Curios of the week #119

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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Winter has finally reached Ballarat. This week began with the King’s Birthday long weekend that saw the good folk of the city mostly curled up before the fire as the rain fell. I emerged at one point to make a beef wellington—beef fillets were on special offer at the local IGA—and when I told people about this at work, I received funny looks. Apparently, beef wellingtons are a factor in an ongoing murder trial. Who knew?

The rest of the week has been drier but cold and, at times, foggy. To my mind, this makes Ballarat look even more beautiful than usual.

This week’s Curios is the Substack-tastic special edition.

Follow-up post of the week

Andrew Old has now completed Part 2 of his Substack posts dismantling of the Education Policy Institute’s report into the impact of phonics and the phonics screening check in England. It is worth a read.

Twitter/X debate of the week

There has been an ongoing debate on Twitter/X about the ‘Science of Learning’—a tag I am somewhat ambivalent about. Strange assertions have been made and ludicrous positions taken. I have largely sat this one out although I will be writing about my take on the Science of Learning soon and why so many people seem to get it wrong.

However, I did have to laugh at the reaction to this tweet by Carl Hendrick who wrote a key blog post as his contribution to the debate:

It is not that the tweet went viral among the education community; it was the fact that some online trolls researched Hendrick, found out that he holds a PhD in education and suggested his tweet was therefore something of a self-own.

The cogs can grind slowly in the heads of online trolls.

Curriculum debate of the week

Debates are happening at a pace in recent times and that may reflect a turn towards Substack by key voices in education, as evidenced by this edition of Curios.