4.2

In James' chapter on attention the main ideas are that attention is necessary to learn, can only be sustained when interest is present, and requires teachers to keep students' active attention during instruction.  One idea that stuck out to me in this chapter was the idea of needing to block out extraneous sensory input to maintain attention.  James says when discussing individual differences in being able to sustain attention, "In others we must suppose the margin to be brighter, and to be filled with something like meteoric showers of images, which strike into at random, displacing the focal ideas, and carrying association in their own direction" (p. 56-57).  I feel like this is a beautiful way of describing the experience of children with ADHD, Autism, or Sensory Processing Disorders who simply cannot block out extraneous stimuli to attend to what is important.  I was reminded of a student at the elementary school I am placed in who was having difficulty during his science lab special time.  The science teacher keeps several animals in the room, one of which eats crickets.  In the middle of a complete melt down, the student was able to articulate to a teacher that he could not attend in science because the "crickets were driving him crazy."  He was unable to block out the sound of crickets chirping and attend to the science lesson.  The constant pull on his attention in multiple directions caused him great distress.

In James' chapter on apperception the main idea is how information comes into the mind and what happens to the information once it is in the mind.  James connect the idea back to reactions when he said, "Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with other materials already there, and finally producing what we call our reaction" (p. 77).  This idea of instant connections being made reminds me of how my toddler makes connections from things her perceives, even when those connections are inaccurate.  For example, he attends a class at Gymboree once a week.  He has been going for several months now.  He has become familiar with the sensory input of the views along the way to Gymboree.  Now, anytime we pass near there, he asks if we are going to Gymboree.  He cannot read street signs and does not know how to navigate the city, but the sight of a certain building or set of buildings activates a connection for him.  I also find this quote interesting in looking how it could relate to students with slower processing speeds as we see in children with ADHD or intellectual disabilities.  I wonder if the time it takes from the input to the drafting in a direction is slower or if the making of a connection is what is slower resulting in slower reaction times.