It’s a mathematics curriculum: one does not expect much history or many references to other cultures. Typically there are a few Roman numerals, a quick hello to Pythagoras and Archimedes, and that’s about it. More would be good, but it is not to be expected.
Continue reading “New Cur 25: Some Cultures Are More Equal Than Others”
For a while over the week-end our Mac keyboard was behaving very strangely: typing “y” would produce “z”, and vice versa. Eventually we realised that the Mac’s language had been changed to Hungarian. We have absolutely no idea how this might have occurred. Continue reading “Crayz Cats”
Two years ago, we annotated parts of a speech that ACARA CEO, David de Carvalho, gave at The Age Schools Summit. De Carvalho’s stage-setting for ACARA’s soon-to-be-released draft curriculum was nonsense throughout, and included a cunning reference to the “Joint Maths Statement” from “five of the leading maths and science organisations” supposedly supporting the then secret draft curriculum; it only emerged a year later that ACARA had prior knowledge of, and appears to have been intimately involved in the production of, this purportedly independent statement. Classy work from a classy guy. Continue reading “David de Carvalho, Annotated, Again”
Yes, it’s Letters Week here at the maths blog. Along with libraries “decolonising” their collections, we had Penguin Books deciding that Roald Dahl’s stories required some nice-ing, with words such as “ugly” and “fat” being replaced with gentler ways of describing Dahl’s ugly and fat characters. Thank God we have such thoughtful and brave defenders of our literary traditions. Continue reading “Dahl Gets Roald”
Northcote High School Library decided to get rid of some books, which is not news: such libraries discard books all the time. Except, the method by which NHS Library went about it was news. A week ago, The Age‘s Adam Carey had a report, School library discards outdated and offensive books on colonisation: Carey’s report begins,
Dozens of 20th century non-fiction titles deemed historically inaccurate or offensive have been removed from the Northcote High School library as part of a push to decolonise the school’s book collection.
“decolonise”. Yep, again.
Continue reading “A Frickin’ School Library Decides to Burn Some Frickin’ Books”
Last year, after the appearance of ACARA’s appalling draft curriculum, we ran a competition: find the best Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elaboration. No one took our competition seriously. This was perhaps unsurprising, since most readers of this blog would have been sceptical already, and then our introduction to the competition hammered the ATSI cross-curriculum priority as enacted in the draft mathematics curriculum. We were serious, but no matter. There is a new mathematics curriculum, with revised ATSI elaborations, and we move on.
Continue reading “New Cur 24: ATSI Elaborations and the Games People Play”
And one more step into Exam 2. To be honest, we couldn’t give a stuff about this garbage topic, other than to note that introducing it into VCE is complete madness. But, clearly some people feel there are specifics to hammer. So, hammer away. (Hammerers may wish to refer to this or this or this or this (Word, idiots), all courtesy of VCAA.)
Having finished going through the Specialist Exam 1 sample questions, we started on Exam 2. We didn’t get far:
I am desperately trying to get back to hammering ACARA’s junk curriculum and VCAA’s junk VCE materials, but new crap keeps on coming. Here’s another one that must be done, and again it’ll just have to be quick. Continue reading “The Principal ATAR Stupidity”
Following on from the group effort PoSWW, this is a group effort WitCH. It is worth keeping the PoSWW in mind, since the zero vector is again a primary source of confusion and error.
The focus is again Year 12 Specialist texts, this time on their coverage of linear dependence and independence. We have already WitCHed this in reference to the previous edition of Cambridge (which remains essentially unchanged on this topic). Readers may feel free to cheat by referring to that WitCH. Although Cambridge’s treatment was and is atrocious, however, the main targets are Nelson and Jacaranda.