Activity 4.2: William James - Chapters 11 (Attention) and 14 (Apperception)

Activity 4.2: William James - Chapters 11 (Attention) and 14 (Apperception)

Summary of Chapter 11 (Attention):  James mentions “passive attention or spontaneous attention” (p. 51), a result of native interests, but the essence and bulk of this chapter is about how teachers can model, encourage, and promote, passive attention in our students, as well as, active, deliberate, voluntary attention,  and effort, especially when faced with less desirable, or repulsive tasks. 

Personal Connection:  James talks about how a genius is able to sustain attention on a particular subject of interest for hours: “you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself …. he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind” (p. 52).  A professor friend of mine falls into this category in that he lives his work and his work is his life, as a sociologist, or “social scientist who studies the institutions and development of human society” (Google, Princeton definition).  When he is in his writing mode, he disconnects from his outside world, and vanishes, temporarily into his inner world of imagination and research. He can sustain this mode for weeks, taking breaks to eat, bathe, and sleep, but even as he sleeps, his mind is actively organizing, creating new thoughts and connections. He may take an occasional long walk to try to escape, clear his head, or get some distance from his writing, offering clarity, allowing him to dive right back in upon his return.  James may refer to this man as “scatter-brained” (p. 57) or we may call him an “absent-mined” professor, but it is simply that he has passion, desire, and genuinely cares, allowing him to sustained, active attention, for his subject.

Outside Connection: In this talk, James motivates teachers with suggestions for grabbing students’ attention. He says, “The teacher must pounce upon the most listless child and wake him up … Above all, the teacher must himself be alive and ready, and must use the contagion of his own example” (p. 53).

This YouTube clip is from the movie Freedom Writers (2007), based on the book The Freedom Writers Diary (1999), about the actual experiences of white, middle-class teacher, Erin Gruwell, who taught the “at-risk” students or “unteachables”, at Woodrow Wilson Classical High School, Long Beach, CA, recently integrated after the 1992 Los Angeles' riots. She grabs her students’ attention after a rough start, by trying to show them that they are not so different, as they tend to segregate themselves in her classroom by race.  She motivates her students by having them write daily, about their personal experiences and interests, stories they often share in class. They learn to trust her and each other, and achieve and succeed beyond expectations (Wikipedia).

Summary of Chapter 14 (Apperception):  James defines apperception as “nothing more than the manner in which we receive a thing into our minds” (p. 77).  Apperceptions are as varied as any individual’s experiences, at any given time, on any given occasion; and will produce a reaction “determined by our past experiences and the ‘associations’ of the present sort of impression with them” (p.77).

Personal Connection: James explains, “The self-same person, according to the line of thought he may be in or to his emotional mood, will apperceive the same impression quite differently on different occasions” (p. 80). The adolescents I work with on the inpatient psychiatric unit, are often in crisis and may not be able to concentrate on schoolwork if they are not feeling well, physically and /or emotionally, or are having family problems affecting their ability to learn. All of my students receive medical exemptions for any high-stakes testing, due to reliability and validity issues, and especially because the kids do not need added stress while they are undergoing treatment. We hesitate before doing psychological testing on some of our patients, but often the benefits out weight the costs. My mood can affect my ability to connect with my students and teach effectively, as well.

Outside Connection: James’s law of economy: “In admitting a new body of experience, we instinctively seek to disturb as little as possible our pre-existing stock of ideas. We always try to name a new experience in some way which will assimilate it to what we already know. We hate anything absolutely new, anything without any name, and which a new name must be forged” (p. 78) is very similar to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. Wadsworth (1996) states Piaget’s cognitive construction process where during assimilation we try to fit new information into a knowledge structure that already exists, a quantitative change. If that new data doesn’t fit with the existing schema, which creates a state of disequilibrium, then we are “forced” to accommodate or change our schema to fit the new data, or stimuli, which is a more difficult, qualitative change. We hate this state of disequilibrium, and work to organize our schema, or knowledge structures, until we reach equilibrium.