Curios of the week #108

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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On Sunday, I had a little work to do and so I popped into the office. If you’ve never visited our Sturt Street campus, it’s worth knowing it is a mix of modern buildings and repurposed heritage houses. Sunday was a beautifully sunny Ballarat day and the campus was still. Crows own the place at the weekend and appeared inconvenienced as they hopped and flew out of my way.

This week, we had a visitor from England tour the school and we planned our strategy for another interesting visitor in May. Watch this space. I have also been teaching some Year 9 chemistry and enjoying that—although I’m not sure they are enjoying my jokes.

This week’s Curios include absurdities, abolitionists, an ‘anti-woke’ backlash and much more.

Standardised assessment of the week

The still relatively new government in New Zealand has been making some welcome changes to education policy. Although I have some reservations about the ‘Teaching the Basics Brilliantly’ approach and dislike its name, the policy marks a break from the previous malaise.

First, those reservations—I welcome the inclusion of science in a primary school strategy but I am concerned about the absence of history. English, maths, science and history represent the four great academic ways of knowing in the school curriculum. And this resonates with my concern about the name. Of course, what advocates of the ‘basics’ are often reacting against is verbose fluff about non-teachable generic skills such as critical thinking, or calls for schools to solve whatever social problem is currently prominent in the news. However, a curriculum should be rich and broad, and a focus on ‘basics’ can quickly turn into just maths and content-agnostic literacy. That’s what I worry about.

So, I have some sympathy with Jade Wrathall and Marta Estellés when, in their recent piece for The Conversation, they worry that a new set of standardised tests might narrow the New Zealand curriculum. However, that is about the limit of our agreement.

Take, for example, this classic piece of educationally progressivist rhetoric:

“Teachers may also be inclined to “teach to the test” and employ rote learning strategies, where children are encouraged to memorise the correct answers. While this may result in high test scores, it is questionable whether deeper learning will occur.”

Yes, teaching to the test can be an issue, particularly when the only strategy a teacher has is to keep practicing past papers. However, the idea that any well designed standardised test is something we can teach children to memorise all the correct answers to is absurd. The number of possible maths questions is effectively infinite and reading comprehension questions will depend on the selected text.

Few people challenge such obviously wrong assertions in education because standardised testing is a bogeyman and any criticism of it must be right.

Wrathall and Estellés also note that the last iteration of standardised testing in New Zealand did not cause improvements in performance. This is a trivial point. A tape measure will not make a long-jumper go further. What it will do is tell them whether their efforts to jump further are working. At least through standardised testing we know whatever New Zealand was doing prior to 2017 wasn’t working.

Would it be better if we did not know? Well, maybe it would if you are an educationalist with bad ideas to disseminate.

Learning styles of the week

Learning styles still live:

What would it actually take to kill them off?

Manosphere of the week

I have not seen the Netflix drama, Adolescence, but I am impressed by its capacity to generate opinion pieces and provide evidence for whatever views the author already holds.