On July 8, AMSI released its submission to ACARA, in which AMSI called for a halt of the mathematics curriculum review. On July 20, ACARA contacted AMSI, requesting a “consultation session” with AMSI, to enable ACARA “to address [AMSI’s] concerns”. That meeting was held on August 17. Prior to the meeting, ACARA forwarded to AMSI […]
The Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute has finalised and released its submission for ACARA’s consultation on their draft mathematics curriculum. For eccentric reasons, we haven’t properly read AMSI’s submission. (Seriously.) We understand that it is a good and strong statement. The second and key paragraph is In early April, AMSI, together with some of its key […]
Sigh. So much crap … This one is even more brazen than Chico. It’s more like Who are you gonna believe, me, or your own eyes and me from two minutes ago? Rebecca Urban, The Australian‘s education reporter, is notable for her poor stenography skills. Urban has this peculiar habit of not simply buying […]
Last week, AMSI released yet another paper on the issue of school mathematics being taught by “out of discipline” teachers. It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that we have many issues with AMSI’s paper. Here, we’ll focus on just one aspect. The Sydney Morning Herald’s report on AMSI’s paper begins: […]
The Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute has just released its Report on Australian Year 12 students’ participation in mathematics from 2008 to 2017. The Report indicates, of course, that the percentage of girls doing a “higher level” maths subject is lower than the percentage of boys. (One headline trumpets that “Less girls are studying maths than […]
I have come to realise the need to acknowledge a major error on this blog. Errors will occur, of course, but when they occur it is important to admit them and to own them, to make amends to the extent that is possible.
One of the shiny new expressions of mathematics education is algorithmic thinking or, if one prefers, computational thinking. It is 10% shrewd rebranding and 90% poisonous snake oil. The new Australian Curriculum is full of it.
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 […]
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.
One of the black humour aspects of ACARA’s promotion of its new curriculum, and the draft that preceded it, was ACARA declaring ad nauseum that the curriculum had been “refined” and “decluttered”. ACARA’s claim was then repeated ad more nauseum by education reporters stenographers.