Curios of the week #86

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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There is a nightmarish toy town on the outskirts of Ballarat, long since abandoned. My wife was born in the city and when she was at school, she would be taken to this place with her bicycle to learn about road rules. There are traffic lights that no longer light up and rows of squat municipal huts lining the forsaken streets. In other words, it’s a perfect place to learn to drive and my eldest daughter has now reached that stage.

Watching someone drive their first few metres and turn their first corner is a centering experience. Even in an automatic car with no gears to change, there are a lot of actions for a novice to process in working memory, from the position of the hands on the wheel, to the really rather important distinction between the brake and accelerator pedals. As you can imagine, it put me in something of a contemplative mood.

This week’s Curios include neuroscience, an open letter, illiterate college students and much more.

Misinformation of the week

Anna Fazackerley has made a name for herself writing poor quality, campaigning articles for British newspaper, The Observer. In a recent piece, while discussing trends in school exclusions in England, Fazackerley makes the demonstrably false claim that, “black ­children are… significantly more likely to be permanently excluded.”* As Andrew Old has been pointing out for some time, the permanent exclusion rate for ‘Black’ students in England is slightly lower than for ‘All’ students and for ‘White’ students.

It is worth noting that the permanent exclusion rate for ‘Black Caribbean’ students is significantly higher than any of the previous three categories. However, Fazackerley illustrates her piece with the story of a boy with Cameroonian heritage and ‘Black African’ students have a still lower rate of permanent exclusion.

Why do people make a mistake like this when the data is so easy to check? I can only assume the narratives they hold about the world convince them that it must be true that black students are at greater risk of exclusion and no further evidence is needed.

Survey of the week

There is still time to complete the survey I have put together on teacher training. The survey collects no names, dates of birth, email addresses and so on, just data on experiences of training. It is open to anyone in the world who has trained as a teacher and I will write about the results on this Substack. Please share widely among teacher friends and colleagues.

I am particularly keen to gain more responses from Australian teachers.

Announcement of the week

researchED will be back in Ballarat on Saturday 15 March 2025. Save the date. Also, please follow the @researchED_Aus Twitter/X account and/or the researchED Australia Facebook page. In the coming weeks, there will be news about ticketing and speaker submissions.

This promises to be the largest researchED ever held in Australia. Last year, we released 300 tickets and as we were closing in on that figure, we did a few calculations and opened it up to 350. However, that was late in the day so we did not sell all of them. It was still the largest researchED to have taken place in Australia up to that point, even though we have held these events in Melbourne and Sydney. This year, we are releasing 350 tickets from the outset and we expect to sell them all.

Start saving your $35 plus lunch money.

researchED Ballarat 2024

Podcast of the week

John Sweller was on Critically Speaking with Therese Markow. I also get a mention.

Open letter of the week

It is not every day that an open letter is written by a British education consultant to the teachers of Australia, so I approached with interest.