Summer School Day 4

Due to unforeseen circumstances I find myself at home instead of at summer school since day 1. Although frustrating, it has given me time to ponder why I consider it an important part of each year.

These I think are the main reasons:
1. It gives me an excuse to investigate areas of the curriculum in detail and develop my understanding of a topic
2. It provides time to interact with other mathematics teachers and gain insight into their motivation, teaching methods and knowledge
3. It's a great time to spend with the kids outside the pressure cooker that is TEE (and I know we're supposed to call it WACE now, but the pressure of L3 WACE is far different to level 1 & 2) and gain that rapport that helps when you have to give them a nudge to get over the finish line.
4. It's a time where you can develop method/pedagogy and style and measure results in an environment where you are not going to leave yourself weeks behind if it doesn't work.
5. You can work on the motivational, career oriented, aspirational and inspirational components of students rather than just focus on curriculum.

Russ.

Summer school day 1

Today was the first day of summer school and what a great bunch. We worked on some areas that have caused difficulties in past years...

1. Fractional indicies and how to simplify where the numerator of the index is greater than one or where the index is negative.
2. Graphing a variety of different functions
3. Domain and range of a variety of functions
4. Odd and even functions
5. Piecewise functions and domain/range
6. Counting techniques and associated proofs

From an IT point of view it's great to use tools (such as slideshows) and make them highly interactive through joint presentations with other presenters. The students seem to enjoy the change in venue too! Students were actively challenging each other to speak up when they didn't understand and demanding more information when an explanation was incomplete.

A productive day!

Summer School 2010/2011

Summer school is about to start again when we get our year 10->11 and year 11->12 students ready for level 3 subjects. It was interesting to hear the students volunteering this year and plaguing us to run it so lets hope they turn up.

A whole week of students and just maths. Who would have guessed it would have been successful?

I wish I could find our slides from last year!

IOTY 2010 Winner

And the Idiot of the Year 2010 goes to our perennial winner

... (drum roll please) ...



.... Julia Gillard .....




...for her ongoing support of the myschool website, the diabolical national curriculum rollout, computers in schools schemes and her support for the complete an utter waste of money during the GFC on school rebuilding.

Oh, and please do us a favour Julia, get out of the way and let Ms Bligh do her job... although they might need you around soon with your unending bag of cash.

Congratulations Julia!

Funny Quote.

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." Albert Einstein

Visitors Poll

Who are you?!! I'm interested. The first person that says West Australians are actually Australian obviously doesn't live here :-)

Russ.

Site statistics

7800 page hits and 5500 unique visitors this year from around the world: Turkey to Bolivia, Canada to Indonesia, UK and Spain; hello to you all.

The most popular topics searched were the CAS calculator pages, Hattie's meta analysis, as well as local topics national curriculum and NAPLAN.

National Curriculum in High School

The implementation of national curriculum in WA is fast becoming a farce. It lacks coherent leadership and information is not reaching teachers in a timely manner.

I'm not sure who we are supposed to be listening to or what the correct pathway is for our kids.

Some of the emerging issues.

• WA & Queensland have year 7 in primary making it difficult to implement subject specialisation (such as requirements for science labs in science and adequately trained mathematics teachers for geometry and algebra courses)
• The deadline for substantial implementation is two phased with all states other than WA set for 2013 and WA for 2014.
• A definition for substantial implementation is required. It is not clear whether substantial implementation means k-10 will be implemented by the deadline (eg, for high school: staged over four years - yr 7 2011, year 7,8 2012, yr 7,8,9 2013 and 7,8,9,10 2014) or that schools will have programmes ready to start implementation by the deadline set (do we just sit in secondary schools and hope that primary feeders have it all sorted out so that we can start in 2014??).
  
• Detailed curriculum documents and sample assessments have not been released, with state agreement for the curriculum dot points only happening last week.
• Agreement on how to handle deficiencies across primary and secondary school boundaries have not been finalised. As found in the WA implementation of OBE this is indeed a real issue with grading standards vastly different across each segment (remember level 3 mathematics anyone??)
• Urgency within the secondary segment has not occurred and a watch, wait and see mentality exists - and rightly so given the amount of change thus far.
• Preparation for NAPLAN (being a key metric for school performance) is causing issues disrupting year 9 curriculum with half to all of term 1 being dedicated to NAPLAN preparation.
• NAPLAN itself becomes an issue for WA as NAPLAN will be attached to National curriculum objectives and as WA will lag in national curriculum implementation we would expect WA to lag in NAPLAN results also (for a considerable time as other states will continue to improve in their understanding of national curriculum objectives whilst WA grapples with implementation and the required modifications in primary and lower secondary).
• With declining NAPLAN scores, this has the potential to further exacerbate the decline of student enrollment in state schools as parents view poor results as further reason to enter private schools where students are already on national curriculum, having access to specialist teachers and materials in year 7.
• It is unknown how to grade students. C Grade standards have the potential to relegate low SES schools to D & E's for all students and provide ongoing failure for our students. This is not fair nor equitable. It is also unknown what an A student looks like. Direction here is required and it is a real pitfall for early adopters.
  
• Independent public schools are also affecting staffing equations in low SES areas as teachers are being poached to IPS schools and EIP's are being parachuted into these positions. This movement of experience restricts schools ability to respond to national curriculum objectives.
• As public schools shrink in size their ability to manage content, subject and student knowledge becomes much more difficult with the loss of redundancy (more than one teacher able to teach a topic) and subject selection (fewer subjects are offered or schools are forced to distance education or busing solutions). The size of a school places the burden of implementation on a relative few (as it did during NCOS implementation) at a time where schools are feeling staffing stress both in administration and teaching roles.

It is not a good equation. At least with the OBE farce behind us, we should be better equipped to handle this one.

Click here for previous posts on national curriculum.