Last month we posted a PoSWW on a 2022 Queensland MCQ exam question, for which the accompanying exam report indicated the wrong answer. It is depressingly unclear why QCAA had not been previously alerted to the error, but a couple weeks after our PoSWW appeared, QCAA updated their exam report: in the amended report QCAA indicates the correct answer (p 27), and they also indicate in a footnote that the correction had been made.
For QCAA to have done this was professional and classy. It was also important. The uncorrected report invited, effectively demanded, a mathematical misconception (on inflection points); by correcting the report, QCAA ensured that their exam-report could no longer be relied upon as an authority for this misconception.
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. Continue reading “Acknowledging and Apologising For an Error”→
It is possible that the lessons to be had from burlesque for the teaching of mathematics have not been so fully appreciated. To help rectify this, here is a number from the musical Gypsy.
And the question: when teaching mathematics, do you gotta get a gimmick? Do gimmicks help? Or, do they simply give the illusion of helping?
I’m honestly not sure. I’m not even sure if my own teaching is gimmicky (although at times it has been described as burlesque).
This one comes courtesy of Mystery Fred. The diagram above is for a Circle Gaps Brainteaser, and appeared online last week as part of Double Helix, CSIRO‘s science magazine for kids. The text for the brainteaser (as if it matters) is as follows:
What is the area of the orange star in the centre? The blue circles each have an area of 3 square centimetres, and the big square has sides that are 4 centimetres long.
A comment on the post makes it clear that the choices of sidelength and area were purposefully made.
Barry Humphries was funny. At times, screamingly so. Dame Edna and Sir Les are two great comedy creations. They are gone, and their creator, who was also responsible for much more than Edna and Les, deserves to be honoured, to be bade farewell in a proper manner. Which is not going smoothly.
It has been much reported that Humphries’ last laugh came at the expense of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Humphries displayed impeccable timing, arranging to die on the eve of the final day of this year’s MICF. That left the MICF organisers with two highly unappealing options: they could pay proper tribute to Humphries, and thus admit at least implicitly that they screwed up in 2019 when they renamed the Festival’s “Barry” award; or, they could barrel on, pretending their past treatment of Humphries was good and proper. So far, they’ve done a bit of one and a lot of the other.
In the background of all this is Hannah Gadsby, whose attack of Humphries, after having won the 2017 Barry, gave impetus to Humphries’ eventual cancelling. Of course Gadsby was perfectly entitled to say whatever she wanted about Humphries, and it is somewhat unfair that Gadbsy has been dragged into the current mess; the blame for Humphries’ cancelling lies squarely at the feet of the MICF. But there is one aspect that keeps Gadsby centre stage: Hannah Gadsby is not funny.
Beyond not funny. As Humphries could be screamingly funny, Gadsby is screamingly unfunny: she is preachy, pandering and obvious, utterly lacking in nuance and comic timing. To be clear, Gadsby seeks to extend humour or to reject humour, or something; she does not always try to be funny. But often enough she tries to be funny, and she never is. She may be other things. She may be a valuable performer. But Dave Chappelle was right: Hannah Gadsby is not funny.
This matters. Gadsby won the top award of one of the most prestigious comedy festivals, the purpose of which, one would presume, is to provide a platform and an audience for funny people. But Gadsby is not even in the ballpark of funny. And nothing can be understood about the Humphries debacle without understanding the disconnect between true comedy and the ICMF organisers, who are much more concerned to honour Worthy comedians than funny comedians.
The difficulty of critiquing VCAA mathematics exams is capturing the variety and the frequency and the depth of the flaws, and then summing the overall effect, the fundamentally impoverished approach to mathematics and its testing. Documenting straight out errors is not overly difficult, and even non sequitur questions are manageable: the error or weirdness typically speaks for itself. Capturing the ubiquitous awfulness of the writing, and the intrinsic meaninglessness of many of the questions, however, is harder. Continue reading “VCAA’s Greater Literary Offenses”→
