A Hard Thing to Measure

How was your break from school? You’re back there now, right? I wonder if any of you took road trips. And now that you’re back at school, you’re counting the days until Christmas.

First, though, you need to get through this term. For Aussie kids, that means end-of-year assessments. Those pesky times when your teacher drops tests and quizzes on you. And you have to show them, tell them, or prove that you’ve learned something this year.

You know what? You have learned something. You’ve learned that finding out how much you’ve learned is a hard thing to do.

Have you grown taller? Most likely. Did you feel yourself growing taller? No, you didn’t. How do you know you grew taller? Your mum told you. Or someone else said, ‘My, you’ve grown!’

Your home could be like mine when I was a kid. My mum put marks on a wall to show how tall we were growing. Over the years, it was easy to see the changes.

Your learning is a hard thing to measure. It's more complicated than measuring height. You can’t feel your learning growing.

Your brain has created new pathways that connect things you’ve learned. But you wouldn't notice it unless you looked at your brain with a microscope. Even then, you wouldn’t know which remembering or learning you were looking at.