With a new year beginning, and with Do the Maths having struck a bit of a chord, it seems a good time to think about doing more than shooting stupid ACARA fish in ACARA’s stupid barrel. I’m open to suggestions for this blog, of what I might write about, and of what you might write about.
Continue reading “What Should I Write About, What Should You Write About?”
When attacking ACARA’s draft mathematics curriculum, we noted the frequency with which certain words and phrases appeared. Below is the revised count for some of these, for the new curriculum. Not that ACARA is mandating how teachers should teach, or anything like that. It’s obviously the furthest thing from ACARA’s innocent little mind.
It is no surprise that the Statistics strand of the new mathematics curriculum is thin. Still, it may be a surprise how thin it is.
The following, as near as we can tell, is the complete list of contents and elaborations that refer to “mean” or “median” or similar, and thus might (and still might not) require at least some mental or written computation. In other words, these are the only items we could find that seem to not simply be a matter of tabulating or “exploring” or “investigating” or “analysing”, the only items that consist of anything more than sitting around and chatting about stuff.
Just a quick one. Not really a PoSWW, but it’s some kind of proof, and it involves stupidity. Continue reading “Probability Goes to the Dogs”
The following is our complete Arena article, which we announced a couple weeks ago. It includes footnotes and references and links that didn’t make it into the Arena version.
Continue reading “Do the Maths: Why Mathematics Education is Failing Our Kids”
Following on from our previous post, it is worth considering the role of Roman numerals in the new Curriculum. There isn’t one.