Time fell away and by chance there I was back in the day (Roy Harper)

Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash

Memory.

This week, I was asked for a memory of a time when communication became distorted. I responded with an incident that happened about 35 years ago (the incident isn't important any more. It was 35 years ago!)

My memory is pretty vivid for that moment though. Still.

Oh okay. Here it is:

In 1989 while teaching in Nelson, I was on a school camp. A guide and I had taken students up a mountain and while there discovered a student had brought marijuana along. The guide and the student returned to base camp, while I waited and came down off the mountain with the rest of the students. When I got back to base camp some time later I rang my wife who told me she knew everything as a local newspaper had already published a story which contained many inaccuracies. Basically, their angle was blaming the teachers, asking what we were doing while this was going on and basing their story on the testimony of the student and his parents. I was incensed and spoke to the Principal, desperate to get our 'truth' out there. He told me that we couldn't win with a 'he said, she said' battle with the newspaper. So the sense of injustice lingers. He was right btw - no way to win against the press.

But is all that accurate? Although the memory can play tricks, it's certainly as I remember it.

The brain acts as a promiscuous encoding device (Oliver Hardt)

Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash

The brain is amazing. 

To remember, the brain must actively forget (I recommend reading the whole article).

Oliver Hardt notes that at night many people can recall even the most mundane events of their day in detail, but then they forget them in the following days or weeks.

The reason, he thinks, is that the brain doesn’t know straight away what is important and what isn’t, so it tries to remember as much as possible at first, but gradually forgets most things. “Forgetting serves as a filter,” Hardt said. “It filters out the stuff that the brain deems unimportant.”

In the southern hemisphere generally, and NZ specifically, we're into the second week of a study break between terms.

After we return, students will have roughly 4 weeks to prepare for external exams.

How much will they remember from the last weeks of Term 3, let alone from pre-lockdown, or during our Alert Level 4 Lockdown?

Our outdated, no longer fit for purpose, rationale for having external exams needs re-examining at least and, hopefully, abolishing in my brain's opinion.