New Cur 25: Some Cultures Are More Equal Than Others
It’s a mathematics curriculum: one does not expect much history or many references to other cultures. Typically there are a few Roman numerals, a quick hello to Pythagoras and Archimedes, and that’s about it. More would be good, but it is not to be expected.
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Crayz Cats
For a while over the week-end our Mac keyboard was behaving very strangely: typing “y” would produce “z”, and vice versa. Eventually we realised that the Mac’s language had been changed to Hungarian. We have absolutely no idea how this might have occurred. Continue reading “Crayz Cats”
David de Carvalho, Annotated, Again
Two years ago, we annotated parts of a speech that ACARA CEO, David de Carvalho, gave at The Age Schools Summit. De Carvalho’s stage-setting for ACARA’s soon-to-be-released draft curriculum was nonsense throughout, and included a cunning reference to the “Joint Maths Statement” from “five of the leading maths and science organisations” supposedly supporting the then secret draft curriculum; it only emerged a year later that ACARA had prior knowledge of, and appears to have been intimately involved in the production of, this purportedly independent statement. Classy work from a classy guy. Continue reading “David de Carvalho, Annotated, Again”
Dahl Gets Roald
Yes, it’s Letters Week here at the maths blog. Along with libraries “decolonising” their collections, we had Penguin Books deciding that Roald Dahl’s stories required some nice-ing, with words such as “ugly” and “fat” being replaced with gentler ways of describing Dahl’s ugly and fat characters. Thank God we have such thoughtful and brave defenders of our literary traditions. Continue reading “Dahl Gets Roald”
A Frickin’ School Library Decides to Burn Some Frickin’ Books
Northcote High School Library decided to get rid of some books, which is not news: such libraries discard books all the time. Except, the method by which NHS Library went about it was news. A week ago, The Age‘s Adam Carey had a report, School library discards outdated and offensive books on colonisation: Carey’s report begins,
Dozens of 20th century non-fiction titles deemed historically inaccurate or offensive have been removed from the Northcote High School library as part of a push to decolonise the school’s book collection.
“decolonise”. Yep, again.
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New Cur 24: ATSI Elaborations and the Games People Play
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 priority as enacted in the draft mathematics curriculum. We were serious, but no matter. There is a new mathematics curriculum, with revised ATSI elaborations, and we move on.
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Witch 99: PseudoPseudoCode
And one more step into Exam 2. To be honest, we couldn’t give a stuff about this garbage topic, other than to note that introducing it into VCE is complete madness. But, clearly some people feel there are specifics to hammer. So, hammer away. (Hammerers may wish to refer to this or this or this or this (Word, idiots), all courtesy of VCAA.)
Witch 98: Contrapositive Definite
Having finished going through the Specialist Exam 1 sample questions, we started on Exam 2. We didn’t get far:
The Principal ATAR Stupidity
I am desperately trying to get back to hammering ACARA’s junk curriculum and VCAA’s junk VCE materials, but new crap keeps on coming. Here’s another one that must be done, and again it’ll just have to be quick. Continue reading “The Principal ATAR Stupidity”