Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that the thing people forget most often is the thing they are trying to do at the moment. Right now, you either know that this is a true statement because your mind already is thinking of something else or you are waiting a few moments to see if it is true. But you probably do recall a time when you lost track of the exact thing you thought you were doing. This sounds like, “Now, what was I doing?” Nietzsche’s observation is true. In fact, by the time you finish reading this brief piece more than half of your fellow readers will find that their minds have wandered off to something else and whatever Nietzsche wrote will have been forgotten. How apt!
Let’s apply Nietzsche to good teaching. What teachers do every day requires unbelievable episodes of complete concentration. Episodes. Few of us are able to sustain the level of thinking, listening, responding, analysis of ideas, and generation of quality conclusions all of the time. We do not use our mental “A” game every minute of the day; we cannot. However, we are at our “A” game level of focus a great deal of the time and these are the episodes of concentration that count when we are teaching.
Children in the classroom also experience episodic highs and lows of their concentration. A child’s mind wanders just like an adult mind wanders. So, Nietzsche reminds us to focus long enough to complete the episode of teaching we want to achieve – just long enough. Because we know that minds will wander, we need to use our skills to bring the concentration of the children we teach to an attentive focus, conduct the instruction they need to learn, check and reinforce that instruction, and move into practice activities when minds will do what they will do – wander a bit. We also need to back up to provide quality initial instruction for those children whose minds were not with us the first time.
Now, let’s apply this to good learning. We need to engage children and keep them engaged for the time it takes to achieve our learning objective. Probably we should think of child engagement looking like an old-fashioned roller coaster of ups and downs. Consider the amount of mental interactions a child receives in an hour at school. A child has dozens of conversations with classmates. She has in-class instructional activities, hallway conversations, cafeteria talk food servers and table mates, and playground interactions with many more children and other adults. She needs to meet her needs for lunch and nutrition and the need for bathroom breaks. On the upside, a teacher and child are cognitively together and engaged with the teacher’s objective. On the downside, reality touches both a teacher and a child and each must take moments to breath, let their minds expand to the places only their mind will go before the teacher begins to orchestrate the next up cycle.
Nietzsche helps us to understand that believing a child must be “on task” all of the time is not only unlikely but impossible. So, don’t measure “on task” as a time, but consider it as many times.
We know that all people, teachers and children, are vulnerable to wandering thoughts. Knowing that what Nietzsche wrote accurately applies to our abilities to focus and maintain a focus helps us to craft our work and capitalize on episodes when mental attention is riding high. Knowing Nietzsche also helps us to understand and accept those moments when our mind wanders and more importantly to understand that a student’s mind also can and does wander.