Curios of the week #104

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

---

Two years of Curios! Thank you for still following.

In the end, the Head of the Lake regatta did not take place on Sunday as planned. It was too windy. Instead, we reconvened on Tuesday in glorious sunshine. Clarendon boys won the big boys’ race and our girls did an excellent job in their big race. I was proud of the way our students showed their support for their peers.

We will soon be moving into Autumn here and the European trees will be shedding their leaves, with the oak trees littering the streets near me with acorns. One of the aspects I love about Ballarat is that there is a changing of the seasons just like I grew up with in England.

This week’s Curios include play, axed teacher training, employment skills and much more.

Nuance of the week

If you don’t have much to say, then one strategy is to criticise what other people say. If you don’t want pushback on your criticism, you can avoid it by not naming the people you are criticising. Add in lots of caveats so as not to make a point that can potentially be refuted and this is essentially Christian Bokhove’s oeuvre—one that he has been plugging away at with modest success for years on social media and in blog posts. To a segment of those who instinctively dislike what has become known as the ‘science of learning’, his perennial appeals to nuance are a soothing balm.

A new piece by Bokhove for the TES exemplifies the approach. Persons unknown are guilty of simplistic takes on the data from international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS:

“Take the topic of differences in classroom practices between the East and West. I have read many times that East Asian countries are all about practice and procedures, and that the teaching methods there are mainly teacher-led. This is not completely without grounds, but we need to unpick it to really understand what is going on.”

Note the caveat: ‘This is not completely without grounds’. Indeed.

Bokhove may have read such claims ‘many times’ but he neglects to provide any links so we can read these sources for ourselves. Is that because he does not want the original authors to challenge his take? Is it because the sources don’t exist? Is it because the sources he is thinking of don’t say exactly what he claims? We will never know.

Bokhove adds:

“It may surprise people that in East Asia many curricula do not really see a contradiction in heavily debated binaries in the West.”

Again, who are these surprised people? Strangely enough, I don’t disagree with this point, having written essentially the same thing myself in the past. For instance, a paper by Carol Bryan and colleagues that I have referenced many times over my years of blogging compares the attitudes of teachers in East Asia with those in the anglosphere. While American maths teachers insist that understanding must come before procedural knowledge, East Asian teachers are more relaxed about whether understanding arrives before or after. It is not that teachers from different countries are at opposite ends of the argument. Instead, a topic on which progressivist teachers in the U.S. feel they must make an ideological stand is just not something East Asian teachers care much about. This is probably because they lack the historical baggage of the debate in the West.

Bokhove’s is an interesting style of commentary. To quote Wolfgang Pauli, “es ist nicht einmal falsch.”

Riposte of the week

Sometimes, a good argument advances everyone’s understanding.