Limited trial of National Curriculum.

Again, on a rushed timetable, the government pushes out information that a trial is to be done this year (5 weeks into term). Teachers will be given programmes (at the 11th hour) and the kids will have to deal with a poorly understood curriculum by teachers through no fault of the teachers themselves.

Successful project management is not rushed and has an understanding of as many factors as possible. Head-in-the-sand management is a recipe for disaster. Success becomes a factor of luck rather than good management. Children's futures should not be a part of a recipe for the re-election of the Labor party at the next election. It should be a bipartisan agreement implemented with long term planning and proven methods.

Regardless of any issues with the trial, the national curriculum will be rolled out next year. What is of bigger concern is that senior school curriculum will be rolled out later this year. I really hope senior school curriculum will be given more consideration than the lower school programme as the consequences for university entrance and TAFE integration are far more severe than upper school teachers coping with students who have suffered a partial implementation with gaps in learning.

Theory and practical application are two completely different beasts. To quote that 900 people have been involved in the theoretical design of the curriculum (with little coalface application) is not going to impress. Are these the same 900 people that designed and implemented OBE in WA? I really hope not.

The media release is found here.

Politicians... What a zoo!

I wrote to the zoo to send me a politician and they sent me a

.. Julia Gillard

.. but she is an idiot, I sent her back.


so they sent me a

.. Kevin Rudd

.. but he kept apologising in Chinese, when I finally caught him in Australia, I sent him back.


so they sent me a

.. Wayne Swan

.. but he spent the postage and gifted my savings to inflation, I sent him back.


so they sent me a

.. Brendon Abbott

.. but he was too busy kissing babies, I sent him back.


so they sent me a

.. Penny Wong

.. but who cares about climate change anymore? I sent her back.


so they sent me a

.. Peter Garrett

.. but he set my house on fire and speared the whales, I sent him back.


so they sent me a

.. Wilson Tuckey

.. I tried to send him back, but he was returned to sender.


so the zoo thought really hard and sent me a banana.

.. it fit right in at parliament house.

Julia Gillard and the national curriculum

Yes, schools can change their whole curriculum focus, understand, resource and ensure that assessment is in place for a draft curriculum that will change five times before the end of the 2010. We obviously have learnt very little from the OBE implementation fiasco.

Dear, oh dear. I hope no-one buys her "it'll be all right mate" routine.

Here comes another round of teacher bashing when poor direction from government is the issue. I heard Kevin Rudd accept personal responsibility for the performance of his government. I hope he is willing to take the legal liability for rushing something through that affects so many.

Julia Gillard is again doing something in a political timeframe not appropriate to schools. Again, the children of Australia will suffer the consequences.

Where is the testing and ensuring that it is applicable in states where it is to be implemented? The issues will only become apparent under application, it needs a limited application/trial before rollout. Cynically, this won't be done due to the poor polling results of the Labor party and political necessity rather than good practice.

The sheer arrogance of the rush approach is astounding.

Manual Subtraction

An interesting question was posed to me today.

How do I subtract two number manually when the answer is negative??

For instance, 3896 - 4321 (to which the answer is -425).

I originally set up the problem in vertical columns

3896
4321
------

and tried to subtract..

3896
4321
------
?575

which obviously does not work.

So I thought about it.. the only obvious solution was to say, when subtracting always put the larger number on top.

4321
3896
------
*425

As this answer is positive, it is still incorrect. It requires an additional rule, that when the order is changed, the sign of the answer is negative. Thus the answer is -425.

I'm sure everyone knows this (and it's just one of those odd cases I haven't come across before), but it could be an interesting short investigation for upper primary or lower secondary doing directed number exercises.

.. and I have a stupid cold, my nose is dripping like a tap and I can't hug my daughter. It's made my day!

Evidence based education vs OBE

Educational trends tend to go in cycles. From ultra conservative, tried and true methods (such as direct instruction from defined syllabus) to ultra experimental (such as the whole of language approach).

Recovering from the ultra experimental 'OBE' we are now heading towards the ultra conservative 'evidence based' approach.

Although the evidence based approach has merits and is a very attractive alternative after OBE, I would suggest caution. The consequences of evidence based education is already starting to slow educational change through the inability of educational practices to change in time with social change (by the time evidence is gathered, social change has again occurred).

Current practice would be to identify an educational need, and then find a current practice (with evidence) to use to fulfil this need. The obvious issue with this is that where we have a new social situation, no evidence exists and with current research practices - no evidence will ever exist as typically research today does not seek to find a solution, only observe existing practice (existing practice which we know is flawed or wouldn't require research).

Has the pendulum swung too far, now stifling the innovative approaches that could be researched and widely implemented? To avoid this I think a middle ground needs to be found, where innovative practices are encouraged and then researched before extensive implementation. To have one without the other is to invite poor practices or stifling of positive change.

Time continued...

We were working on applying time calculations today, so I posed a question:

"If [student A] was given detention for 1.4 hours and [student B] was given detention 1 hour 25 minutes detention, who would be in detention the longest?"

Students had a guess and then they reviewed the caterpillar for converting between time units.

