drmarcushill.bsky.social
Mathematician, educator and geek. He/him.
354 posts
118 followers
105 following
Active Commenter
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"In typo veritas"
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I suppose if it's a performance with a script, it doesn't have to be on the fly. Still not an easy job!
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I'm fine with those, it's indefinite integration and finding the differential function that I want them to demonstrate.
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Splitting classes at any level makes it much easier to timetable if any of your department work part time.
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In my exams they can have any calculator that won't do calculus for them.
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Only if you miss all the assessments in the qualification. If you have done some, they base your grade on those and how others with the same marks in them did on the paper(s) you missed. That's why there are multiple exams per subject spaced over weeks.
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Nobody takes papers at a deferred date, it is impossible to maintain paper security.
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The second of the three A level maths papers were entirely different for the ~0.2% of students who need adapted papers (large print, Braille etc.) than for the other candidates. Pearson keep saying everything is fine and the marks will be fair, but aren't saying why. Maths Edu Sky is ablaze.
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Surely whoever decided on Pearson's communication strategy knew full well that nobody would believe for a second that this was planned all along. And even in the unlikely case that it was, when someone suggested doing that they would have known everyone would think it was a cockup and shot it down.
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But if the leak was paper 1, the difference in the adapted papers would have happened then, as the paper 2s would have been produced ages ago.
Meanwhile, we have continued iterations of
Everyone: Why would you make them different?
Pearson: All is well and as intended.
Everyone: Yes, but WHY?!
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I would definitely want to see a comparison between those 111 and the overall distribution.
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But surely the true and ancient rules of calling shotgun stipulate that you must be outside and be able to see the car before you are permitted to make the call!
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And maybe they are waiting for the result of an investigation to tell us this, since if there was a leak the adapted papers (which seem to have been the originally intended ones) would be insecure.
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With the added bonus of the heat. 😟
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It will be something a competent outfit would have found and fixed well before getting to full scale testing.
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As others have said, it's the shift from being able to accurately reproduce steps in an algorithm to understanding the mathematical concepts and structures on which the algorithm is built. It's the shift from Skemp's "procedural" to "relational" understanding.
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Not so much a hot take as "exactly how we train teachers to work". Helping kids develop accurate self assessment and fostering a classroom atmosphere where "I don't get it" isn't a mark of shame are key teaching skills.
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Just nick a couple from @aptshadow.bsky.social , he's got so many he'll never know they're gone.
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You're writing objectives like a noob. Always set targets that have already been met (or so close that they are inevitable) but not yet officially reported.
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This sounds a lot like the Final Voyage of the Marie Celeste, a larp where everyone plays one of the people on that ship. Only the captain is a normal human sailor, everyone else is a disguised alien, time traveller, Atlantean etc. because all of the weird theories about the disappearance are true.
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$=xp
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Dunno, I think four works too...
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When we wrote the Song of Steel rules, one of the main meta-rules that we instituted from day one was "no ability or spell obtainable or usable by a player will ever trigger a time freeze, and use it damn sparingly with monsters".
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You could do a bit of Indiana Jones roleplay. I'm sure the stuff currently in your fridge will be OK for an hour whilst you climb in.
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Reminds me of the rec.games.frp.live-action FAQ that I used to maintain, where a lot of wordage was basically "this is what these terms mean in this document, but you will see them used differently on the group and you will find the same ideas referred to by other words"
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Can it really be heard over the 3 to 5 lawnmowers that are constantly going on any day between May and September when it isn't raining torrentially?
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Catfolk and the ability to dominate through clever use of free text downtimes.
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Do we have data on the historic performance of students who needed modified papers in past series? If it doesn't line up with that of their peers who used the standard papers, small n is the least of your worries when it comes to setting fair grade boundaries.
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And finish the first one with one or two hinge questions using whiteboards, you can then fairly confidently decide whether to extend phase 1 for all, let them all on to phase 2, or split with some pushing on and others getting a bit more instruction.
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You could just turn the game's music volume to zero and play your own music on another device...
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Most heads would be absolutely showing off how much they use the practical music facilities. How utterly joyless.
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In my experience, when I make those kinds of accurate predictions I think they are most often about something that will go badly (kids won't understand, there won't be enough time for the activity etc.) than things that will go well. And I am sometimes surprised, despite having observed thousands.
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Whilst I absolutely agree that we should have trustworthy, evidence based guidance, any implementation would need to take account of a few potential difficulties.
Teaching is inherently much messier than medicine. Yes, there are some predictable aspects, but many more sources of potential variation.
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The upshot is that we have a complicated field with genuine academic debate happening all the time, in which politicians constantly stick their ill-informed oars. The curation of any body like the one you propose would need to be transparently independent. It is needed, but it will be hard.
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You also have to consider that, even more than medicine, education is hugely politicised. Just look at the "market review" of ITE, the formulation of the ITTECF framework or the Ofsted so-called "subject reviews", all with far more ideology than evidence behind them.
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We already have the EEF, but they have a definite tendency to methodolatry. Something that is perfect for a PE lesson in a particular type of school becomes disastrous in a different subject or setting. There simply isn't one best way to do anything in teaching, though there are plenty of bad ways.
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Whilst I absolutely agree that we should have trustworthy, evidence based guidance, any implementation would need to take account of a few potential difficulties.
Teaching is inherently much messier than medicine. Yes, there are some predictable aspects, but many more sources of potential variation.
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Oh, absolutely. That's why I think, on balance, I am hoping Disney win this one. There's a way for smaller players to stay in, and at least creators get to keep their rights. There are many problematic aspects of IP, but if it doesn't exist, creators can't make a living.
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Some of the rest of the original cast might be a little harder to get on board...
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Is this a good thing? Well, not great, as it will lead to the few huge corporations with stacks of IP hoarding it and maybe paying a pittance for the rights to use other input data. But it's a bit less crap than where we are going, which is that creators get nothing and AI bros steal their labour.
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It is absolutely a power play, and they will have people who have run the numbers and reckon this is the best way to become dominant in the AI training game. Politicians seem intent on allowing AI to be built without paying the creators of the training material, and Disney want to keep theirs.
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Oh, absolutely not. Any large corporation, by its very nature, will act purely to enrich its shareholders. It's just that on occasion that motivation actually leads them to do something that benefits others as a side effect.
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"Valued in" is a slippery concept, especially with new tech firms. It doesn't mean they have the sort of ready cash and stock of IP lawyers on retainer that Google and Microsoft do.
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Expensive as their lawyers are, I can't see them being able to win a case that establishes that you can't train your models on other people's IP and then claim they can do that. They have such a massive store of IP that they can train their models without stealing it.
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And it must be nice for Disney's lawyers to be on the side of good for a change...
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Incidentally, I graduated in 1993. Well, for the first time. I just hung around gathering more letters after my name for the rest of the decade.
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Yeah, I was in my 20s in the 90s, and I had read LotR as a teenager. It was definitely the predominant reference point for FRPG players in my circles in the 80s, the one thing you could be sure everyone had read, though there were plenty of others that most of us had.
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I love how they actually name "Eastlandia".