Trite, Tattered and Tardy

This week saw the release of a range of test figures from The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2011 and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 

The Minister was quick to send a media release deploring the ‘poor’ performance and spinning that the present government’s reforms under National Partnerships, and the My School Website are only now biting and would make a significant difference. Just how is not articulated.

The usual candidates from every lobby group in the country took to their bunkers and rolled out the same old arguments: we need better teachers; schools need more funding; teachers need higher pay; we need to attract high performers in to teaching; extend school hours; principals need more autonomy; concentrate on teaching literacy and numeracy; get rid of poor teachers; scrap the union; provide more professional development;  improve the retention rate; set more targets; the National Curriculum will fix it; test, test , test, test…….. blah blah blah. 

We’ve heard it all before - the attempt to compress a complex set of reasons for individual student performance into a grab bag of the top ten ways to fix a perceived problem. It’s trite, it’s tattered and it’s tardy of the protagonists to give us the same old, same old. 

We are still with the basic assumption that the tests are right, the methodology is right, and that you can actually treat children and young people like scientific experimental subjects- if you control the variables you can get a constant result. Human beings just don’t work like that. They are each individual and the combination of factors which lead to the person before the teacher is as unique and variable as the number of people we are as a whole. 

It might be useful to look to a time when we valued a well rounded education that trusted the skill and dedication of the teacher and  that championed the full range of human knowledge as critical learning for a civilised society. 

A hard call in an economic rationalist world where the belief is that counting the beans in the jar over and over again will improve the quality of the beans. 

One of my favourite things about Christmas is that parliament stands down and we have a slight reprieve from the shooting gallery, the gaping clowns, the ducks in a row, the spin, spin, spin.

For a little while we will have no pseudo-Amazonian battles between  Bland Barbie and Juggling Julia, with their slings and arrows that are just a step up from a schoolyard cat fight with its hoes and moles. On Radio National yesterday morning one guest described the Australian parliament as an ‘infantile shout fest’. 

Revolutionaries have always known that words are one’s greatest weapon– the winning of the hearts and minds. Look at David’s Marat, dead in his bath like an alabaster Greek statue still writing rousing rebel rhetoric as his life blood leeches away. Never mind that he was in reality pox marked and delivered ignominiously by a spurned lover- so the story goes. 

The linguistics and ideologies of our representatives are piddling about in the mire of mendacity. It’s personal attacks, attempted broadsides, niggly skirmishes and nuisance hand grenades. 

Entertainment for the masses in the 24/7 sound bite and news grab - bread and circuses. 

But it leads us nowhere.

There’s a novel idea – Politician as leader. I wonder if it could catch on?

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Art Work of the Week

Here's a new way of looking at an old problem.

No testing was used in the creation of this art work.

Jester cuppa

Larry the Larrikin

This week I heard the story of a workplace where one of the members organised a private party on the weekend and invited some work mates. One of her colleagues, not invited, raised a formal complaint with her supervisor, that she was being excluded. The upshot was that the party organiser was ordered to issue an open invitation to all colleagues to attend the party. Two things amazed me: first that the supervisor took the matter seriously and  felt he/she had a right to respond to a private matter, but more, that the party giver, a good Aussie,  actually complied with the order. 

It’s been a week where the larrikin spirit has been in the spotlight.

When you check out the meaning of larrikin, the Oxford and Britannica dictionaries describe it as a rowdy,  badly behaved youth. 

The Britannica especially reveals it as a young hoodlum or hooligan in the impoverished subculture of urban Australia. The term was applied to the large numbers of sporadically employed teenagers and young adults who banded together in gangs, or “pushes,” glorified the outlaw bushrangers, engaged in gang fights with each other, assaulted citizens and generally defied and ridiculed the authorities.

While these may be historically correct definitions they somehow miss the mark. I prefer the description given in an ANU paper (http://andc.anu.edu.au/pubs/ozwords/June_98/5._larrikin.htm which says that :

The term larrikin came to be used affectionately of a person who did not always adhere strictly to polite social conventions; a bit of a stirrer. It was used in political contexts as well—used positively as a term almost of endearment. The negative meanings gradually died out completely in Australia, and the larrikin came to be seen as someone who defied social or political conventions in an interesting and often likeable way. 

