Attention Spans and Making Plans
First off, good news! I’ve been placed at a school (finally) for my practical experience subject. The school is extremely local to me (about 5min on the bus) and I’m hoping this will pan out well – although, I already know I’m going to have to tackle some problems. I’ll post more on this later. Right now, I’m supposed to be studying for my last exam (maths) and I realised that my attention span is really affecting how much I get done in a day. I get so distracted easily and my lecture material isn’t really helping me stay focused… It made me wonder how many other people experience this in my class. Is it the lectures, themselves, that are so boring so people tune out easily, or is it just me?
It also made me wonder how many other students experience this in the classroom. How would I be able to make a lesson where all students were engaged? I could do group work, but that could mean some students are left out for various reasons. I could try videos, practicals, making the students try at teach the class in a little “mock lesson”, but there are pros and cons to all of these ideas.
Above all, how do I keep my attention focused? I go on a lot of tangents and get easily distracted by other things – I gotta be a good role model for students, but it feels like I’m the complete opposite at the moment. Or maybe I’m thinking to hard about this. Maybe, I should make myself a plan on how to maintain my attention span.
1) A reward system for every time I stay focused for more than half an hour? 2) Doing things a different way? E.g. rather than reading through lecture material, I could make a video of myself pretending to be the lecturer and ‘teaching’ the content. 3) Collaborate with others?
- Problem with (1): short term, could start focusing on reward rather than content, won’t be as effective, can wear me down
- Problem with (2): time consuming, creative but could also end up with putting too much thought into the creativity of the task rather than the content of the task
- Problem with (3): could go off-task, “counter-task” – might get work done, but it might be time consuming if I am frequently distracted by others
I could even say this post is a distraction from my studies, but hey, we all gotta start somewhere, right?
Nonsense Writing 