Why can’t you pay attention anymore?

This interview with Dr. Edward Hallowell hits home on a number of levels, first because I’m the king of multitasking for better and, more often, for worse. Second, because it’s an issue we deal with in the classroom all the time.

Students today — and this could simply be my misperceptions of some sort of pre-Internet golden age, when I went to school (haven’t we all heard that one before?) — seem to have a harder time getting big chunks of reading done for our classes, or wrapping their minds around some of the big theoretical concepts we discuss in our core “Critical Approaches to Literature” course here at UVM. Did I complain as much about having to read large novels or difficult works of literary theory? Probably… but I think that our attention spans (mine too) have changed significantly over the last 10 years.