4. Schrödinger’s undead cat

Photo by Eberhard Grossgasteiger on unsplash

Schrödinger was a bit of an egghead. Not many people understood his theories. He came up with a weird idea in the 1930s that we're still trying to figure out today. You see, there's something in physics called quantum indeterminacy (put quantum in front of anything, and people will think you're a genius). Quantum indeterminacy describes that moment when you don't know where a particle is, until you can observe it. But once you observe it, you can't really be sure of how fast it's travelling. So you're stuffed. You're going around in circles, because it's the Catch-22 of physics. Which reminds me - where are my car keys?

Schrödinger needed to explain his complex idea simply so that even simple folk like you and I could understand it. So he suggested that if you locked a cat in a box with something that might kill it (a radioactive atom, or a burger from a well known fast-food brand), no-one would know if the cat was dead or alive until the box was opened again. So, the cat was (in a sense) both "dead and alive" while the box was locked.

This is absolute nonsense of course, because the cat would know, and anyway it's not possible to be dead and alive at the same time unless you're Dracula.

And what did Erwin Schrödinger have against cats anyway? They can be arrogant little @$%!s at the best of times, but they don't deserve to locked inside boxes with only poisonous substances to keep them company. But before you phone the animal protection people, we have to remember that this was just a thought experiment (although I still think he secretly hated cats).

There is also indeterminacy in education. Often, teachers don't know whether a child has learnt something or not - unless they observe them either saying it, doing it or writing it. We call this assessment. But let me put this out there - how much do teachers really need to know about a child's progress? Sometimes children learn things that don't need to be assessed. Sometimes children learn things that can't be observed or measured. Sometimes children learn things that haven't been taught. The teacher may never know the child has learnt it, but the child knows. And sometimes, that may be all that matters.

So what are you going to do about it? Lock the child up in a box? Or in other words, regularly test them to the point they begin to hate and fear school because of all the stress it causes them? Testing is a bit like uprooting a plant every other week to check on how much it has grown. The quantum indeterminacy of education is that you can either regularly test children, or you can stand back and let them grow. We need to think outside the box. Assessment can be done without stress, because there are many alternatives to testing - and there's more than one way to skin a cat.

If you get my drift.

Next time: Frankenstein's well-meaning monster

Previous posts in this series
1. Pavlov's drooling dog
2. Chekhov's smoking gun
3. Occam's bloody razor


Schrödinger’s undead cat by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's