Lots of people these days are saying that there is learning loss and that we need to be concerned about it.

In fact, Katie Pekel claims just one principal has received 30 emails just about learning loss from people really concerned about it.

That principal must have good spam filters in place.

These people are actually businesses preying on the fear that administrators and teachers have about what this pandemic is doing to kids.

When we assume kids have gaps in their learning, we are missing one key point:

A single child cannot have gaps in her learning.

Every child’s learning is complete where it is, because learning is a highly personal activity.

Even learning in school is highly personal.

A child may have gaps in her learning according a preconceived notion that doesn’t take into account her abilities, dispositions, skills, strengths, weaknesses, trauma, socio-economic status, or many other variables.

In our system of prescriptive, data-driven education, we falsely believe that if a student doesn’t learn in exactly the way we prescribe, they haven’t learned at all.

There is no learning loss because kids haven’t been inside the four walls of a school.

Guess what? Kids are still learning. Every. Single. Day. Because that is what kids do. Actually, kids and adults learn every single day.

To assume that learning only happens or matters when schools direct it is the height of arrogance and just plain wrong. 

This belief is damaging to our students, to their families, and to our educational system as a whole.

Did teachers have learning gaps because they didn’t know how to teach during a pandemic? No.

You see, when a person learns something, they are ready for the next thing to learn. It’s really quite simple.

When a child learns that 2+2=4, they are ready for the next thing to learn.

Maybe that is 3+2=5.

Maybe it is what a noun is.

Maybe it is how to soothe their crying sibling.

Maybe it is how to read a new word.

Maybe it is 2+2+2=6.

Maybe it is 2+x=4

Maybe it is that they better not wake up their mamma, because she is going to be mad, even if they are excited to share that they learned something new.

Our educational system gets it wrong by grouping everything into subjects and teaching it linearly.

Learning isn’t linear.

I scribbled this image in October of 2019 illustrating what learning actually looks like.

In schools, we think it is a straight line. In reality, it is a jumbled mess that goes in all different directions. 

Our school system needs to start valuing the unique way every single human being learns.