Mathematics, 2nd year, background includes decades of theatre design, technology and production including creating interactive software and working with embedded systems, since then a degree with pure maths and a computation major focussed on theory …. AI, algorithms and programming paradigms. Once upon a time, long long ago, I started a computer science degree … when mainframes and unix where still the bulk of computing, but digressed into audio, lighting and then video and projections. I remain very committed to open source software and hardware especially wrt learning and my own personal usage.

I view mathematics as deeply creative and about thinking, problem solving and understanding the world. As much part of philosophy, language and reasoning as some kind of toolbox for science and technology. Even as a toolkit much of the very procedural stuff in the senior curriculum misses the target … computing and serious physics depend on much more interesting, creative and challenging mathematical thinking of the kind almost ignored in school. What I have experienced in mathematics classrooms and school mathematics faculties appalls me. The second reading this week races though much of what I want to see in schools, but the absurd hype and suggestion that it is both new and will happen in a “long term” time frame of 5 years is ridiculous. Over the course of this degree I have come to believe that the kind of enquiry and project based approaches I have been engaged with in creative practice are very much appropriate for school, but that this depends on a type of engagement with school by student and family that is not widespread here, and can only work in a very much opt-in school, of the kind that have been operating for decades. Yet here they seem to be packaged with social values I could not live with. I have postponed prac till next semester and this semester hope to focus on where I could fit in education, and explore more the options available …. this subject is certainly part of this and I hope to explore the kinds of tools that will enable student enquiry based or project based schools, or even just the less radically different Dalton style programs that shift emphasis to independent student work and away from exclusively teacher led classrooms.