Curios of the week #31

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

---

Last weekend was Grand Final weekend in Australia. On Saturday, Collingwood played Brisbane for the Australian Football League (AFL) title and on Sunday, Penrith fought it out with Brisbane for the National Rugby League (NRL) championship. Poor old Brisbane lost out in both codes.

Of the two, it is the AFL that Victorians are most interested in. I was at the Llanberris* Athletics Reserve, timing laps for my daughter as she practiced her three-kilometre run. It wasn’t until I left and noticed you could shoot a gun up pretty much any of the streets we were driving along without hitting anyone, that I realised the Grand Final had started. I am a disappointing AFL fan, to be honest — I did not grow up with it in the way most Victorians did — but I did watch the final two quarters.

Today’s Curios include general affrontery, mathematics anxiety, the right side of history and much more.

Substack of the week

I should first point out that I posted a couple of Substacks this week, one on looking in books and the other on full inclusion. I guess you have seen those already. However, other Substacks are available, including the splendid No More Marking by Daisy Christodoulou.

Recently, a UK government minister has proposed banning smart phones in school, a measure that is both sensible and long overdue. We banned them at my school in 2019 and have not looked back. Since then, most Australian states have either banned them or are in the process of doing so.

And yet, in the UK, the suggestion is weirdly controversial. Christodoulou has woven this controversy into an essay about technology, the future and being on ‘the right side of history’. I recommend reading it:

Mobile phones and the right side of history

Phone bans are on the right side of history now, but:

“Maybe in the next ten years we will find ways to mitigate or live with their worst effects. Maybe things that we think are bad now about mobiles will come to be normalised. For example, one of the things I dislike about mobiles is the way that spending a lot of time on them leads people to a state of semi-permanent anxious distraction. It feels to me that this an objectively bad thing. But maybe it isn’t. Maybe future generations will conclude that actually that’s preferable to the minor low-level boredom of a world where you aren’t glued to your mobile all the time.”