Last year, after the appearance of ACARA’s appalling draft curriculum, we ran a competition: find the best Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elaboration. No one took our competition seriously. This was perhaps unsurprising, since most readers of this blog would have been sceptical already, and then our introduction to the competition hammered the ATSI cross-curriculum […]
Sorry, no energy for a joke title. The reports are here (Word, idiots): Specialist Exam 1 report (and exam) Specialist Exam 2 report (and exam) Methods Exam 1 report (and exam) Methods Exam 2 Report (and exam) For background, readers may wish to go to the following blog posts: Specialist Error List (and see here, […]
INTRODUCTION The word “equivalent” is one of the most useful in mathematics and one of the most abused in mathematics education. The implication is that this one is not all ACARA’s fault. Nonetheless, the fact that it was predictable that ACARA would make a mess of it doesn’t alter the fact that ACARA made a […]
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.
This is late, and it isn’t very Christmasy. But it came up as part of another project, and it’s been bugging us, so Bah Humbug. The following is a question from 2022 Mathematical Methods Exam 1. It’s been discussed some on this post, including a concerning rumour (edited 24/12/22), and we also hammered some of […]
One of the all-time great literary wallops, by one of the all-time great writers, is Mark Twain’s Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses: Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in “Deerslayer,” and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It […]
This post will be about the new Curriculum, of course, but first a bit about the draft curriculum that preceded it. In August last year, there was a Zoom meeting between representatives of ACARA and AMSI (and of member organisations) to discuss the draft mathematics curriculum, a delayed response to AMSI’s submission calling for a halt […]
The following is a selection of elaborations, and parent content descriptors, with a common theme.
This is the sum total of the approved curriculum‘s coverage of logarithms:
This one is different. It is ostensibly a year-by-year selection of the worst statistics lines chosen from the Complete Awfullest Works. Unlike for Number and Algebra and Measurement and Space, however, this is effectively impossible. Nothing similar, or anything, properly works for Statistics. Even the lines chosen for the Complete Awfullest Works were chosen largely […]