I Wrote a Blog Post

It is a good post, I think. It would probably annoy a couple powerful people, who have behaved poorly and could really use a decent slap. But I’ve talked about the post with some who are closer to the scene. They agree with the message and the force of the post, if not necessarily the Marty style. For strategic reasons, however, they believe it is better to not publish the post, at least not yet, even in less of a Marty style. I’m not convinced, but I’m not convinced enough otherwise, and they are better at the relevant games.

So, after three solid days of writing, four thousand words is just sitting there, perhaps forever. Which, even if the right move, is very annoying. So at least I’m gonna tell you: I wrote a blog post. Continue reading “I Wrote a Blog Post” →

Remembering The Fantasticks

My brother Jeff was a music guy. He was a philosopher of language by training, and a very good one, but music was his first and greatest love. Growing up, our house was not filled with records, because records were very expensive; every new acquisition was a carefully calculated purchase. But, subject to that constraint, we had a lot of records and it was an eclectic mix. Jeff listened to anything and everything, and I, younger and with no real sense of what these records were or what they were doing there, had a lot of music to explore. One of these records, which I listened to over and over, was the original cast recording of The Fantasticks.

Continue reading “Remembering The Fantasticks” →

RatS 28: Nate Silver – The Expert Class is Failing

Nate Silver, the famous politics-stats guy, gets a lot of flak for accurately predicting that bad stuff will happen. In general he seems bemused by this, is flippantly contemptuous of his critics and just gets on with accurately predicting more bad stuff. But Silver clearly gets frustrated, that his natural political allies can be so pigheaded and so incompetent and so censorious. The Biden-Harris-Democrats screw-up, gifting Trump the presidency, has made him more frustrated than usual. Continue reading “RatS 28: Nate Silver – The Expert Class is Failing” →

What Were the “Errors” on the 2024 VCE Mathematics Exams?

For the long-term health of VCE, the major bad news this year was the resignation of VCAA CEO, Kylie White. The major good news was that, after decades of awfulness and denial, the mathematics exams were significantly better. Of course the media was all over the bad news. There is seemingly not an education reporter in the state that gives a stuff about the good news. Continue reading “What Were the “Errors” on the 2024 VCE Mathematics Exams?” →

TIMSS, Australia and the Iraqi Army

UPDATE (21/01/25)

No big deal, but I just stumbled across an article in the online magazine Teacher, a joint article by Wernert and Teacher editor, Jo Earp. Written to accompany ACER’s release of Australia’s TIMSS results, the article is similar to Wernert’s Conversation piece but is longer and sillier. Why these people see it appropriate to be cheerleading rather than reporting, God only knows.

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The 2023 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study results came out last week, and it appears to have Rorschached people. The Australian cried doom and gloom, including CIS’s Glenn Fahey doing the right wing thing of suggesting that we might want to teach young kids some maths. The Age went with Victoria lagging behind other states before repackaging the report to a more Australian line. The Herald Sun had some STEM guy declare, to the surprise of no one, that what we need is more STEM subjects. The SMH and the ABC went with the persistent boy-girl gap, ABC radio following up with a mathematics professor declaring that what we need is more Eugenia Cheng. Yeah, maybe, although Eugenia would not be my top recommendation. Perhaps, rather, it is time to conclude that the years of such crusading hasn’t helped anyone, including the girls. Continue reading “TIMSS, Australia and the Iraqi Army” →

Changes at the AMT

Regular readers will know that I am a fan of the Australian Maths Trust while also being no fan of the Australian Maths Trust. The AMT, uniquely, does great stuff for Australian school mathematics, and has done so for fifty years. There is the Australian Mathematics Competition, of course, and there is plenty more. But for all this great work, the AMT, at least in my opinion, has also been corporatised, and weirded, beyond all health or common sense. AMT also now clearly caters much too much to the privileged private schools at the expense of the plebs. (It is not clear that AMT can do much about this last issue but it is also not clear that AMT has much cared about it.) As commenter ABC has noted, however, there have been changes at the AMT.

Continue reading “Changes at the AMT” →

The Joy of Gambling and the Thuggery of Murdoch

There’s been a fair bit of Murdoch bashing recently: last week, Media Watch gave the Murdochs a whack for their self-serving moral panicking over social media; earlier in the week, Crikey posted an excerpt from Robert Manne’s just-published memoir, on when The Australian launched a personal crusade against Manne, as does The Australian routinely against people who call out its moral bankruptcy;1 a couple days ago, various people started walloping Murdoch for their pseudo-news shilling for gas companies; and I’ve been giving the Herald Sun my own little whacks for their disgraceful reporting on the – thanks to Murdoch – ousted VCAA CEO Kylie White. Given that this pleasing Murdoch-bashing is in season, I may as well share the story of the time a Murdoch reporter thugged me. My experience does not remotely compare to White’s or Manne’s, or to that of many other Murdoch victims, but being a low level academic attacked by a major newspaper and a Federal senator is not trivial. I’ll state at the outset that I handled it badly. Continue reading “The Joy of Gambling and the Thuggery of Murdoch” →