Headmaster's Weekly Newsletter -- Week 20

Because our senses constantly provide so much simultaneous information, we cannot pay attention to everything our ears hear, our eyes see, our skin feels etc, at once. Like our email servers, one of the primary functions of our brains is to filter out what is important from what is spam.  As a result, we listen to less than we hear, we watch less than we see.  

 

All this brings me to a pair of invisible gloves. They are beautiful quilted black gloves which are happily residing on a window ledge in the main corridor outside the theatre. All of us walk by these gloves, multiple times, every day. Crystal has cleaned around them hundreds of times. Students leave stuff beside them. But no one sees these gloves. Or maybe they do, and like so many other things in our lives, they are left alone, untouched, unclaimed, unworn. 

 

I first noticed them in December. They are similar to Christmas gloves I ordered on Amazon for Belinda. I figured someone would claim them soon enough but here we are in February and they are still there. Part of me wonders if they always will be, like the books beside my bed which have not moved in years, or the spare socks in my hockey bag which I have been carrying around since 1995 and never worn.

 

It has been said that studying something inevitably changes what is being studied. The Hawthorne Effect describes how people and animals change their behaviour when they are aware of being observed. I wonder if the gloves will change their behaviour now that their presence is known? Or, more likely, will the students and staff at KES change their behaviour around the gloves?  I wonder if I am being responsible writing about them. Could this newsletter be putting these gloves at risk?