Curios of the week #78

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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This week started in Newcastle, a coastal city about an hour’s drive north of Sydney near the famous Hunter Valley wine growing region. I was there for researchED Newcastle, the latest outpost in the researchED empire. I drove to the airport to take an early flight from Melbourne on Saturday morning. This meant I missed the keynote by Peps McCrea and most of the talk by Ben Jensen.

My breakout session was on cognitive load theory and its application to mathematics. I gave a similar talk on Wednesday to New Zealand’s Education Hub, only this time it was online and focused on cognitive load theory’s implications for explicit teaching. Both seemed well received. Oh, and I got my taxes done. So that was a good week.

This week’s Curios include the Tower of Hanoi, lots of critical theory nonsense, an unguided missive and much more.

Substack post of the week

Apart from my own post on Load Reduction Instruction, I once again would like to draw your attention to Andrew Old’s Substack.

Old has recently contributed to a story in The Guardian about post-pandemic behaviour in schools in England:

“Andrew Old, a secondary school teacher and blogger who identified the trend of rising exclusions among younger pupils and girls, said: ‘Next year’s year 9s and year 10s could be the most challenging for many years. However, that may depend on whether schools have successfully addressed the behaviour of those pupils in the years they have already been at secondary school.’”

This enraged a section of Twitter that feel Old should be silenced, a response that may seem baffling on the basis of the quote above.

Instead, it is likely to be related to Old’s tendency to call people out on social media when they make unevidenced claims. For example, when anyone suggests black students in England are excluded at a greater rate than white students — presumably because they think this must be true — Old points out this claim is false. This must be infuriating for the builders of simplistic narratives and the reason why Old has so many trolls talking about him.

So, it is a good opportunity to highlight Old’s Substack. In a recent subscriber post, he reflects on his teaching in the early 2000s. It was the time of a policy of ‘inclusion’ which in practical terms meant that poor behaviour rarely led to any kind of consequence. This passage was recognisable from my own experience:

“In my first cover lesson, I was assaulted by a pupil who I asked to stay behind for a detention. In my second year of teaching, I remember a teacher, who was new to the school, was mystified that a member of my form group had spat on him and yet it had resulted in no serious consequences. By then, I considered that normal. There were never any serious consequences.”

Although of a lesser scale, I remember an incident that was typical of the time. I was teaching Year 9 science in a challenging school and I turned my back on the class to point to where the kidneys are located. A student shouted, “We don’t want to see your fat arse!” When I mentioned this to my line manager, he smiled and said, “I wouldn’t say your arse is fat — I would say it’s quite pert.” Needless to say, little was done about this or the many similar incidents teachers at that school experienced on a daily basis.

Bait-and-switch of the week

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A bait and switch is a sales tactic where a product is advertised but when you get to the store, it is unavailable and you are pressured into paying for a substitute.