Also, did you give up blogging? :[

I’ve been blogging a lot this week!

vanessa

My gut feeling is that the principle of the Electoral College is fine, and I’m happy to slightly overprivilege some relatively rural constituencies, relative to relatively urban ones, to ensure that the minority rural voice is heard. However, the implementation whereby states habitually assign all their electoral college votes one way or the other, with only a very small number of shining exceptions, detracts from the extent to which the system is representative. I also have a suspicion that this proposal would be more likely to aid third party candidates than the status quo, which strikes me as a Good Thing in principle, even if most of the (viable?) third parties worry me considerably.

While in practice my concerns are more likely to be aligned with those of the city-dwellers than those of rural types, at the moment, this may not always be the case.

HA.

2. No. Although it may not cost the school anything to offer different terminal exams, it’s highly impractical to teach two different syllabuses. The Lycee Francais CdG is the only school I can immediately think of, offering A-levels in English and IB in French (I think?).

3. I would be a strong supporter of more financial education. It’s very odd that there is almost none in the maths curriculum (there’s brief comment on calculating VAT, but not why anyone should care – in the context of buying jeans). In fact, I think maths education could benefit from extreme reform in this regard. Maths education should make better reference to what the majority will actually use, and decisions they will have to make in jobs and life.

2. Very interesting. I wasn’t familiar with MEI at all, to my shame – but it does seem unlikely that schools might ever offer a choice of exam boards within the same school. (Few schools are sufficiently well-resourced to offer a choice of qualification structures within the same subject – e.g., A-level or IB or Pre-U – as you know.)

3. I wonder if there’s a way to tie this in with the calls for compulosry financial education within schools – or would that be more likely to be at a KS3/KS4 level?

Some paragraphs with random thoughts:
1. I’ve heard it said that students are arriving at university with far less maths (quoted as “a year behind”) than they used to. Obviously subjective and perhaps biased, but applicable to any courses needing mathematics, not just maths itself.

2. The MEI syllabus is broadly good at (informally) introducing proof and asking creative proof-based questions, but there’s a big problem there: other syllabuses, with no real grounding in proof, are easier and therefore schools are more inclined to offer them.

When an exam board is owned by a publishing company, they are motivated to make their exams and grade boundaries easier, to attract schools and students, to sell more books. I believe this is driving an accelerating “dumbing down” process, where the exam board makes cuts to and simplifies the syllabus at any possible opportunity. Bad.

3. With 80,000+ students taking Maths A-level each year, it’s clear that university-level mathematics is not the only endpoint for these students. I believe we should be teaching students vocational as well as academic mathematics: in particular, more practical statistics (perhaps as a separate A-level) would be helpful for almost any career.