ACARA is why we can’t have nice things. Yesterday I decided to be a good guy for a change, and went about writing up Alfred Lodge’s derivation of the volume of a cone. While doing so, however, I thought to take a quick peek at how cones are covered in the new mathematics F-10 curriculum. […]
A few months ago, I made a submission to the Inquiry by the Productivity Commission into the National School Reform Agreement. The Commission has just released its Interim Report, and has invited further submissions. I won’t be bothering.
Tony Guttmann is a Very Big Shot. Tony is Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne and he can claim a dozen or so honorary letters: AM, FAA and so on. Tony was a valiant warrior during Curriculum War II, and he was The Hero of Curriculum War I, which was fought out in the […]
The MAV have started the engines for their 2022 Annual Conference. The organisers have already lined up an impressive list of speakers and, as always, the MAV have put out the call for anyone and everyone to present, at a cost of only $500 or so for the two-day extravaganza. Of course, if planning to […]
An unexpected benefit of writing this blog has been that, although now persona non grata with polite academic-journalistic society, I’ve made a number of new, interesting and valuable contacts with impolite society.* One such contact is Shelley, a kindred and kindredly nutty spirit. Shelley and I have chatted and emailed over the last year and, […]
Oh, Canada. We’re very late to this one and it is way outside our territory, but it feels necessary to post something. In December the Ontario Superior Court, in a 3-0 decision, ruled that requiring prospective teachers to pass Ontario’s Mathematics Proficiency Test (MPT) violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The reason? According […]
I briefly mentioned Mike Deakin in this post, and I talked about him (too) briefly in Mathematics in Hell (at 6:40). I’ll be having reason to refer to Mike in a future post. As background, the following is an Age article Burkard and I wrote about Mike Deakin in 2014, one of our final Maths […]
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 […]
Does anybody ever properly read Terms of Reference? Probably not, and in the case of ACARA’s Terms of Reference for their curriculum review, this was a fatal error. The Education Minsters who approved ACARA’s ToR screwed up. Royally. Below, we work through the ACARA’s Terms of Reference, section by section, highlighting critical aspects to the […]
Jen Deyzel is a retired primary school teacher, a “septuagenarian” (now octogenarian) with decades of experience. She came up in conversation with a parent, whose children are tutored by Jen. In 2017, Jen wrote an essay on the decline of Australia’s educational standards. Jen has kindly permitted us to reproduce her essay, below (and in PDF […]