We then did a number of calculations with some templates to show how a calculation could be constructed.

Eg

3.4 hours = _______ x ________ mins

= ______________ mins

2 122 131 sec = ________ ÷ _________ ÷ _______ ÷ _______ days

= ____ days

1 hour 20 mins = ________ x _________ + ________ mins

= ______________ mins

After we did that, students were just given a range of questions to solve without the templates.

Eg.

2.8 hours = ___________ minutes

12 hrs 12 minutes = ______ hours

12 hrs 12 minutes = ______ days

Then we revisited our original detention problem and a range of similar problems.

Students then practiced with math-joke type connect-the-answer-with-the-question exercise (the old worksheet with a bad, bad mathematics joke at the bottom to solve). Students were able to solve the majority of problems.

yay!

There's nothing to say that with a stronger group I couldn't have taught the same topic by teaching basic time facts (such as 60sec = 1 minute) and then relied on their application of multiplication and division, but in this case I'm glad I didn't do that, the look on the faces of my students when they realised time calculations made sense (that they had found difficult over a long period) was priceless.

Teaching Elapsed Time

Teaching time is always a little problematic with a class, as some students will have this well and truly conquered by year 10 and others will struggle.

Elapsed time is a difficult topic for many as it drags in a lot of sub topics. With each step it is important to draw student's attention to possible mistakes and also to any parallels with an analogue clock.

A common method is to find the number of hours elapsed and then add the remaining minutes on either side (eg. for 2.14 to 4.15: 2.14 -> 3.00 -> 4.00 -> 4.15 would be 46min + 1 hour + 15 mins = 2 hours 1 minute)

The usual approach is to
a) draw a number line
Issues: Students don't relate a number line with time, and commonly place decimal marks (eg. 10 between each hour) rather than 12 (for 5 minute intervals).
b) place the start and finish time on the number line.
Issues: Students don't realise that the start time and end time have to be placed in that order. Eg. if the start time is 8am and the end time is 7am they want to put 7am first on the number line.
c) mark on the hour after the start time and the hour before the start time
Issues: Students have difficulty adding the two times inside the interval. If 7.30am is the start time, they might add 7.00am instead of 8am or for a 4.30 finish time they might add 5.00pm or 3pm.
d) mark on midday and midnight if they lie between the start and finish time
Issues: This is problematic especially with times over 12 hours where both midday and midnight are involved. Students are often not sure whether 12pm or 12am is midday or midnight. They also get confused moving from 12am to 1 am (counter-intuitive).
e) calculate the time between each number on the timeline
Issues: This is the bugbear of the exercise. Students are not sure of the answer counting up to the nearest hour and counting back to the previous hour. Eg Finding the time between 1.17am and 2am or 4.00pm and 4.55pm. Many issues here are related to issues in part c)
f) add the elapsed times
Issues: Students write times such as 7hrs 85 minutes not realising 85mins is greater than an hour.

An alternate approach is to go up in hours and add the remainder (eg. 2.14-> 3.14 -> 4.14 -> 4.15 = 2 hours 1 minute). This may help struggling students and reduce the amount of calculation required.

Heroes in mathematics education

There are some heroes in mathematics education in Perth. They're the ones that share their resources freely, commit to projects and help out. Most are quiet, private and retiring soon. I feel sorry for the public heroes like Rom Cirillo at Curriculum council who is trying to help everyone and is succeeding most of the time. If only there were four of him.

Then there's those that are paid to help and are more talk, little knowledge and bugger all action. I've labelled them the West Australian New Kurriculum Education Resource (the acronym is all important - feel free to put it after your name - no charge!). They join TDC's, MAWA and teaching groups and are paid to produce resources and assistance. All too often they send out untried resources that cause confusion and show their lack of knowledge, they provide advice that is the flavour of the month and denigrate anything functional (their favourite seems to be the Saddler texts). Their advice is ill researched and they often don't answer the question posed. I often have a good laugh at their email sigs that are fourteen lines long outlining their projects as if this means something.

Numeracy consultant, Leaders Facilitator, Specialist teacher, TDC coordinator (yawn - and all in one sig!). It seems rampant self aggrandisement. I've seen title based nonsense before in IT, it's not something we need in teaching. The word 'consultant' brings about shudders - tell me what you're doing and then I'll record it so that you will know what you are doing (and charge at $400 per hour), tell you how the latest fad might help and provide insanely conservative advice as any real advice I give could lead to litigation that might hold them responsible.

One only has to look at how well these experts do during in school PD to realise how out of touch they are.

No thank you.

To me - it makes more sense to signoff Mathematics teacher. Add BEd, if you need qualifications. Sometimes I might add senior school to make it easier to find me within the school. Anything more seeks to diminish the reputation of a classroom teacher.

Give me a teacher that can teach a TEE student and a year 8 effectively any day (or a primary equivalent).

Show me a "super teacher" and I'll show you an idiot. Teaching is too wide a profession with too many different contexts to be an effective specialist or specialist trainer. To specialise is to remove yourself from the coalface and limit your student involvement (eg. reduce your ability to teach). I fail to see how this is a good thing.