They Are Everywhere

James Parker

I don’t know about you, but I find motivators everywhere—in what I see daily while I am interacting with students, in facts I read in books and watch on the news, and in conversations with teachers and other administrators. 

Recently I read Stolen Focus by author and TED Talk speaker Johann Hari. As I read, I collected a few sobering thoughts on sustained attention, focus, reading, and interruptions that I believe could be motivating factors for our work teaching students to build reading stamina and focus. 

On reading: 

• Since the advent of the smartphone, pleasure reading has decreased 29 percent for women and 40 percent for men.
• 57 percent of Americans do not read a single book in a given year.
• A study by university researchers in Toronto found that the more novels you read, the more successful you are at empathy. 

As teachers, we have a direct way—and indeed an obligation—to improve these statistics by helping students develop a love of books and reading in our classrooms. How? We provide them the time for authentic reading. We model the love of reading by talking about the books we read and reading aloud to our students. We provide them the tools to pick a good-fit book, and we help them find the books they enjoy.

On stamina and focus: 

• A study from Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you are interrupted while focusing on something, it will take you 23 minutes on average to get back to the same state of focus.

We can help with this one too! In our classrooms we teach our students to build stamina and ignore distractions. These skills will carry them through and create adults who have more focus and stamina for the projects they are working on. 

The points from this book are alarming, and we can use them to fuel our desire and inform our practice moving forward. We won’t allow them to discourage or deter us; rather, we will use them as our motivation to keep going. 

Have you heard an alarming statistic or piece of information that has stayed in your mind and motivated your practice? We would love to hear about it! Join the conversation on our discussion board and share with us there.

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