After donating hundreds of pounds of Clothing since 2021 and hundreds of Books in 2023, my efforts at decluttering our house have reached Paper, the third of Marie Kondo’s five sequential categories of stuff to discard (clothing, books, paper, miscellaneous items (basically everything else), and sentimental items).
Of course, tons of clothing and books have passed through to the Sentimental category, but that’s a bridge to cross and boxes to fill on another day. At some point, I will realize that the clothes that I will never again fit into and the books on IRT that I appear to have not yet opened have lost their sentimental value.
For now, my attention has turned to Paper – boxes, desk drawers, and file folders full of papers to be recycled, shredded, digitized and discarded, a relatively small amount to be donated, and once again, paper that falls (for now) into the Sentimental category. There have been tax forms and telephone bills, newspapers and magazines, greeting cards and correspondence, ticket stubs and Playbills, calendars and collectibles…
And there are class notes, lots and lots of class notes – beginning in high school, continuing through college, and then on to graduate school. [To those of you new to my blog, we have already had the hoarding and OCD discussions.]
Last week, my focus was on the two neatly arranged and carefully packed boxes containing my class notes from college. Boxes which at some point in the past 30 years had made the move from the corner of a closet in my parent’s house to our basement here in Maine.
As many of you know, I was a music major in college. Naturally then, the bulk of my binders contained notes from music classes. The required full year courses on theory and composition and the electives covering music from the Renaissance to the Romantic, and courses covering the lives and works of Bach and Beethoven.
There was music notation paper with a smattering of original “compositions” – I use that term very loosely – and composition exercises. There were hundreds of pages of hand-written notes and even greater hundreds of pages of photocopied musical pieces. As I opened each three-ring binder and quickly sifted through the papers before tossing them into the recycling bag I thought to myself,
Man, at one point in time I knew an awful lot about music.
Then I got to the graded blue books and class papers tucked into the back of each class folder. My thinking quickly shifted to
Man, at one point in time I was taught a lot about music.
In one folder, there were the photocopied class notes borrowed from a classmate after I missed two weeks of classes with a bad case of the flu. I read through her notes and compared them to mine. In my judgment, they differed from mine in neither quality nor quantity. We both heard the same lectures and noted the same key points.
She excelled and I didn’t.
She went on to an academic career in German and musicology, has published multiple books, received grants, and won awards for her work on the history relating music, the arts, and the writing of cultural history to ideological, political, social, and economic conditions, focusing twentieth-century Germany, Europe, and the United States.
I was a regular at Opening Night of the Boston Pops (pre-pandemic), attend Taylor Swift concerts, and listen to the oldies station.
By some point during my junior year of college, I had accepted that my future was not in music (performing or musicology). I completed my music course requirements in the fall semester of my senior year and began loading up on courses in education policy, statistics, and assorted social sciences. And you pretty much know the rest of the story.
Was her performance so much better than mine simply because she more engaged in the content area than I was? Definitely not, but if I had been more engaged in music, I probably could have closed the gap between us a little.
Lessons Learned or Not Learned
That waltz through three years of music notes started my mind meandering down the path of all of the other courses I took in high school, college, and graduate school. What lessons did I take with me as I progressed from one level to the next during my 20+ years of being educated? Then what knowledge and skills did I carry forward into the 40+ years in education that followed?
There was the mathematics knowledge and skills primarily gained in high school that I applied as a high school mathematics teacher in the 1980s. That application was probably a little too direct.
The writing course freshman year in college opened my eyes. That “how to write a paper” lecture during the first year of my master’s program stuck with me like glue.
For many of the courses, however, the connection (if there was one at all) to the rest of my life and career was much less direct. A snippet here. A nugget there.
What Comes Around Again and Again and Again
There were those topics, like most of those in my music courses, where the lessons and learning came around once and almost all of it slipped away as quickly as it came.
But there were also other topics that came back again and again and again.
Topics like statistics which I encountered first in high school (actually elementary school if you count basic probability and measures of central tendency), then in college, again during my master’s program in educational research, and again during my doctoral program in measurement and evaluation. The depth of the courses and my understanding increasing a little more each time around, then deepening even more as I began to use it on a daily basis.
At that point, I started thinking about a third category: learning that actually occurred, but was either not used, or used sparingly (e.g., speaking French on trips to Montreal).
Use it or Lose It?
Are knowledge and skills that were learned, but no longer used, learning lost? Or does that learning lie dormant in some form, like VZV, the varicella-zoster virus, ready to strike when you least expect it. [deep ominous voice] Shingles doesn’t care.
When I pick up a clarinet these days, my lip is gone, the notes are harder to read, and I have to dig deep for some of the fingerings, but the skill, significantly deteriorated, is still there. I’m not starting from scratch.
I thought about a meeting years ago in which one participant talked about being asked to recall German that he learned in high school. A lot of the vocabulary and specific rules might be “lost” he said, but he thought that the foundational framework for speaking German was still in place ready to be built upon.
Which led me to think about one of my best friends from Minnesota. He had joined the Air Force after high school and was a freshman undergraduate at the same time I was starting my doctoral program. During that fall semester, I tutored him for a few weeks in fairly basic Algebra until the math he learned in high school kicked back in. By the middle of his sophomore year, he had surpassed my expertise in mathematics. By his junior year, he was taking mathematics courses I never heard of, and he graduated with a degree in engineering. His math skills weren’t lost, they just needed to be rekindled.
From there, I started thinking about learning loss.
Learning Loss
Prior to the pandemic, most discussion of lost learning was related to summer learning loss. In the case of learning lost over the summer, in many cases, it just took a quick jumpstart to restore knowledge and skills that had not been used for a couple of months. In other cases, perhaps with skills which had not been as securely held to begin with, more instruction was needed.
When we consider learning loss and the pandemic, I’m certain that both of those situations apply.
In other cases, my guess is that learning appears lost simply because the students are not as engaged as they might have been prior to the pandemic. Or perhaps those students and schools are engaged in something different, as I was when I shifted from music toward educational research and evaluation. Is that the same kind of learning loss?
What about learning that was not lost, but never occurred because the learning opportunity was lost, or severely degraded during the pandemic? You cannot lose something that you never had, but you may miss having it down the road.
And what of the learning that has been lost?
What knowledge and skills will come back around again a second, third, or fourth time as students progress through and beyond high school? Is the curriculum and life still spiraled enough that the important lessons are repeated?
Are there any topics which are critical to all, or most, students that don’t usually come back around again?
Are there other topics that don’t usually come back around again that perhaps would have been nice to have, but really won’t be missed by most students? Or perhaps they can be picked up on the streets, via Instagram and TikTok, or by watching movies like Barbie and Oppenheimer.
A test score or two may tell us that student achievement in Reading and Mathematics is lower than it was in 2019, but a little higher than it was in 2022.
But it doesn’t tell us nearly enough about learning loss.
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 