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Last May, when I had just finished a semester of teaching, I was struck by an opinion piece in the New York Times by Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University.
The one statistic that stood out for me was this one: according to Bauerlein, one national survey found that 43 percent—almost half—of all students earn grades within the A range compared to 15 percent back in 1960 when getting an A meant outstanding, as in really standing out among your peers.
I was so intrigued by his comments about teaching—he wrote about the importance of one-on-one meetings with students to delve into their writing assignments and the need to provide constructive criticism—that I bought his latest book, The State of the American Mind. It’s a collection of essays edited by Bauerlein and Adam Bellow, an executive editor at HarperCollins.
I read the book (and even called Bauerlein to talk about it) and was ready to join the chorus of contributors complaining about the shallow teenage brain these days. I'm talking about the kids who are absorbing facts galore on their smart phones but not thinking deeply about anything. I was so energized, I wrote a quick blog.
And as I was rereading it, I realized that if any of my neighbors happened to read it, they would say this: “Aren’t you the one walking her dog, talking on the phone, emailing or texting or doing something with your head buried in your smart phone all the time?”
That’s when it dawned on me that I may be just as to blame as my kids and my students and that could learn a thing or two from the essays in this book. Was my attention span plummeting?
The State of the American Mind contains all kinds of data on IQ test results and SAT scores and attention-focusing-drug abuse. One of the most compelling essays—and maybe the most encouraging chapter—was written by Maggie Jackson, a journalist and author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Jackson bemoans the fast-pace, face-towards-iPhone age we live in. She worries about people like me.
But there is a movement to reverse the trend. She mentions Dr. Irvwin Braverman, a Yale dermatologist, who started a program to bring his residents into an art gallery to learn to slow down and look—two skills crucial to being an effective diagnostician. ( I knew Dr. Braverman from my days as a medical student and saw him recently as he was setting up the Fall exhibit “historical illustrations of skin diseases” at the medical school library. If you're in the vicinity, I'd check it out.)
Taking Dr. Braverman's lead, I organized a similar class for my undergraduate students, most of whom want to become doctors. For one session of our medical writing seminar, we visited a museum on campus and, guided by a few of the docents, spent upwards of 7 minutes staring at one painting. Then we talked about what we saw.
I’ve done the class twice and both times had the same response. A few students admitted to me that before class they thought it would be a fun excursion but a waste of class time. Afterwards, they told me how much they really appreciated the process and how much they learned. They felt as if they tapped into an inner passion, a deeper contemplation that, with all the stuff going on at school, they rarely had time to do. A few said they want to make an effort to keep returning to the museums on campus, even for 15 minutes here or there. Some were shocked by how much they learned by just observing.
Jackson wrote that another professor who conducts the same kind of art gallery class explained that slowness is the key to knowledge, to understanding what’s around you. I know for me, it’s a reminder that I need to take the time to observe, to contemplate, to go beneath the surface and beyond the 140 characters. Popular tweets make for fun small talk but they aren’t going to satisfy our inherent thirst for a deeper understanding of the world we live in.
Jackson concludes her essay by saying that her efforts to stare at a painting “had not unlocked all the truths about the painting," but she said (and I couldn’t agree more), “In looking, I had begun to see.”
