HOW TO CURE THE EVER INCREASING ATTENTION SPAN CRISIS
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I am no longer a voice in the wilderness when it comes to urging teachers to teach students to maintain attention. I’ve found a partner. Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and has written an opinion piece about the ever-increasing attention deficits among our young people. Here is an excerpt from the professor’s article.
“The key point for teachers and principals and parents to realize is that maintaining attention is a skill. It has to be trained, and it has to be practiced. If we cater to short attention spans by offering materials that can be manged with short attention spans, the skill will not develop. The “attention muscle” will not be exercised and strengthened. It is as if you complain to a personal trainer about your weak biceps, and the trainer tells you not to lift heavy things.
Just as we don’t expect people to develop their biceps by lifting 2 pound weights, we can’t expect them to develop their attention by reading 140 character tweets, 200 word blog posts or 300 word newspaper articles.
In other words, the “short attention” phenomenon is something of a self-fulfilling prophesy. First, we tell