Curios of the week #13

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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Last week, I mentioned the weather here in Ballarat. As if confirmation were needed, this week saw the news that Australia has experienced what, by some measures, has been its coldest May on record. As ever, this was reported with plenty of caveats noting that this is not evidence against global warming. I am pretty convinced by the evidence for global warming, but it would be good to be able to report these things straight without being constantly hammered with grand narratives.

I have grown concerned about this tendency, alongside a related ‘rightsideism’ entering Australian politics. What do I mean by that? Jess Singal wrote an important 2019 essay about what he described as the difference between ‘right-side norms’ and ‘accuracy norms’ that I keep returning to. For Singal, people with right-side norms are primarily concerned with being on what they perceive to be the right, good and virtuous side of a controversy, with less interest in the factual basis of the claims being made on either side. In contrast, those with accuracy norms are very much concerned with the factual basis of the claims being made. A person with accuracy norms will disagree with a false claim ventured in the service of a good cause.

Rightsideism is the increasing tendency to evaluate political arguments using right-side norms. It is the intelligentsia telling people that if they are good people, they will believe, support or vote for X, and it is usually followed by the people rejecting this argument. It’s part of the reason the world got Brexit and Trump.

I don’t want rightsideism here in Australia, thank you very much. Perhaps it’s too late. I hope not.

This week’s curios include some AI nonsense, teachers and their holidays, some truly welcome news of educational success, a disappointing experiment and much more.

Non-thinking behaviours of the week

Our old friend Peter Liljedahl has popped up to pen an Australian article for The Conversation alongside Professor Tracey Muir. It’s the usual nonsense about standing up and working on whiteboards being an educational panacea and it proceeds via a bait-and-switch. Muir and Liljedahl comment on Australia’s poor performance in PISA maths before going on to propose a teaching method for which, as far as I am aware, there is no evidence that its adoption would lead to improvements in assessments such as PISA.

It also includes an exquisite piece of rhetorical wordplay that has been present before in Liljedahl’s writing but is made even more transparent.

Liljedahl has a list of what he calls, ‘non-thinking behaviours’ and regurgitates a bunch of stats drawn from Liljedahl’s research about how frequent these behaviours are observed in Canadian maths lessons. The first three seem aptly named but squeezed in at the end is ‘mimicking’:

“mimicking: this includes attempts to complete a task and can often involve completing it. It involves referring to others or previous examples.”

Tell me exactly how students successfully complete a mathematical task without thinking?