Last week we wrote about the mushy Australian puff piece on PISA clown, Andreas Schleicher. Readers may recall that Schleicher was critical of “Australia’s shallow Curriculum”. Schleicher says nothing of substance, simply advocating, ad nauseam, “teaching fewer things at greater depth”. The Australian piece also briefly quoted Ben Jensen and Mailie Ross, from some consultancy group […]
We still haven’t gotten to ACARA’s sparkly new curriculum. We do have David de Carvalho, however, to tell us all about its wonderfulness, and the wonderfulness of ACARA’s processes. A couple weeks ago, De Carvalho was interviewed by Geraldine Doogue on Radio National’s Saturday Extra. Of course, Doogue asked De Carvalho all the tough questions. […]
Happy April Fools’ Day everyone. Guess which gang of fools is gonna get fooled, and guess which gang of fools is gonna do the fooling. There’s not a whole lot of point to this any more, but it’s niggling. So we’ll post again on ACARA‘s thoughtful and classy CEO, David de Carvalho.
Recently, we decided to look a little at the writings of ACARA’s CEO, David de Carvalho. There’s not a lot to see. De Carvalho’s writings exhibit the calm smugness typical of a Catholic intellectual lightweight, and without any proper consideration of how the ideas expounded might play out in practice. There is some discussion of […]
One of the notable aspects of the Curriculum farce has been ACARA’s silence in the face of contempt. There has been no serious attempt, by ACARA or anyone, to publicly rebut the many pointed and strong criticisms of their draft curriculum. Evidently, ACARA has seen no need to pretend that “public consultation” has any meaningful […]
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 […]
The Year 6 Number stream of the new mathematics Curriculum contains a notable content descriptor: multiply and divide decimals by multiples of powers of 10 without a calculator, applying knowledge of place value and proficiency with multiplication facts; using estimation and rounding to check the reasonableness of answers (AC9M6N06) Yep, we’re just like Singapore.
Is it significant that Keith Devlin’s twitter handle has “prof” in it, and that the name of Devlin’s website has “prof” in it? Maybe not, but at the moment it feels significant. Greg “Non-Prof” Ashman could reasonably regard it as significant. Last week we wrote a bit about Slow Jo Boaler, her threat to call […]
There are bigger, stupider fish to fry, but this also needs to be done, and it’s now or never. Earlier this week, David de Carvalho, the CEO of ACARA, gave a speech at The Age Schools Summit. flagging the Daft Australian Mathematics Curriculum (the spelling is correct). Our most recent WitCH is based on an […]
In this column, ACARA will be playing the role of the Good Guy. Now that we have your attention, we’ll confess that we were exaggerating. ACARA is, of course, always the Bad Guy. But this column also contains a Worse Guy, a bunch of grifters called Center for Curriculum Redesign. ACARA appears to be fighting […]