A grade 12 rhizomatic learner's journal entry

The questions Dave Cormier asks in week 1 of #rhizo15 are lived, explorative questions for me.

Below is a journal entry from a student who was in the learn-whatever-you-want pilot year of a hastily undesigned we-don't-know-where-we-are-going learning experiment that I started five years ago in a rural high school.

I had started this week like every other week, working on the Classics, and then I started to think. I was connecting myths to what I was learning and then I started thinking about fate and freewill. Somehow, I'm not quite sure how, this led me to thinking about ghosts and how maybe they aren't spirits of dead people, but people on other planes, reminding me of a book called A Crack in the Line where every decision splits off into its own alternate reality. From this, I made the leap to time and how if all decisions split into an alternate reality would they eventually come together into one? If fate exists that would be the case. But if fate doesn't exist there is no reason for any of the planes or realities to come together because why would the two realities face the same decision? i.e. A person in reality 1 (P1) must make the decision to go to war or stay at home. The decision is made to go to war but an alternate reality is created in which they stayed home. Now the person who went off to war has decisions such as, do I shoot this person? etc. There's no reason for the same person who stayed home to have to decide between shooting someone or not shooting someone. However, if for some unknown reason, the person in reality 2 (P2) did have to make the decision, and they made the same decision as P1, maybe the paths WOULD cross but not on the same plane, thus creating the illusion of a ghost. Or maybe their paths would only cross when both people were in the same place at the same time... Sort of like the Lake House idea except in the Lake House, the characters had crossed paths on the same plane once before and he was in the past and she was in the future. And they changed the future if I recall correctly. She told him not to be in the place he died during her time and saved his life in his time so that they were together in the past and therefore the future...? But what if dying was his fate? Or maybe saving him was her fate? Omigosh my brain hurts. Anyways, I was thinking about time and the future and the past and eventually all of this confusion led me to make a connection to String Theory, which is where I am now. 

With the objective being subjective, there was no way (or desire) to measure the learning here. If you don't know where you are going, how do you know when you get "there"? Subjective learning got done. Our struggle was that in creating a different way to do learning, we didn't have a way to fit it back into the system--not that we wanted to. The necessity of grades and credits, however, required a number.

It's the requirement for measurement and the certification--another kind of measurement--that requires the destination (objectives) to be pre-determined. The snake eating its tail.

So. Freed up? Yes. Free to be subjective. Free to reject objectives. Free to be lost. Free to not be in the mainstream. Free to unsettle the system. Free to experience backlash.
If we don't know where we're going, are we at least clear where we've been?