The leadership of my high school in the early 70s was, I presume, pretty typical for a suburban Melbourne school. It was not unkind, but it was authoritative and distant. Except for one guy, a deputy principal or something, who was a complete asshole. This one guy was always angry, always yelling at some kid for something, and forever stomping down the hallways. He also always held his head at a weird and pronounced tilt. And so, the students’ name for this asshole was 43 Degrees. Continue reading “Funny Numbers”
Month: September 2022
Sins of Commission
A few months ago, I made a submission to the Inquiry by the Productivity Commission into the National School Reform Agreement. The Commission has just released its Interim Report, and has invited further submissions. I won’t be bothering. Continue reading “Sins of Commission”
David de Carvalho and the Annoying Taco Kids
Last week we wrote about the mushy Australian puff piece on PISA clown, Andreas Schleicher. Readers may recall that Schleicher was critical of “Australia’s shallow Curriculum”. Schleicher says nothing of substance, simply advocating, ad nauseam,
“teaching fewer things at greater depth”.
The Australian piece also briefly quoted Ben Jensen and Mailie Ross, from some consultancy group called Learning First. In the same issue of The Australian, Jensen and Ross had an opinion piece strongly criticising the Australian Curriculum in the opposite direction:
“The Australian curriculum, however, is not a high-quality, knowledge-rich curriculum. It doesn’t guarantee the knowledge students are supposed to learn … Instead, it is a skills-based curriculum; the standards for students to achieve are skills-based. A skills-based curriculum includes knowledge but isn’t specific about what knowledge should be taught, so there is no guarantee of what will be taught in each year level, let alone across the curriculum.
[The Curriculum should] make it clear what knowledge and skills students have the right to learn in order to participate productively in life. Be honest and acknowledge that the Australian curriculum does not offer this clarity.”
Jensen and Ross’s piece is not great, in particular arguing too loosely on the basis of vague generalities. But, notwithstanding the vagueness of both pieces, there is a clear conflict about what the Australian Curriculum is, and what it should be. Luckily, we have ACARA’s CEO, the all-wise David de Carvalho, to resolve the conflict. Continue reading “David de Carvalho and the Annoying Taco Kids”
Giving Experts the Boot
Greg Lynch
It’s story time again. This short one is not about education, although there might be a lesson in there somewhere. It involves a drive-in movie theatre and a car boot. Continue reading “Giving Experts the Boot”
The CAS Betrayal
This post will take the form of Betrayal, with a sequence of five stories going backwards in time.
STORY 5
Last year, I was asked by an acquaintance, let’s call him Rob, to take a look at the draft of a mathematics article he was writing. Rob’s article was in rough form but it was interesting, a nice application of trigonometry and calculus, suitable and good reading for a strong senior school student. One line, however, grabbed my attention. Having wound up with a vicious trig integral, Rob confidently proclaimed,
“This is definitely a case for CAS”.
It wasn’t. Continue reading “The CAS Betrayal”
Australian Mathematics Curriculum Awfulnesses
This is our post for noting local nonsense in the new Australian Mathematics Curriculum (downloads here). It is a list of the content descriptions and the elaborations that appear to be deficient/wrong/misplaced/weird/whatever. It includes anything that has come to our attention and has sufficiently annoyed us and/or others. (This post supersedes a previous post, and the suggestions already made have been incorporated below.) There is no intention to be comprehensive, which would probably entail transcribing 80% of the thing. We’ll just keep adding over time, as awfulnesses come to our attention. Of course criticisms and suggestions and discussion are always welcome, and can be made in the comments. Continue reading “Australian Mathematics Curriculum Awfulnesses”
Original Digital Sin
About a decade ago, the New York Times ran an opinion piece in which the authors argued for a renewed emphasis on the traditional algorithms for arithmetic. In particular, the authors claimed and lamented an increasing use of calculators as a supposed alternative to proper instruction in the algorithms:
The idea is that competence with algorithms can be substituted for by the use of calculators, and reformists often call for training students in the use of calculators as early as first or second grade.
Keith Devlin wrote a snarky response, including an accusation of straw manning: Continue reading “Original Digital Sin”
We Are the Robots
First, enjoy some great Kraftwerk, because, and just because:
Regular readers may recall Australian reporter Natasha Bita. Natasha did some really excellent stenographic work for ACARA. Natasha also played right along with AMSI’s most recent Chicken Little crusade. It turns out that Natasha is an excellent stenographer even when there’s nothing to stenograph. Continue reading “We Are the Robots”
New Cur 1 + PoSWW 29: Cut Down in One’s Prime
As part of writing our WWW article, we forced ourselves, finally, to look at ACARA’s new Mathematics Curriculum. Jesus, it’s bad. Like village idiot bad.
We’ll start a post in the near future,* compiling the various nonsenses, new and old, and including aspects readers have already pointed out on this post. One new piece of stupidity, however, seems worthy of special mention.
Continue reading “New Cur 1 + PoSWW 29: Cut Down in One’s Prime”
WitCH 83: A Viral MAS Question
8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = ?
This is really a PoSWW. Except, there are a lot of words.
Above is one of those stupid BODMAS things, which appear in the media about once a month. Except, this one has just been sorted by a couple of Canadian Maths Ed professors, in a Conversation article titled The Simple Reason a Viral Math Question Stumped the Internet. Regular readers will be aware of our method of resolving such questions, but we think there are aspects of the Conversation article that warrant specific whacks.
Have fun.