Curios of the week #36

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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This week started at Lakeside stadium in Melbourne where I took my eldest daughter to compete in the Victorian All Schools Track & Field Championships. She ran in the 3 km race and did a great job, finishing with a bronze medal and a proud father. Her running is nothing to do with me. I was never an athlete, although I did play a little Rugy Union for a while as a teenager. I seem to remember that was mostly about knocking people over.

I took my marking with me to Lakeside — I teach a Year 10 Specialist Mathematics elective and they completed their first semester exam last Friday. Their second exam was on Wednesday afternoon, the day of the great Optus outage when one of Australia’s biggest mobile phone and broadband service providers didn’t show up for work and the network went down across the whole country.

This week’s Curios include a facepalm, a racist book, two of the finest educational institutions in the world and much more.

Learning potential of the week

Amongst other things, I am a part-time professor at Academica University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam. It is, self-evidently, one of the best universities in the world and has a dazzling array of professors. My colleague, Piet van der Ploeg, is Dean of the School of Education & Society. He has written an article about the concept of learning potential which I was able to read via a Chrome translation.

Van der Ploeg’s argument is similar to one often made by my principal at Clarendon, David Shepherd. Everyone is in favour of students reaching their potential. These are warm words that are easy to say. No wonder the Education Inspectorate in The Netherlands has decided they want schools to, “maximize the learning potential of every student.”

But what does this mean? Van der Ploeg points to a number of issues:

“The concept of learning potential has a sympathetic connotation. Nevertheless, it provides little guidance. This is due to the relationship between learning potential and ideal conditions. Learning potential is what a person can learn under ideal conditions, as opposed to what he can actually learn. The learning potential of the vast majority of children is then infinite, because under ideal conditions the vast majority of children can learn almost anything . Imagine: endless instruction, practice, support, attention, effort, feedback; and all of this of the highest quality, with the very best materials and resources; in optimal learning environments. This makes learning potential as a concept extremely elastic.” [Taken from the Chrome translation]

When educational institutions pledge themselves towards high-minded but vague and unmeasurable goals, it is quite possible that the more prosaic and achievable aims — such as teaching every child how to read — are forgotten.

Parliamentary video of the week

If it were needed, further evidence that Academica University of Applied Sciences is one of the best universities in the world can be found in the fact that Tom Bennett OBE is also a professor there. Bennett founded researchED, a global grassroots education movement, in 2013, and since around 2015, he has been advising the UK government on behaviour management in schools.