Curios of the week #69

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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This week started with a walk to Loreto College’s Mary’s Mount Theatre to watch my daughter and others perform in Clarendon’s dance showcase. As ever, it was a slickly-organised event and the students did a great job, demonstrating atheticism and creativity. On my way to the Theatre, I experienced Ballarat in its Winter Glory. The air was crisp and fresh, and the gates of the former Bishops’ Palace cast long, lugubrious shadows under the bluest of skies.

This week has had its challenges. I have never understood why some people think it reasonable to bring employers into arguments they have on the internet, but they do. I am lucky in the people I have around me, but anyone with an opinion about education, especially one that others may not like, should consider the potential costs of expressing themselves. Writing under a pseudonym is an option worth considering. So is joining the Free Speech Union, which now has an Australian chapter.

Perhaps the most significant event of the week was the end of term. As you are reading this, we start our two-week winter break after a long, eleven week term. My household is keen to do very little for a while. Hopefully, I won’t go so far off the rails that you don’t receive a post next week, but you never know.

This week’s Curios include failure, an oddity, the greatest hits of physics and much more.

Physics course of the week

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Tim Dodd in The Australian is reporting on an alarming decline in the uptake of Year 12 physics in Western Australia, a decline that physicist, Professor David Blair, claims is representative of Australia as a whole. Blair is rightly concerned that:

“We are on track to having no young medical physicists, no physicists to become tomorrow’s astronomers, no physicists to support the energy transition, no physicists to support the nuclear industry – not just submarines but crucial medical products – and no climate scientists,”

However, I worry about the proposed solution — the ‘Einstein First’ physics course and its nerf guns — because I think this represents a common misconception about motivation. Apparently:

“Figures show that 14-year-olds are far more interested in physics after doing Einstein First. Before the course, only about a third of the girls and half the boys found physics interesting. After the course about 80 per cent of both girls and boys were interested.”

I used to have a party trick where I would explain some cool aspect of physics in plain language to people who had dropped the subject as soon as they could. Whether to humour me or not, they would always profess interest. If only physics had been like this at school, they would say.

Anything can be interesting if you play the greatest hits and miss out the difficult, technical stuff. Students in this course may well be studying ‘Einstein First,’ but they won’t be solving Einstein’s equations for general relativity which are notoriously difficult. Instead, they will wave their hands a bit and play with a rubber sheet. It’s a bit like teaching history by telling a colourful account of a bloody battle and missing out all that business with source analysis.

It is pretty easy to generate ‘situational’ interest in this way. However, sustained personal interest — the kind that gets us through the hard slog aspects of a subject — is strongly associated with a sense of personal achievement. This is a two-way relationship, although there are hints that the direction of achievement to motivation is stronger.

If we want to arrest the decline in physics, we need to teach it really well so that young people develop a sense of achievement. Rather than stripping out the hard stuff, we need to teach kids how to handle the hard stuff.

Oddity of the week

As in much of the anglosphere, Australia is facing a teacher shortage. I have written about my proposed solutions before and so I was interested to read a new blog post from a group of researchers who have been investigating the issue. The post is at the AARE blog site, which is never a good sign.

However, rather than taking aim at explicit teaching, the new post by Scott Cowie and colleagues represents something of an oddity:

“Historically, the teaching profession in Australia – and globally – has attracted more females than males. As such, efforts to increase the number of females graduating from ITE programs would play a significant role in bolstering the teaching workforce. Supporting women’s entry and retention in the teaching profession is key to ensuring an adequate ongoing teacher supply. “

There is some logic to this approach — let’s market the profession to those most likely to be interested. However, if we made a similar argument about, say, construction and therefore decided to target recruitment at men, I think this would be widely viewed as prejudiced.

Cowie et al. double down by suggesting financial incentives:

“Policymakers should consider… Offering financial support, such as scholarships and financial incentives, which are specifically targeted at female students, for example:

1. loans or grants for female students during placements to help cover living expenses…

2. needs-based support for female students from underrepresented or disadvantaged backgrounds.

3. Capping tuition fees to ensure they remain affordable for all female students.

We can question the ethics of such an approach but I have to wonder whether it would even be legal.

Transcript of the week

You can read a transcript of the evidence I gave to a recent parliamentary committee in Victoria here.

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Fight of the week

It is rare to hear the voices of classroom teachers in Australian government schools. However, this week saw them strongly voice their concerns.