How do you measure eternity?

Why are teachers so frantic? One reason is that they went into teaching for one thing, and discovered it was something else. Edward Burton got me thinking about this in his comment on a previous post about the measurement community, which you should really go and read.

Meanwhile, a Henry Adams quote, though usually taken out of context, comes to mind:

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where their influence stops.”

Henry Adams 1938-1918.

Whether you take that positively, or negatively (as it was first written), it is the fact that measuring eternity is a very hard thing to do.

And surely here’s the problem.

Teachers go into teaching expecting to positively affect children’s lives. They want to teach them so that they can have better futures. But when they get into teaching they find that they are measured half termly on arbitrary progress numbers that have more to do with performance than learning. They find they are given a raft of non-negotiables that they have to comply with. As Edward Burton points out:

Things which are easy to see are easier to measure.

And so managers measure the easy stuff and forget that the true measure of a child’s education is what that child is doing in twenty years time, or the kind of person they are forty years from now, or their impact on eternity.

And you can’t measure that stuff.

It’s no wonder that we’re frantic. Desperately trying to meet goals that we don’t believe in. Desperately trying to prove that we’re doing a good job. Distraught at our lack of perfection. Frantic.

 

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