One of the indicators of our larrikinism lies in our use of language. We call redheads Rangers or Blue; one armed friends Lefty or Bandit  We add ‘ie’ to common words like bickie, sickie,  reccie. I’ve lived in towns called Bello, Lizard, Canbubble…not dignified official names you will find on any local map, but well known to those in the locality.

I travel with people who have strange nicknames . By day they hold down responsible jobs, contribute productively to their communities, raise well adjusted families and go about their chores like the mild mannered Clark Kent. But look out when they let their hair down. Larry the Larrikin looms large.

This weekend I have seen a diligent health and safety officer scale a spiked fence, naked at 3am, in order to have a swim with three others all in the pink. The pool screamed keep out from the padlocked gate. It was an authority challenge, and a good thing we had passed the full moon, so to speak.

The following morning at breakfast, one of the night dippers, who has taken to writing messages on her arm to ensure that she stays on the straight and narrow (eg: Don’t take off your clothes. Don’t drink rum) was asked if she had any new messages for herself. She opened her palm to reveal in large capitals:

Stay away from these people. They get you in trouble.

My father always said: Show me your friends and I will show you who you are.

I think I have discovered I am a larrikin.

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This week's Art Work

Sea Spray

I am still  making  tea cosies - probably little larrikins themselves

Building Bridges

I always loved Mathematics. When I was a small child I would have my mother set sums on scrap pieces of paper – the backs of envelopes, the torn off ends of cereal cartons- and while she beavered away ensuring the house looked like it should have been shining off the cover of Women’s Weekly, I would solve the additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions.

Education was delivered differently. We sang song our tables with no real understanding, drew a working out margin to show the thought processes we had used, wrote pages and pages of numbers, and had daily mental Arithmetic. Calculators, if you discount the abacus which we did not have access to and didn’t even know about in my parochial little school, were not available for general consumption. 

I arrived at boarding school at the start of my fourth year at high school and discovered to my horror that I couldn’t do Maths. Or so the teacher finally convinced me. She was known to have a brilliant mind, but to be an absolute dud in transferring knowledge to fertile minds. I laboured for hours, filled pages and pages with working out, setting out, pondering and solutions. But if the answer was wrong, her response was that I had not done my work. And if I laughed, she smacked me with the ruler.

Moving in to my final years I took the basis course that I could get away with.   At the trial external exams no-one in the class go over 15%. Thank god for my father’s foresight in booking me some private tuition with a local teacher who helped me to get a decent pass and restored some faith in my ability to understand.

At university I found logic –The  highest form of Mathematics they say- an discovered what it was to shift into an entirely new brain space.

There have been some light bulb Mathematical moments over the years. 

One was when the new Mathematics syllabus was being introduced into NSW and I had the regional consultant on my staff. His responsibility was to shift thinking about ‘thinking mathematically’. I went to a professional learning session with him where the teacher asked people to do a particular mathematical problem in their head and then to explain how they had arrived at the answer. There were as many different ways of reaching the solution as there were participants in the room. The second thing the teacher did was give us a solution and ask us to devise the problem- The answer is 7, what is the question? This was my sort of Mathematics.

Another was on reading Steven Hawking's And God Created the Integers, when I discovered that the square in Pythagoras’ theorem (which I know and have applied a thousand times) actually means a physical as well as a mathematical square. The theory suddenly made sense.

I read somewhere that 70% of all scientific knowledge is proven to be inaccurate or downright wrong, over a thirty year period. It doesn’t seem to be the case with Mathematics.

This year I am doing  Year 9 Maths. My granddaughter and I tackle it each week. I’m amazed that as I look at the text book I am seeing exactly the same things I remember from my youth – except it now has cartoons. We’re up to quadratic equations and parabolas. This is where my confidence begins to slide and I get flashbacks to Year 10.  But we are saved by a Year 11 student demonstrating solutions on YouTube. 

And we both get it. 

I  recall asking my high school teacher when we would ever use parabolas in real life. She said I would need it to build bridges. 

Metaphorical or physical? I ponder.

I haven’t built one yet

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This week's Art Works

 

Still creating tea cosies. Now for the Epic Christmas Markets to be held on December 14 and 15. I am applying my mathematical skills, but not a quadratic equation in sight.

Pencil me in for tea