Curios of the week #111

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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The week started in the English Midlands where I was visiting my parents. While at my mother’s house in Stourbridge, I took a walk into the old town. It seemed a little run down, although I could not quite comprehend the number of barber shops it now has. On my way back, I took a slight detour. I don’t know why. As I turned a corner, I noticed a street sign I had never noticed before—Ballarat Walk. Why was this street named after the Australian town I now live in?

I then flew back to Australia on the big bird from Heathrow to celebrate Easter and be ready for the new school term to begin.

This week’s Curios include an ill portent, a spray and pray, study skills and much more.

Report of the week

This week, The Grattan Institute released its report on the teaching of primary mathematics in Australia. Surveying teachers, they found many are not confident to teach maths at Year 6. In addition:

“Maths has been deprioritised in Australia for decades. Governments have also been too slow to rule out faddish but unproven maths teaching methods. To turn rhetoric into reality, governments need to take seriously the evidence-base on how humans, including children, learn maths most effectively.”

This was picked up in the press, with various articles such as in The Nightly and The Age. The report’s authors have five key recommendations to address this, including a target for standardised tests, ‘clear guidance on how to teach maths well’ and ‘quality-assured curriculum materials’. Any attempt to implement such a plan will no doubt be met with much mischief about what good maths teaching and high quality curriculum look like.

The Grattan Institute visited us at Clarendon when researching their report and we are mentioned a number of times, including on the issue of curriculum:

“The quality of the curriculum materials is key. Ballarat Clarendon College’s shared materials were refined over several years, and now support highly focused and intentional teaching. A teacher who recently joined the school told us that as a result of the shared, high-quality materials, ‘I think we teach four to five times more content every hour here than at other schools’.”

It is underappreciated that the efficiency of explicit teaching means we can teach students a whole lot more in the same amount of time.

In pleasingly patriotic fashion, Victorian education minister Ben Carroll is on board with The Grattan Institute’s plan:

This is a good sign and I am hopeful it means the Victorian government will no longer be funding trips by Professor Jo Boaler to provide training to maths teachers here.

Adolescence-related article of the week

I still haven’t seen Adolescence—please don’t inform on me—but I did watch a silly movie on the plane about a serial killer who is trapped with a potential victim in a car in a snowstorm before some kind of evil spirit hauls him away. I am now wondering what lessons we can learn from that.