You’ve read the same article multiple times for multiple different classes. I don’t want this to be a negative comment, I love re-reading articles and find it a great way to learn something you didn’t learn the first time (or the second, or third). Pencils to Pixels is one of those article for me. I can’t remember all the classes I’ve read this for, but as soon as I saw the name I remembered previous discussions I had about it. Though I value re-reading I am choosing to ignore this paper for the topic of tonights discussion. I’m going to focus on my uncertainties within our other reading for the week, Hyper and Deep Attention, which is something that is all over our news today and as a teacher am often asked about.
I know my mother isn’t the only who thinks I am crazy for jumping from one task to another at the tip of a hat. I’ve always been one of “those kids”, my mother got multiple diagnoses from teachers saying I needed to be medicated. This conversation about ADD and ADHD was in the paper throughout, and I found it refreshing that she seemed relatively against artificial chemical intervention. I struggle a lot when it comes to doing school work and it typically takes me twice as long as some of my friends, but I feel that I am a pretty good student and I question whether I would feel that way if my parents had chosen to put me on medicine. First question would be how many other people feel they are more hyper attention? Do you feel that technology and media is what caused you to be that way as the article begins to discuss on page 193.
Now, I admit I have hyper attention tendencies, I also can be extremely attentive. When I read novels, I fall into a world that isn’t my own and I read a book front to cover in two days. When I am writing I fall into another world. I write for hours at a time and don’t stop to think about anything over than what I’m doing. I think that this is a great skill to have, but can also be damaging. I once was late for work because I didn’t want to put the book I was reading down. I’ve had to pull over while driving because I got a great idea for a poem and I end up sitting and writing for a half an hour making my road trip a little pushed back. So my second question is – how many of you can see a little bit of both styles within yourselves? Do you enjoy this? Would you rather have one over the other? If so, why?
Overall, I’m curious about how you all feel about this topic and college. Do you think that there are ways both styles independently can work well in higher education? Can it hurt higher education? I personally feel that success stories don’t come around often enough in this topic but I feel as though they are all around us. I personally know that I struggle with some of the things she mentioned in her article, however, I am about to graduate undergrad and go into a masters program (hopefully, fingers crossed everybody)! I don’t want to brag, but I feel as though more of these stories need to shine and I hope if someone has one they are willing to share!
P.S. I don’t want anyone to feel they have to label themselves in this article. I was simply labeling myself for easy transitions back and forth between the article! I thought sharing my story would help let others open up if they share similar issues, but if not that is absolutely fine! Or if there is someone who is offended by something I wrote please feel free to communicate that with me, I am by no means a master at this topic just something I wanted to discuss for the evening.
Let’s talk (:
I think I agree with your comment that we have multiple types of attention. Sometimes I feel myself jumping back and forth from one task to another quickly and sometimes I feel that I could focus on one particular task for hours at a time without switching focus.
I’m not sure if one particular type of thinking is better than another in all instances, but there are definitely certain times when very focused attention is necessary. I would think that doing a long math problem would require intense focus for long periods of time, but when students are overwhelmed with a lot of work sometimes it might be good to switch attention. One particular assignment on the list may more frustrating than others, and knowing when to break focus and move on to something else for a while is important for maintaining sanity during a difficult week of the semester.
I do agree with you also that not being able focus on a particular task for a long time can hinder schoolwork and lead to longer periods of time needed to complete work. I don’t think this necessarily affects the quality of the work; it just takes longer to get the same quality as others with better focus. As long as we each figure out how long we need to properly complete different types of assignments (which hopefully we can help our students with as future teachers) everyone has the chance to produce great work.
I can share a success story in progress on hyper attention (or at least I hope it’s one…).
I agree that people have both types of thinking, but for most of my life I definitely skewed predominately toward deep thinking, which helped tremendously in school–I could focus on my work and get it done without much distraction.
About three years ago, however, I started to express the symptoms of bipolar disorder, which has drastically altered my ability to think deeply, sometimes to the point of me not being able to do this at all. Frequently I experience hypomania, which is a lot like having way too much caffeine–my thoughts race, I’m interested in everything at once, want to do everything all in the same minute, and can’t focus on anything. I can be in this mode for hours or days. This makes it difficult to do deep thinking projects such as reading a book or article or writing.
Medication can help to an extent, but the efficacy of these drugs can be as unpredictable as the fluctuations of the disorder itself.
What I do to get through particularly bad or long phases is to engage the hyper attention instead of fight it. I won’t force myself to sit down for hours and read a book if my mind is having an internal rave. I will read a paragraph or sentence at time, if that’s all I can do, and alternate with another task–a sentence of reading here, a sentence of writing there. It can take much much longer than normal, but assignments can eventually come together.
