Every few years some student test will show us that the vast majority of opinion writers don’t understand basic numeracy.
Take the latest PISA results. Australian students showed a significant drop since 2000. Of course lots of other western nations also showed a similar drop but they’re not our concern and it’s hard to criticise the woke agendas in Australian schools if you’re also looking at countries that aren’t Australia. Then you might have to ask exactly what’s going on that places like Singapore and China are suddenly outperforming us.
After all, it does become a little harder to blame the “communist” government of Australia when the communists in China are one of the places where the education system seems to be going well. Then we might have say, “Well, those communists in the Labor Party have only been in power federally for ten of the past thirty years so maybe it’s the capitalist Liberal Party who are to blame for poor results.”
I would never say such a thing, of course, because – having been a teacher for a large part of my life – this could be used in a totally out of context way by someone with an agenda under a headline such as: WOKE TEACHER BLAMES CAPITALISM FOR EDUCATIONAL FAILURE.
One thing I always love is the anecdotal story about someone else’s child whose teacher or school did something which seems outrageous. The school is never named and the context is ignored. Take this recent post by Kevin Hogan:
While I have no idea about the context, I would feel that it would be wrong of me to mount a strong justification of the teacher’s actions. However, I do note that we have no information about how the school responded or even whether the teacher had a slightly different version of the events.
As someone who has taught in many schools I offer the following fiction as an example of when I might have taken confiscated a flag:
Me: Today we’ll be looking at various flags and…
Benny: My dad says that we should only have this flag in Australia and replacing it…
Me: Benny we’re not replacing it, we asked people to all bring in a flag from some other…
Benny: When Pauline becomes PM, she’ll get rid of all those flags and the people waving them will be sent back to where they came from.
Me: That’ll be hard because most of them were born here…
Benny: And she’ll ban that stupid flag…
Me: Benny that’s the aboriginal flag and it is a recognised…
Benny: So you don’t like Pauline Hanson.
Me: I never said that. Now stop waving that flag in Jenny’s face.
Benny: If she doesn’t like it she can go back to where she came from.
Jenny: I’m indigenous, you stupid…
Me: Benny, either stop waving the flag in everyone’s face or I’ll confiscate it.
Benny: You can’t take my flag, it’s flag day.
Anyway, I think you get the point about context.
Whenever I read about anything that’s meant to have happened in a classroom somewhere I usually have three questions:
- Has what’s being described have a totally different context? For example, when there’s someone alleging that boys were asked to wear dresses this may not be some attempt to get them to change their gender; it may – in fact – be some dramatic production in an all boys school and that the boys all had a hoot of a time… Speaking from experience, if you throw some costumes in front of a class and ask them to pick something at random, some of the most unlikely boys will leap at the chance to put on a dress and wig.
- Did what’s being described change as it was passed from person to person like a version of Chinese Whispers? (Is it still ok to call it that or has political correctness caused a name change?) For example, when Georgina says that she prefers to be called “George” and the teacher agrees, does this morph into the idea that Georgina has had her name changed by the school without the parents’ consent and later becomes an example of how she was allowed to adopt a “boy’s name”, followed by a suggestion that the school performed gender surgery during one of those “Respectful Relations” indoctrinations.
- Is there any possibility that this actually happened and, if it did, was it some teacher who was a complete outlier and will probably not last the year once he or she is actually named in a formal complaint? You’ve probably heard about the school (or schools) where students are allowed to identify as cats. This has never happened. If you wish to dispute it, please provide the name of the school and where it’s located so I can verify it. And yes, there is always the possibility that some teacher has done the wrong thing. I could relate the story of how I teacher I once knew joined Derryn Hinch’s shame file for setting an exercise out of a book where students were asked to write from the point of view of the killer. Unfortunately, it was just after one of Australia’s mass murders. “I never watch tv,” she explained, “so how was I to know that it was a bad time to do that.” (The irony is that she’d come from a hippy, alternative school and this was the first time she’d ever set an exercise from a text.)
Anyway, as to my first point. Whenever a test shows that a certain number of students are failing to meet benchmarks, there is a predictable concern from the media. And it is a concern, so don’t get me wrong here. There are a lot of areas for potential improvements in the way kids are educated. But usually, even the worst results, show that most students are performing at or above the expected level.
However, the media often demonstrate their lack of numeracy skills by such headlines as: “OUR KIDS CAN’T READ” when it’s not even the majority!
