One type of educational horror that we haven’t yet written about are SACs, those internal assignmenty-examinationy things that make every second week of Year 12 studies a living hell. It is a tricky topic since SACs are school-based, often teacher-specific, and our primary goal is to attack inept authority. In that regard, schools and beleaguered […]
The following WitCH is from VCE Mathematical Methods Exam 2, 2009. (Yeah, it’s a bit old, but the question was raised recently in a tutorial, so it’s obviously not too old.) It is a multiple choice question: The Examiners’ Report indicates that just over half of the students gave the correct answer of B. The […]
Eddie Woo is reportedly concerned about private tutoring. His warning comes courtesy of SMH‘s education editor, Jordan Baker, in an article entitled ‘Be very, very careful’: Experts raise warning on private tutoring. The article begins, Maths teachers including high-profile mathematician Eddie Woo have sounded an alarm on private tutoring, warning that bad tutors could be […]
OK, playtime is over. This one, like the still unresolved WitCH 8, will take some work. It comes from Cambridge’s Mathematical Methods 3 & 4 (2019). It is the introduction to “When is a function differentiable?”, the final section of the chapter “Differentiation”. Update (12/08/19) We wrote about this nonsense seven long years ago, and […]
The following exercise and, um, solution come from Cambridge’s Mathematical Methods 3 & 4 (2019): Update Reflecting on the comments below, it was a mistake to characterise this exercise as a PoSWW; the exercise had a point that we had missed. The point was to reinforce the Magrittesque lunacy inherent in Methods, and the exercise […]
We plan to have more posts on VCAA’s ridiculous curriculum review. Unfortunately. Now, however, we’ll take a semi-break with three related posts. The nonsensical nature of VCAA’s review stems largely from its cloaking of all discussion in a slavish devotion to “modernity”, from the self-fulfilling prediction of the inevitability of “technology”, and from the presumption […]
This WitCH (as is the accompanying PoSWW) is an exercise and solution from Cambridge’s Mathematical Methods Units 1 and 2, and is courtesy of the Evil Mathologer. (A reminder that WitCH 2, WitCH3, Witch 7 and WitCH 8 are still open for business.) Update As Number 8 and Potii pointed out, notation of the form AB is amtriguous, […]
This PoSWW (as is the accompanying WitCH) is from Cambridge’s Mathematical Methods Units 1 and 2. and is courtesy of the Evil Mathologer. (A reminder, we continue to post on Cambridge not because their texts are worse than others, but simply because their badness is what we get to see. We welcome all emails with any suggestions for […]
Our new WitCH, below, comes courtesy of Charlie the Enforcer. Once again, this WitCH is from the 2018 SCSA Mathematical Methods Exam (here and here): it’s the gift that keeps on giving. (And a reminder, WitCH 2 and WitCH 3 still require attention are still unresolved.) Question 11 and the solution in SCSA’s marking key are […]
This Proof of Stupidity Without Words comes courtesy of a smart Year 11 VCE student. It’s an exercise in the Jacaranda text Maths Quest 11 Mathematical Methods (2019). (Just to clarify, the stupidity obviously contains plenty of words; it’s the proof of stupidity that requires no words.)