Back to Basics: Private Charities, Tutors & Mathematics Challenges are Beating the State on Maths Education.

Those of us in the trade have long known that the quality of maths education in NZ was in decline, before it became news headlines and a political issue. So years ago, a Charity I help run started awarding prizes for Maths teachers. Good Maths teachers have a big range of employment opportunities outside teaching - making the salaries they receive in schools often unattractive. The least we could do was offer them Best Maths Teacher Prizes. In 2017 we gave our inaugural Kalman Teacher Excellence Prize to Subash Chandar at Ormiston Junior College in South East Auckland. Today he features on the front page the NZ Herald:

"By day, Subash Chandar is in the classroom, teaching maths to Year 7 to 10 pupils at Ormiston Junior College. By night, he switches on his computer, logs into his YouTube channel infinityplusone and goes live for some of his 52,000 subscribers, tuning in as Chandar K. He solves maths problems, goes over NCEA curriculums & talks viewers through previous exams. Another 8,000 follow him on Instagram; 4,000 on TikTok. This time of year is particularly busy, with thousands of Kiwi teens across the country preparing for end-of-year NCEA exams".

In addition to winning our Kalman Charity Prize in 2017, another private Charity, this time Australia based, gave him their National Excellence in Education Award in 2019. Now we're helping fund the South & West Auckland Maths Challenge (SAMC). Josephina Tamatoa and Katalina Ma are the brainchilds behind it. They say "The ‘trends in international mathematics & science study’ (TIMSS) scores for Aotearoa paint a bleak picture. This initiative gives students opportunity & fosters belief in their potential as mathematicians. The success of SAMC and the follow up success of Māori & Pacific students in Mathex regionally is a prime example of what happens when you instill confidence in communities".

But its not for private charities to sustain all of these activities - the Nats, ACT & NZ First better reward maths teachers way more, or there wont be any left. Some Best Maths Teacher Prizes & the "South Auckland Maths Challenge" aren't enough to turn it around, by a long way.

Sources:

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/ncea-exams-maths-teacher-and-infinityplusone-youtube-channel-founder-on-helping-kiwi-teens/BK53IVUHUJCQPLTWB4N7U5JPOE/

Mr Bean - oops, RBNZ Governor Orr - is in Washington - lecturing on how to conduct monetary policy.

Labour's former Ministers and appointees are on a roll. Grant Robertson has returned to Otago University, where he spent much of his student days playing politics at the Union, but is now the Boss. Meanwhile Ms. Ardern is lecturing the world how to do pandemics. Harvard University characterizes her as follows, "She drew widespread praise [in NZ] for her leadership style .. she faced some protests against her vaccine policy during the COVID pandemic, but earned broad support for strict lockdown & public health policies". Its a good (brand) line, ".. some protests". These days, Harvard won't let a good "narrative" get in the way of truth. The Occupation of Parliament Grounds - never happened.

Now its RBNZ Governor Orr's turn. He's given a lecture in Washington this week on how to do monetary policy during pandemics. Mr Orr pulled off an amazing feat. How do we know? He told us so - saying “we're now in a situation where we can provide the perspective of an economy returning to low & stable inflation, interest rates becoming less restrictive, and economic activity being revitalized. But that is just the most recent navigational plot on the ocean chart". In Orr's Central Bank Fiefdom where he sits as King Frog, his preferred male comparison is Demi God Maui. Its just no-one in NZ knows our "economic activity is being revitalized" - we're one of the worst performing economies in the world, according to the IMF (which he's visiting). Our GDP is stagnant; GDP per capita is falling. As for interest rates, they're still high. As for how the RBNZ navigates oceans, this is what Orr told Bloomberg in 2021, before inflation took off in 2022, 2023 and 2024, as reported on DownToEath.Kiwi:

"Inflation is a very different beast today than it was in the 1970s, giving central banks the confidence to look through a short-term spike in prices .. The fear of the 70s, the 80s, stagflation, it is such a different world . There is a single global price for so many of the raw materials, the intermediate inputs and the final consumer goods. We google that, we are prepared to wait .. Central banks today are therefore prepared to wait longer because they're more confident that we have stable inflation expectations, we have a much more flexible set of pricing, we have less of that generalized inflation.

In 2021, according to Governor Orr, there would only be a short term "spike in prices" - no high "generalized inflation" after the pandemic. And though unemployment is surging in NZ, he assured us no such occurrence should be feared, since "Its a different world now". Stagflation no longer exists, apparently. Good luck to Mr. Orr with his lectures at the IMF .. and to Ardern with her lectures about how she unites, not divides .. and to Robertson as he does on-the-job-training as to how to be a VC. And good luck to Hipkins as he plots his political come-back by erasing memories.

Sources:

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/announcements/jacinda-ardern-appointed-hks-fellowship