Here is a quote from Julia Gillard about ‘the education revolution’

“The revolution will come in changing the thinking of teachers so they embrace practices based on the evidence of what works and not the latest scatterbrain idea dreamed up by some dusty academic who rarely enters a classroom, much less teaches kids.”

I think that is a rather powerful quote.

Here is a parody on “new-age” cutting edge exam questions;

After reading the seat belt Physics question and the history of cosmetics Chemistry question, I got worried about Mathematics. If they can do that to the empirical sciences, what will they do to the deductive? I started to have horror vision of future Maths questions. Maybe this is how we’ll see Pythagoras assessed in the NCOS!

Question 1: Pythagoras called numbers that are equal to the sum of their factors (except themselves) Perfect Numbers. 6 is a perfect number because 1 + 2 + 3 = 6.

(a) Why is the number itself not included in the sum?

(b) How do you think numbers that are not perfect feel about this? What can Mathematicians do to improve non-perfect numbers self esteem?

Question 2: Most people know Pythagoras for his right angled triangle theorem named after him. There is evidence that Egyptian rope stretchers were using this very theorem before Pythagoras.

(a) What do you think was going through the minds of the rope stretchers when they saw all the publicity Pythagoras got for formalising their work?

(b) What attitudes, values and beliefs were responsible for the creation of modern copyright legislation?

Question 3: Pythagoras considered numbers to be the essence of reality. He also considered that there are male and female numbers.

(a) What is your favourite number and why do you like it?

(b) Do you think it was right for Pythagoras to enforce sexual stereotypes on numbers since everyone must use them at one time or another?