Curios of the week #177

There has been plenty of deliciously golden winter sun around this week and so I have been adding to my photograph collection. I have a particular fondness for winter sun because it feels like such a gift, especially after a few days of rain and gloom.

Apart from the sun, I have picked up a Year 7 science class for just a single period per week. My first lesson on Wednesday was a practical and still, after all these years, I had the teacher dream about the students ignoring me. In the real world, they were absolute sweethearts and did a tremendous job of cleaning up after a messy session making seed bombs (don’t ask).

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This week’s Curios include a letter, another letter, some racist tests and much more.

On Thursday, public school teachers in Victoria held a one-day strike. As Alex Crowe reports in The Age, it is not entirely clear what the strike is about. What is clear is that earlier in the week, teachers narrowly rejected an offer by the state government for a 28.3% pay deal and a halving of meetings from 80 to 40 hours per year i.e. roughly one hour per week during term time. Pay is significant because Victorian public school teachers somehow managed to negotiate a series of low pay rises in their last agreement that has left them trailing teachers in other states.

Teachers are also concerned about funding. Public schools are funded by both the state and federal government and the state government is not yet providing its full share under Australia’s School Resource Standard (SRS). Victoria is in financial difficulties following extensive Covid lockdowns and a highly controversial ‘big build’ infrastructure program and this may, in part, explain the tardiness.

There is also much discussion of students with ‘complex needs’. I wonder whether this is sometimes deployed as a euphemism for the behaviour crisis in schools. It is more palatable for romantic educationalists to frame it in this way but the effects on teachers are the same, regardless of framing. The ‘complex needs’ argument does have one effect—it suggests behaviour is a resource issue. If only we had smaller classes, more teaching assistants and so on, we would be able to meet these apparent needs.

In contrast, Professor Marian Mahat, writing in The Conversation, is happy to name the documenting of behaviour, along with, ‘planning, reporting’ and ‘individual education plans for students with disabilities’ as a driver of workload. So, is it workload or pay? The answer appears to be both.

What of the meetings? I am willing to believe that teachers in Victoria are attending plenty of pointless meetings. I have attended many during my teaching career. But meetings don’t have to be pointless and I don’t see how it would be possible to drive an effective professional learning program with just one hour per week, especially when the need to hold staff briefings and conduct mandatory training in issues such as anaphylaxis is taken into account.

When Will They Learn? Episode #13 called ‘Once upon a time at Mossbourne’ is out now. I tell a long-winded story about the Mossbourne school saga that I have documented on this blog and that recently appeared in a feature in The Sunday Times. We also address gendered subject choices and parent entitlement.

The episode is available on all major podcast platforms and you can read the show notes over at the When Will They Learn? Substack.

Can a test be racist? If we take Ibram X Kendi’s definition of racism as our starting point, then if it leads to different outcomes for people belonging to different groups then yes, it can be. On this definition, that is all that matters.

This argument was used by American colleges as one reason to abandon the use of standardised assessments in the admissions process, although that process has reversed in recent years.