the noting of really dumb ideas to our other ninety-eight posts.
The list follows. The majority are elaborations. There are a few content descriptors, for which associated elaborations are indicated by a further indentation. Again, commenters are encouraged both to suggest additions to the list, and to argue for deletions from the list.
Continue reading “ACARA Crash 18: Errors in the Draft Mathematics Curriculum”
And now for something completely different: poetry.
Last Year, the Evil Mathologre was contacted by Ros, an editor at Cordite, an Australian poetry magazine. Ros was searching for a mathematician to be part of a poetry-mathematics collaboration, with poet Tricia Dearborn. Well aware of our literary pretensions, EM handballed the gig to us. The strange fruit of this collaboration has now appeared.