Adolescent Attention

It has been awhile for this blog. A long while. So long in fact, that I have rethought the scope of the blog and will focus on education issues for the time being. Basically, I am going to try and self-apply the adage of teachable moments to my own life and take instances from my 6th grade English class and build some larger understandings from which I can benefit. It is mostly just a place for me to make some sense of my teaching experience, but perhaps somewhere along the way other teachers can benefit as well.
One thing that has yet to cease to impress me has been the ability of my 6th graders to ask off-topic questions. There I am, trying to explain the difference between a subject and an object when up pops a hand. I am taken by surpirse and excited that this student is so engaged in grammatical technicalities, and I eagerly call on him. Almost without fail, I receive a question abou the duration and timing of lunch, a question about when the student can get a new ID badge, or when they can get another copy of their locker combination.
It is the first few weeks of school, so part of me understands the preoccupation with logistical questions like these. But this is not a beginning of the year type thing, these questions persist through the year. These types of questions, despite my best efforts to teach content in an engaging, relevant way, give such an accurate look into what is happening in the 6th grade mind. These questions come from the same place that cause 6th graders to not be able to remember their homework, but they can remember to remind their parents to take them to the store so they can make their locker look like a living room (see picture). These questions come from the same place in the tween brain that cause field trip permission forms to be turned in with their parents' signatures twice as fast as their report cards with those same signatures.
Consistently, these questions incite the rest of the class to feel like it is their turn to ask their own off-topic questions, and it takes some serious mental wrangling to corral the class back where it needs to be. While frustrating in the heat of the action, in retrospect these moments make me smile. The window into the tween mind is one into which few desire to peer, but I find it endlessly entertaining. I believe these are good kids, who are trying their best, and that bahavior is communcation. They are not consciously avoiding learning (usually), they are just reacting to the development of their 6th grade brains that are telling them to worry more about these non-academic details that our current curricular focus. They are communcating to me what concerns them most at that moment, and if I am doing my job well, then that information is beneficial.
A brain that is anxious about whether they will have enough time to go to their locker and get through the lunch line to get the "good" cookies, is just a brain in flux. I choose to embrace the flux. Their focus in not misguided, they can't help where their brains take them. My goal is to use their focus on the non-academic to get them to think about the academic. Whether that is making literary examples about the trials and tribulations of Middle School, or to hooking them into the lesson with a youtube video about Harry Potter, I choose not fight what would be a losing battle against their brain development. If we can love our kids where they are, and do everything we can to bring them along, then we are on the way to being successful.