I would really like to see the back of 2022; VCAA would undoubtedly be thrilled to do so. The continued litigation of 2022, and 2023, is not remotely as important as the current, massive job of repairing VCAA, and the former can be hugely distracting for the latter. (Ill-directed and badly inaccurate news reports are also of no assistance whatsoever.) Nonetheless, there are outstanding questions on VCAA’s honesty and integrity, and there are reasonable concerns that VCAA’s past sources of nonsense may also be current sources of nonsense. I’ll finish with 2022 as soon as possible, but it is not finished until it is finished. Which includes tidying up some loose ends, the purpose of this post. Continue reading “The Bennett Report, 2022 and Mathematics Experts”
Month: July 2024
0.9999… and What it Means for Mankind
One aspect of having given so many school presentations is the feeling, the reality, that one has been saying the same thing over and over again. It is pretty much always the same few routines, employing the same tricks and the same jokes in order to deliver the same messages. It is impossible not to ponder “Haven’t they heard it all before? Aren’t they bored?” Continue reading “0.9999… and What it Means for Mankind”
On Simplicity, Silk Purses and Bad Teachers
What can one say in a teacher PD that can possibly make a difference? After having given about a thousand of these, we think the answer is obvious: bugger all.
Even if a teacher has a mind to get something from a PD session, a FIFO “expert” can offer little that won’t immediately get lost in the jungle chaos of real live teaching. And of course many teachers, either through exhaustion or lethargy or not-really-being-a-maths-teacher or all three, will not be very interested in the little of value that might be on offer. So, over the years, we have tried to adapt to this grim reality. We look to offer very little, while trying to make that very little offering as loud and as unignorable as possible. We yell. A lot.
Continue reading “On Simplicity, Silk Purses and Bad Teachers”
Getting Back on the Hoarse
A couple months ago, I was invited to give a couple talks at a school. This was, to say the least, a surprise. Although I used to give such talks every other week, I had not been approached since around the time I wrote off the MAV as a cabal of censorious tossers and resigned from the whole popularisation thing. Now, many years later, there appears this invitation, from a teacher I do not know or know of and who seemingly knows little about me. Strange.
How Do You Extend Primary School Students?
This blog seems to be turning into a Dear Abby column, but what the hell. If readers keep posing questions then we’ll keep posting them, to see what answers arise. You gotta keep the customer satisfied.
This latest question comes from frequent commenter, JJ, who has begun doing extension work with Year 6-ish primary school students:
I’m keen to keep it to broadening rather than accelerating. … Not doing things they will cover later rules out most of algebra (though I might make rare exceptions such as converting recurring decimals to fractions). …
I’m interested in two things – developing a framework for the approach (ie a sense of the bigger picture and areas to go to – apart from ensuring the basics +-*/, decimals, fractions, % are fully covered and automatic) and also sources of good materials.
So, what do people think, and what do you primary teachers do? What are good resources to use? This previous post is somewhat relevant, and I have my own thoughts, but I’ll leave it to the readers to respond with their ideas and experiences.
More or Lesson
Frequent commenter Terry Mills has asked me to ask another question:
How many lessons each week do your secondary students have in mathematics, and how long is each lesson?
WitCH 141: Laws Unto Themselves
We’ve done part of this before but it came up again recently and it annoyed us all over again. The excerpts below are from Cambridge‘s coverage of the index laws, at Years 8, 9 and 10. It includes everything we could locate that indicates in any sense why the index laws for general indices are what they are.
Cambridge have known for at least a decade what we think about their index crap, and obviously they don’t care. But, as long as they keep reprinting this crap we’ll keep calling it out for the crap that it is. Continue reading “WitCH 141: Laws Unto Themselves”
The Exam, the Rocket and the Grateful Dead
After a couple of posts whacking teachers’ involvement in VCE exams, it seems only fair to tell a story about a university exam debacle.
Once upon a time, about eighty years ago, I was a PhD student at a pretty good American university. Let’s call it Stanford. As part of the scholarship, PhD students were required to assist with the undergraduate teaching, which was a plus. The teaching was not onerous or overly time consuming and, unsurprisingly, the Stanford undergraduates were excellent students. Even the humanities students, reluctantly completing their “math requirement” and typically weak in maths, were smart and had a good work ethic. Continue reading “The Exam, the Rocket and the Grateful Dead”
Foundation Stoned
It is not our intention, much less our desire, to be actively monitoring Foundation Mathematics. Whatever the real or imagined purposes for such a subject, it is of close to zero interest to us. We shall tend to avoid it as we do Further-General, but more so, preferring to stick to mathematics subjects. Sometimes, however, one does not get to choose.
Jay, a not-so-silent commenter, has bobbed up and, for whatever perverse reason, has decided to go through the inaugural Foundation Exam and report (Word, idiots) with a fine tooth comb. Forcing us to do the same. Jay owes us.
A Quick Note on Marty and the Media
I’ve pondered doing this post a few times, at various stages, but it felt like it would be grandstanding and so I left off. I’ll do it now.
I started this blog in 2017, after Burkard and I had ended our various popularising activities, and after I’d had enough of the MAV (and vice versa). Things in Australian maths education were, and are, an unmitigated mess, and the MAV and everyone didn’t want to know about it. The blog was an easy way to state easy truths, which no one else had a mind to say. There was no intention other than to say what I thought, with no sense that it would do any good other than to make me feel a little better. A couple years ago, that began to change. Continue reading “A Quick Note on Marty and the Media”