It also helps to create a lot of external noise–I feel that it gives the racing, interested part of mind something to focus on while the calm, deep thinking part can work. Television works the best because there’s a lot of variance in sounds–different character’s voices, sound effects, and volume levels.
These measures don’t always work, but I use to not have any way to get through school while dealing with this issue.
Since I am now taking the time to think about why I am responding to the posts I do, I am going to answer my own question: “Why do I respond to Elyse’s blog posts, almost every week?” My answer is, because Elyse uses the same humor in her blog posts as I do in mine. It’s funny, it’s like we are talking aloud, while typing. Therefore, are we actually funny, and is it actually considered humor if the words are empty and have no emotion behind them? How can black words, on a white screen be humorous? (Well, black words on a cream colored screen in the case of our blog…) The computer isn’t laughing at us like people do when they hear us say something funny. Therefore, I laugh at myself when I type, thinking ‘Kristie, you are so clever and actually that was super funny,’ when in reality, is anyone else really laughing? Or going to laugh? I don’t know the answer to that, so whatever. You mention the idea that you jump from one thing to another, and I do this all the time, in a different way. I’m going to introduce a new idea, cleaning is literacy. You may ask, ‘How?’ and I’ll say, “Because in my eyes, it needs to be learned.” Okay, maybe I’m a little too particular; actually I am a little too particular. When I clean, every single day, I jump from task to task, half completing it, moving on to clean something else, and then returning to complete the second half. I get so side tracked when cleaning because everything needs to be cleaned and nothing is cleaned and it all needs cleaned right NOW NOW NOW!
Let me take this intermission to conclude that I am crazy.
Anyhow, when I clean, I have a very particular way of doing so. When I make my little brother’s bed, I make sure the sheets are all the same length, tucked in nicely, the pillows are stacked neatly at the head of the bed, the throw blankets are all folded. Task complete. When I hesitantly attempt to ask my little brother to make his own bed, because maybe I am too tired to, he goes into his room, picks up all the covers and pillows off the floor, throws them on his bed. Task complete.
WHAT.
For serious right now?! You did not just make your bed, you attempted to make view of your floor, now make your damn bed. So I proceed to become pissed off because my twenty year old brother doesn’t know how to make his bed and I can only ask him so many times before I have to do it how I want it done, so I just end up making the stupid bed myself; then I realize, I need to communicate. If I simply walked him through a proper bed making process, then maybe we wouldn’t have this fight every day, (I wouldn’t have this fight with myself every day?). Therefore, since I’ve rambled enough, you can understand how cleaning is a form of literacy. My brother has proven to me that cleaning is a task that needs to be learned. That was completely off topic.
I am with you 100% Elyse. Growing up I was off the walls. My first and second grade teachers both wrote home to my parents because they were worried that I had ADD/ADHD. Luckily my mom and dad decided that it was that I was a 7 year old boy that was the root of my hyperactivity and not ADD. I feel like the idea of deep concentration has been so romanticized and reinforced by older generations that I almost feel ashamed at times for being more hyper attentive.
I feel like to be a great student you should have a little bit of each kind of attention. As you were saying I can get through a novel or a reading if I’m really interested in no time flat, but that’s not all there is to education. After hearing what Valerie had to say in class I really started to see that even though these kids had a ton of crazy ideas, they managed to sift through them and come to an agreement and create something awesome.
Each attention certainly has a time and a place, and all of use certainly lean one way or another in this subject, but I don’t feel that there is necessarily any reason why both types shouldn’t be considered and capitalized in the classroom.
I’m interested in how teachers would be able to capitalize on both types of thinking in the classroom when the strategies to engage these different types of thinking are different–how do you design a class that touches on both deep and hyper thinking without making a mess of the topic?
As frequently mentioned in the reading, the class discussion, and these posts, reading a book requires deep thought, what way can that be ramped up to hyper without losing important engagement with the text?
Oddly enough, I think I was (or still am) just like you, in terms of hyper-activity, but also very different. A lot of my friends were diagnosed with ADD/ADHD when we were young and their parents made the decision to medicate them. It seemed so odd that we all acted the same, but some were “chosen” to be special. I think what set me and other people in my classes was that we were very quiet. I was an especially quiet kid along with many of my close friends. However, put us in the woods behind our house or in a creek next to the school, and we would be as hyper-attentive as they get. Usually the outwardly hyper-attentive kids would get in trouble for not respecting the teachers, so my friends and I learned to seem more “deeply-attentive” when adults were around. In reality, we were off in our own worlds while the teacher praised us for being so attentive.
Being in higher education, it is definitely more beneficial to be deeply attentive. Universities are basically designed so we can absorb a lot of information in a short period of time. I have a notion that deep-attention helps develop meaning, while hyper-attentive develops creativity. Unfortunately, I usually have to develop creativity skills on my own in college, while my development of meaning stands at the front.