Curios of the week #95 🍾🍾

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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On Christmas Eve, we had rock lobster linguine, using a couple of Western Australian lobsters. It was delicious. My job on Christmas Day was to smoke a 4kg piece of wagyu brisket in my kamado. We took it around to my sister-in-law’s house in a cooler. They were hosting Christmas this year.

Aside from that, there has been plenty of time for walking and contemplation. I’ve been thinking a little about my entropy idea and how it relates to various aspects of cognitive load theory, while worrying about whether I could be classed as a monomaniac. Ballarat Botanical Gardens have just reopened their rejuvenated fernery and so that is a great place to stroll and reflect. Actually, it’s quite magical.

This week’s Curios include rewards, potential fines, a stingy decision and much more.

Math(s) war of the week

On Twitter/X, Sarah Powell posted a link to a letter from the Aletheia Society responding to a joint statement by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) about teaching mathematics to students with disabilities.

The Aletheia Society is dedicated to special education and their response letter is signed by Amanda VanDerHeyden among others. The signatories find it hard to understand why a position statement on teaching mathematics to students with disabilities would not focus more on explicit teaching.

“Among the many omissions from the position statement is an emphasis on systematic, explicit instruction. In the High-Leverage Practice documentation from CEC, the practice with the strongest research base to support its use with students with disabilities was systematic, explicit instruction (Nelson et al., 2022). Not including systematic, explicit instruction in this position statement is educational malpractice, particularly for an organization like CEC that is designed to promote high quality, inclusive, and equitable education for students with disabilities.”

‘Malpractice’ is a strong word but perhaps we should be more prepared to use it when educational organisations veer from the evidence so comprehensively. No, there is not evidence to inform every decision we make as teachers, but there is plenty of evidence for this. No doubt apologists will feign surprise at this criticism and insist there’s absolutely loads of explicit teaching involved, no matter what way we teach mathematics and so it hardly merits a mention.

And the NCTM has no shortage of apologists. It is a weirdly doctrinaire and ideological organisation, given it is meant to represent practising maths teachers, and it is one with extraordinary influence, even here in Australia.

Blog post of the week

In a great post on his blog, Education Rickshaw, Zach Groshell tells the compelling story of a school that fixed behaviour and then unfixed it again. He describes exactly what the teachers and administrators did and how and why it eventually, frustratingly, unravelled. He concludes:

“Our greatest embarrassment in education is that we allow the schools plagued by the worst behavior and academic performance, which also tend to serve our most impoverished communities, to languish in failure. It’s embarrassing because we know how to turn these schools around.”

It is worth a read.

Book ban of the week

In recent years, removing books from school libraries has been more a feature of the right, as they mount cases against children’s fiction that contains sexually explicit material—cases that have varying degrees of merit. So, it took me back to an earlier point in the culture war to hear news of a book ban from the left.