Patterns for Attending and Reflecting on Readings for the Course

The assignment sheet for reflecting on the readings for the course is posted under course documents. It is probably best to think of this assignment as a take-home essay exam, where your purpose is to demonstrate your knowledge of the readings - and to show that you can apply the ideas from the readings to new contexts/situations. In class today you will do some brainstorming to set up a focus for your essay. As you will see from the assignment sheet - you have a choice of three questions: CHOOSE ONE. The questions are there to give you direction if you need it - but they can also let you follow your own interests if you want to. Your completed essay is due with your portfolio.

How long do you think it should be?

Patterns for attending

The following discussion sums up the overall patterns within the class.

Deep attention 1 2 3 4 5 Hyper attention

School 3 3 3 1 0/ average 2.3

Living 0 2 1 6 1/ average 3.6

Relaxation 0 1 2 2 5/ average 4.1

These numbers indicate that, in general, you use more deep attention for school, and more hyper attention for recreation, and that daily living presents the most variation in your choice for style of attending.

Further reflections:
1. Everyone in the class moves between deep attention and hyper attention - though the reasons and activities that influence the choice of one style for attending rather than another vary from person to person.

2. More individuals preferred deep attention for school work (there were no 5's in the average, but there were 5's for individual tasks - such as researching topics.)


3. Attending style seems to be activity dependent. Some of us had a preferred identity as a hyper attention or deep attention person - and said so out right - but most of us seemed to have attending styles that reflected the activity - not a dominant attending style.


4. The range for attending for the class was the same in all three categories (always spanning 4, never 5 or 3 ratings), yet when your reported which category had the biggest range you either indicated school or living activities (no one reported recreation); and recreation was the only category reported as having the least variation. This may be accounted for by the experiences of the particular individuals who reported for this section (only 5 out of the 10 participants provided answers for this section).