Thanks Rossleigh,
As a fellow chalkie (mostly Maths and a bit of senior Physics) for some decades, I was accused of being “WOKE” (it was a few years ago before the word existed in that context) when I suggested – with some evidence to back me up – that middle school girls may do better in single gender Maths classes, even in a co-ed school.
The middle school coordinator at the time was horrified, and slammed my suggestion, saying something like “but boys and girls need to learn how to cooperate and work together”.
I have to add that most parents – of both boys and girls – were very happy with the suggestion when given the choice, and also happy with the outcomes when it was implemented.
Australia’s education system would of course have nothing to do with inequality of funding. In China every child gets a laptop. Then there’s issues relating to time-poor parents which also flow into behavioural. I would hate to think what the flag guy would think of Pioneer Day when sisters came in their Korean National dress and other kids came with faces decorated Aboriginal style…how woke.
Beware the Woke Mind-Virus (according to some). Avoid vaxxing.
Boys in a dress; what is strange about that?? Back in my days teaching at an all boys boarding school, there was the annual Gilbert & Sullivan production when the Year 7 kids filled the roles of most of the female chorus, while the female leads were played by ”imported female talent”.
The senior boys (years 11 & 12) were only allowed to play Rugby if they had some active part in the G&S production.
BTW – 1) girls thrive in girls only classes, especially in STEM subjects;
2) The reasons that ”kids can’t read in secondary school” is usually that they were not taught or encouraged top read in primary school. Similarly, too many primary teachers find teaching times tables boring, but trying to do any high school Maths without instant recall of times tables makes a challenging subject very difficult for kids from such a background.
3) My former farming mentor left school aged nine (9) years to raise his three brothers after his mother died and his father abandoned the family. He could do speed Maths in his head, much faster than a calculator. ”If you cannot do the sums instantly when looking at cattle you will never make a profit”.
Somehow ”when [kids] fail to reach certain bench marks” the commentators rarely criticise the teachers because all the not so good teachers get promoted up into the DoE where their dubious teaching practices can be passed on to successive generations of under-achievers.
What a gift, parents who encourage you to learn to read.
The joyful world of books.
Media have been very coy about comparisons offshore as most nations have had a slight decline.
It may simplify signify an issue with the validity/reliability of the current PISA test version, or a short term statistical blip….
One knows RWNJs in Central Europe and Oz who keep bringing up same and similar to try prove pupils and teachers are dumbed down.
Then claim it’s due to woke teachers, liberal democracy and the west….suggesting that Russia, Turkey, China etc. are the education models to follow…
@ Andrew Smith: Uhm …..”the education models to follow” are currently seen in very few, if any, major school systems world-wide but have been around for over 30+ years. The traditional ”shut up, sit up & listen” model is notoriously boring and inefficient. So it takes longer to complete the curriculum.
By comparision, drawing on psychology and research results in the field of education efficiency, learning efficiency can be greatly improved with a consequential reduction in the duration of schooling from 12+ years to about six (6) years. Naturally the social and political consequences are quite dramatic on the current structure of the education industry.
Check out Doman from Penn State University, who worked with disabled kids often physically missing half their brain. These ”disabled” kids could be educated with his appropriate methods. When he applied his system to ”normal” kids, they became super-achievers.
Check out Accelerated Learning which provides background largo music to kill off background distractions during the induced hyper-focus condition while studying. Very useful personally when writing uni papers and theses.
The underlying problem is that too few desk jockeys in DoE Head Offices are interested in improving the efficiency of learning, mainly because they are too frequently refugees from a scary classroom environment rather than educators. Why create change that might just challenge the position of the boss resulting in transfer back into the ”wonderful” classroom environment.
Much better to stick with the ”trusted & true” time wasting ”cyclic curriculum” that refuses to acknowledge differences in student learning skills and simply repeats all the boring stuff, think Year 7 revision/upgrading kids from diverse schools and hopefully reaching an acceptable skill standard, then on to Year 10 when another built in revision bores the kids again.
Now the big step forward; the into the former Maths & Society where (yep!! you guessed it!!) the kindergarten curriculum is repeated!! And after such an education, kids leave school not knowing times tables, unable to manage fractions or percentages and requiring extensive coaching to reach a basic tertiary skill standard.
There was one NSW attempt to increase Mathematics curriculum beyond kindergarten level that failed abysmally because the DoE refused to upskill the two year Teachers College trained teachers of that time.
NEC:
And too often, the reason they can’t read in primary school is because reading isn’t encouraged at home.