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The Absolute State of Maths Education rn

Yo so the bigwigs at VCAA (the guys who write the curriculum for all education in Victoria, Australia) have been coming out with new study designs for almost all VCE classes that’ll be implemented at different points over the next 3 years. The VCE is considered relatively prestigious-ish in the sense there’s a fair few people in other countries who send their kids to Victoria to do it (Australia’s biggest export is education after all) so it’s a big deal when major changes happen to how important courses run. Context = understood.

So I’m a maths (…and science) teacher now and the major changes to the three maths streams since I graduated in 2012 can be summed up like this:

Spesh (the highest tier of maths, scales up the most out of any course except stuff like Latin) - Kinematics are less of a thing but they added in Proofs and hypothesis tests(?!) instead

Methods (still high scaling, but more like uni engineering maths instead of theoretical crazy hard stuff) - Stats removed, some more “calculus but if you can’t do calculus to that particular thing” included instead

Further Maths (General maths, scales down(?!) and is the “ya got a mortgage here’s a maths problem” class that a commerce degree at uni usually means by saying you need at least one maths background to get in) - the stats from methods is here now and they call it General Maths to stop the confusion with it and methods

and there’s also now a fourth tier of maths called foundation

I’m assuming foundation is the barebones “pay your bills with x income And do your taxes” class your relatives keep saying they should’ve been taught how to do in school

So that’s all the changes across a decade of education. When they announced “big changes are coming to the way things will work across VCE maths” I think I’m safe to say most of us took it as the usual reordering and in/out for content as described above. Since I’m a good boy (read “I wanted to put on a good front to make sure I got my contract extension” - I’m permanent now dw) I attended the online seminars (lmao webex) that they presented as information sessions on the changes.

First one was Spesh. No biggie, exactly what you’d expect, some stuff’s swapped again, hang on Pseudocode is in..? But that’s just any code that could do any maths?! And they’re mentioning that it’s in methods too??? The chat at this point’s asking a lot of questions, mostly “how can we know what’s examinable so we can actually teach this??” But thankfully they have an example that should satisfy you:

This is not even a half step above “hello world” and it’s in the hardest maths course? How hard does this get? What do they consider legit? Is there an example exam question that they have as a reference? How will they be able to write textbooks on this if that’s all they have?

No answer. Oh well methods is the next day maybe that will elaborate on it.

Methods opens with the same spiel on things, negligible changes imo on actual content… and he acknowledges some confusion from yesterday on Pseudocode! Has he got an answer? What’s the example this time…

Oh. And it’s definitely examinable and we might elaborate on that later but for now that’s all we got.

That was all 2022. Recently (2023) they did the same thing for “revisions” which was for FurtherGeneral Maths’ course (all of these are being phased in kinda since changing a year 12 course when year 11s are running on the old one makes no sense). Guess what showed up in the General Maths study design!

It’s ya boi 21st century life skills!

I’ll be honest, I was a little suss on this from the Meth/Spesh presentations but I think this confirms what I was thinking: this is some boomers pulling the “kids need to learn how to computer” card isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, kids do need to learn to computer, but lol as if they’ve got this as their only example to show off across all three variety of maths!

But wait, there’s more!

They’ve got a page about it now! Yay! There’s some more examples - harder ones now - but there’s still no actual information on how this topic can be presented on the actual end of year exams. What do i teach them? What constitutes legit Pseudocode vs nonsense pretend code? Is this basic computer science 101 or are the kids going to be presented with a max level spesh question through the lenses of a guy saying “yeah but make it code”

eh I’ll just teach them excel :)

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