Curios of the week #55

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Today is researchED Ballarat and I hope to see some of you there. Make yourself known to me if you are.

This week, I was in Sydney for an excellent little boutique conference on student behaviour and classroom management run by a group called The Hatchery that I have not encountered before. I presented on a panel and, to be honest, I don’t think they really got their value out of me. It was about early career teachers and the questions were all directed at what I do in my school, whereas my comments were more about the wider issues.

Nevertheless, this gave me the opportunity to be there and hear the other speakers. I missed Tom Bennett because I was still on the way from the airport, but I caught Cate Whiting of the Australian Education Research Organisation talking about their extensive classroom management guides, Tim McDonald of the YMCA Western Australia who will be at researchED Ballarat on Saturday and two force of nature principals — Noel Dixon of Granville Boys High School in Western Sydney and Lisa Holt of Rosebud Secondary College out on the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne. Both had transformed their schools for the better by — as every good principal knows — getting the behaviour right first.

This week’ Curios include an attack, a sociopath, some errors, a weird unpublished paper and much more.

Sociopath of the week

An odd little story kept appearing in my Apple news feed so I eventually decided to read it. The story is the perspective of a person who identifies as a sociopath and work as a therapist. It is seemingly full of insights into how a sociopath may see the world:

“Just because I don’t care about someone else’s pain, so to speak, doesn’t mean I want to cause more of it. I enjoy living in this society. I understand that there are rules. I choose to follow those rules because I ­understand the benefits of this world, this house where I get to live, this relationship I get to have. That is ­different from people who follow the rules because they have to, they should, they want to be a good person. None of those apply to me. I want to live in a world where things function properly. If I create messes, my life will become messy.”

I don’t know exactly how well this journalistic take reflects the research evidence behind sociopathy. However, it does make me reflect on a fact I have noted before that makes me uncomfortable.

In schools, our default assumption is that students possess empathy that we can activate through a process of educating them about the impacts of their actions. However, there will be a subset who have sociopathic or other personality disorder traits. Do we have a plan for these students?

Complaint of the week

Susannah Luthi in The Washington Free Beacon is reporting that an anonymous group of ‘math-and-science focused professionals’ has lodged a complaint with Stanford University about Jo Boaler. The complaint alleges that Boaler has ‘engaged in a reckless disregard for accuracy through citation misrepresentation’ and asks Stanford to investigate. It refers to one of my blogs posts as evidence.

I was approached by Luthi for a comment on the citation trail for Boaler’s claim of a link between timed tests and maths anxiety — a claim which forms part of the complaint. My comment did not make it into the online article but this is what I wrote:

“I doubt whether there is any conscious effort at deception going on. Boaler is as much a campaigner as she is an academic and I suspect that in her eagerness to make her case, she has sometimes made mistakes. The Engle 2002 reference is clearly unrelated to timed tests in any way and so I cannot help thinking this is the kind of citation tracking error it is very easy to make when composing papers. It's the sort of issue that gets picked up by good peer reviewers, although I am unsure whether the original article was peer reviewed. What I find mysterious is that Boaler must be aware of this particular error by now and yet she has not attempted to fix it by providing the correct reference. Given the paper is quite old, she may have now forgotten what it was.”

I am not a fan of anonymous complaints, particularly when the subject of the complaint is made public. However, if this complaint results in some corrections to the record then it may be helpful.

Think tank report of the week

Image via AI

In the field of education, where universities are often not particularly interested in practical solutions to realistic policy options, think tanks play a vital role.