Tom has a new post on his Teaching Mathematics blog: Introducing Negative Numbers. Amongst other things, Tom suggests that Europeans eventually accepted this mathematical magic because of the genius and/or stubbornness of accountants. Please support Tom’s blog and check it out.
Continue reading “Tom’s Latest Post: Introducing Negative Numbers”
Tom has a new post on his Teaching Mathematics blog, on Exploratory Data Analysis. Please check it out, and support Tom while he gets going. Continue reading “Tom’s New Post: Exploratory Data Analysis”
When attacking ACARA’s draft mathematics curriculum, we noted the frequency with which certain words and phrases appeared. Below is the revised count for some of these, for the new curriculum. Not that ACARA is mandating how teachers should teach, or anything like that. It’s obviously the furthest thing from ACARA’s innocent little mind.
It is no surprise that the Statistics strand of the new mathematics curriculum is thin. Still, it may be a surprise how thin it is.
The following, as near as we can tell, is the complete list of contents and elaborations that refer to “mean” or “median” or similar, and thus might (and still might not) require at least some mental or written computation. In other words, these are the only items we could find that seem to not simply be a matter of tabulating or “exploring” or “investigating” or “analysing”, the only items that consist of anything more than sitting around and chatting about stuff.
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 at random.
The Statistics stream is so bad, so vague and thin and aimless and repetitive, the only proper way to appreciate the badness is to read the entire thing. There is likely just one person in Australia stubborn enough to do that: Merchant-Ivory has its Joe Queenan, and ACARA has its Marty. You’re welcome.
Continue reading “The Awfullest Australian Curriculum Statistics Lines”
This post, on confidence intervals, is by frequent commenter, John Friend. It is the second of our guest posts; the first, by Anthony Harradine, is here. A version of John’s post is also available as a PDF, here. Continue reading “GitS 2 : John Friend – A Lack of Confidence”
VTAC, the Victorian body responsible for figuring out ATARs and the like, is, of course, a professional and widely respected organisation. VTAC is staffed by very well-qualified boffiny stats types, just quietly doing their boffiny stats thing, and they don’t make mistakes. Well, except for this. And this. And really, really this.
Anyway, a few months ago the Evil Mathologre alerted us to some new(ly discovered) weirdness courtesy of the always-perfect VTAC. Or, maybe it’s courtesy of ACTAC, which is the national umbrella group encompassing all of the State-TACs. It’s difficult to tell, since, much like QANTAS, it seems that ACTAC cannot be contacted, appearing to exist only as an abstract concept. Anyway anyway, to the weirdness. Continue reading “VTAC Converts an Own Goal”
It’s Greg Ashman‘s fault. It’s always Greg Ashman’s fault.
A couple days ago Ashman had an excellent post, on Jo Boaler and her California Dreamin’ curriculum. That draft curriculum has been, let’s say, hammered, particularly by mathematicians. Not that such criticism slows Boaler:
“We understand education, and they have no experience studying education. Mathematicians sit on high and say this is what is happening in schools.” Continue reading “PoSWW 23: Jo Boaler is Challenged”
By overwhelming demand,* we have decided, much belatedly, to put up a post for discussion of the 2021 Further Mathematics exams. We have no particular plans to update this post, although we will do so if anything of interest arises. We’ll just note the two excerpts below, from Exam 2, the first of which is discussed here, at 5:30. Thanks to Simon and SRK to bringing these to our attention.**
Here is one more from the 2019 Specialist Exam 2, once again courtesy of student PURJ (who is vetting the exams much better than the exam vetters). It consists of the last four parts of Q6, the final question on the exam, concerning a machine that packages noodles. The answers from the examination report appear below the questions.