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You can find previous Brain Dumps here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12.

It is now the closing days of the first trimester teaching period... and I just have one single last assignment to complete this week. Unfortunately, it is one of these tricky ones where we have to address and describe and justify various teaching standards and strategies. In itself, it isn't such a bad idea... except that the assignment is pretty unclearly defined and all the standards seem to all run into each other and be full of jargon crap.

Knowledge
integration

Lessons regularly
demonstrate links between
and within subjects and key
learning areas.

Tasks require students to
build from an understanding
of the links between and
within subjects and key
learning areas

The above description is the description for knowledge integration which is one of the strategies under the Quality Learning framework for Australia. Much like alot of the marking rubrics that I've seen... it is this sort of meaningless tail eating writing that pervades much of the humanities (as I've have now come to experience).

The second part is how lessons demonstrate Knowledge integration, and the last section is how students demonstrate knowledge integration. Like much of this stuff... it is just copy and paste and change the "doing" words... but it still doesn't really describe what it is exactly. Well, this one isn't so bad as it is pretty obvious what Knowledge integration is...

Now, all the learning strategies are pretty importnat... and even more so when you are talking about classroom management. But the high level descriptions are at best "carrot up the bum" sort of writing.

Linking knowledge across subjects and topics is a great thing... but I figured that everyone would do that anyway! Apparently not, and there are billions of academic papers that are written about how it is a good idea.... duh... okay, maybe billions is an exaggeration. To me it boils down to a single question: Do topics exist in a silo with no relevance to anything else?

... but I guess that people need to have jobs that are generated by writing meaningless crap. Which reminds me of a Freakonomics double podcast that I recently listened to... where they started to analyse the actual effect sizes of online and TV advertising. Surprisingly enough, the effect size (near zero) didn't reflect the gigantic pools of money that were being poured into advertising accounts! But I guess no-one wants to know about that... because, jobs.

So, back to the assignment... I was looking at a couple of the exemplars that we were provided, as I was getting a little bit stuck in how I was going to address the questions. It felt like I was transported into a mess of acronym gobbledy-gook mixed with incomprehensible sentences and words with a smattering of referencing that broke up the natural reading of what survived. It felt a lot like this...

... so, is this how people experience normal jobs?

Anyway, the thing was about how to link Knowledge Integration into our Unit of Work (a series of lessons). My series was on Space Exploration and the Solar System, and so I was thinking about Pale Blue Dot, Golden Record and linking that back to the humanities and reflecting on society and humankind. So, that artifacts and observations from Science have some relevance to human society...

... the exemplar? How students can find triangles in buildings...

Perhaps I'm overthinking this assignment...

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