We haven’t paid much attention to this, since there have been much smellier fish to fry. Still, it is worth some attention. In April, Alan Tudge launched a Review into Initial Teacher Education, and in June a Discussion Paper was released, with an invitation for submissions. Today (midnight?) is the cut-off for submissions.* We wrote […]
Tony Guttmann, AKA Mr. Very Big, is a member of or is associated with just about every mathematician organisation in Australia, excepting the Geelong Primary School Mathletics Squad.* Tony has signed the open letter and, much more importantly, has been working hard within the various organisations, arguing against the draft mathematics curriculum. He has been […]
We’ll take a day off from bashing the draft curriculum, in order to bash the draft curriculum. This one’s not a Crash post, but it gets to the disfigured heart of the draft. Yesterday, a good friend and colleague, let’s call him Mr. Big, threw a book at us. By Alexandre Borovik and Tony Gardiner, […]
Honestly, it wasn’t our intention to write three hundred posts on ACARA and their appalling draft mathematics curriculum. But, we did. Given that we did, it seems worthwhile having a pinned metapost, so that anybody who wants to can find their way through the jungle. (There’s probably a better way to do this, with a […]
It was a dark and stormy curriculum; the jargon fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by violent gusts of puffery which swept up the streets (for it is in Australia that our scene lies), rattling along the schooltops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flames of thought that struggled against the darkness. […]
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 […]
This post is on ACARA’s comparative study of the Australian and Singaporean curricula. It will be, thank God, our last post on the literature supporting ACARA’s curriculum review; previous posts are here, here, here and here. As we noted, ACARA’s Key Findings document somehow concluded that the Australian Curriculum was broadly similar, in style and […]
A bit over a month ago, Alan Tudge, gave a major policy speech, Being our best: Returning Australia to the top group of education nations. Tudge’s speech, which we annotated here, was not all bad, a weird mix of goods and stupids and non sequiturs; we graded the speech a C+. The most encouraging part of […]
A few weeks ago we wrote about ACARA‘s review of the Australian Curriculum. The mathematics component of ACARA’s review appears to be at least partially in the hands of some loose cannons – the Center for Curriculum Redesign – which ACARA seems now to regret having hired. CCR is still on our to-whack list, but ACARA’s […]
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 […]