This is an excerpt I found in a book I was reading. I thought it was very interesting and not surprising at all. It supports the idea when students begin to focus on preserving their grade-point average and 'getting ahead of everyone else', it diminishes the actual content of what they learn. Once they receive the desired grade, what they've learned is quickly forgotten in the pursuit of the next test or exam or paper. Here goes.

"Two groups of elementary students were asked to do some reading. One group was told that they would be tested on what they read and the other group was given no expectation of any test or evaluation. When both groups were tested, the group that expected the test demonstrated better rote memorisation but the group that had not expected the test showed better understanding of the concepts contained in the reading. Interestingly, the researchers returned a week later and tested the two groups again. As they expected, none of the children remembered as much as they had for the first test. Surprisingly though, the children who had originally expected to be tested had forgotten far more than the children who'd simply read the material without expecting to be tested."

I have to say, I remember getting completely stressed over my Year 12 exams when I was 17 but I remember hardly any of what I've learned. However, now that the kids and I are studying the human body, some of what I learned in my Year 12 biology class is coming back to me. I think it is such a weird feeling when something you appear to left behind in your dim, dark past comes flooding back. As I read the "Little House" series to Emma, the same thing is happening. With each chapter, I find myself anticipating what is going to happen to Laura and Mary in the next chapter, although I haven't read them for years. It's like having something saved on computer file, doing nothing, for years. The human brain truly must be an astounding organ.

We're having another blast of summer heat this March. A few days ago I took my two older children to pick strawberries at a nearby strawberry farm and preserve factory. There were fields and fields of them. We could smell the sweetness in the air whenever we breathed in. It cost us more than I usually pay for strawberries because they charge by the kilo and we were having so much fun, we probably picked more than I'd ever buy from the shop. Even Logan ended up enjoying himself although he complained at first about having to work "in this stinking heat." When we got home he immediately went into the backyard to tear around playing cricket, and when I pointed this out he said, "This isn't hard work." We've dipped the strawberries in chocolate, eaten them with sugar and cream or just dug into the pot. It was a nice thing to do while they're still in season.