Some words and phrases for our time:
Pico-femto baboons
Infobesity
Neomania
Sigh.
In today’s World we have refined the concept of time to an unprecedented degree. Long ago, it was enough to simply measure time in seasons, and the time of day by the position of the sun.
The first clocks had hour hands, and it was only in the twentieth century that we added the minute hands to our clocks.
Now we have gone digital and created instruments that can measure time in milli- seconds, nano-seconds, pico-seconds and femto-seconds.
There are more femto-seconds in a second than there have been seconds in the last thirty-one thousand years!
Some people live as if they are on “pico- femto” time. As the alarm goes off, they jump out of bed and brush their teeth while they are shaving or going to the toilet, all to save time. Then they rush to their cars, and speed to their offices, always needing to be somewhere fast, like now!
(Sidewise metaphor – warning alert! Apparently the male baboon completes the act of copulation with around fifteen thrusts in a mere eight seconds. Without getting too personal, some people seem to live their lives like a baboon, operating on “pico-femto” time, rushing through everything that they do, no matter how enjoyable, to get to the next thing on their list, rather than taking their time and savouring the moment.)
The Buddhists have a saying:
When you eat a mandarin, eat the mandarin.
This is very true and equally applicable to both food and to life in general. How often do we rush through a meal and barely know, let alone taste and savour what we have eaten. Similarly, how often do we rush through our day without taking the time to enjoy fleeting moments of pleasure, let alone hours of deep contemplation and conversation?
We all need to address our “pico-femto” baboon-like behaviour and see where we can slow down and enjoy the journey. Paul Simon gave us the advice: ‘slow down, you move too fast, gotta make the morning last.’
In today’s world we have an epidemic called Infobesity. There is so much information around that folk are constantly snacking on flicks of information and never sitting down to a proper meal of learning. The sport of our World has become constant sprinting. Moving fast from one web site to the next, from a television screen to an iPad to an iPhone to a mega screen all in a milli second and all at once.
Way back in the 80’s Barrie Hopson & Mike Scally wrote a book called Lifeskills and led the way to us thinking about the T Skilled Worker/Learner. The T skilled worker has the horizontal line of the letter T representing our Broad skills and the vertical of the letter T representing our deep skills.
Our broad skills include our ability to scan information and to bounce between fields of knowledge; our deep skills incorporate our ability to dig deep into a particular field of knowledge: to delve, persevere and gain nuances of distinction.
We need both.
Instead of a pattern of skim, skim, skim, skim… good learning may require a pattern of skim, skim, travel deep, deep… then skim again and re-loop.
There is a danger for our brain to get stuck in a rut of Neomania – just loving the new and the next. The next page, flick the iPad, the next best thing, flick to the web page. Becoming a Neomaniac in a World of Infobesity may mean the pico-femto baboon keeps on snacking but never feels sated, never feels the esteem that persistence and consistence and mastery of deep learning can bring.
When designing lessons for students, incorporate some slow time, some delve time, some deep time. Help students with attention and focus. Praise the ability to go longer and deeper on subjects. Likewise, add a touch more contemplation and vertical T travel in your own life and learning.
It may feel frustrating at first but once we all re-learn how to pace our learning we can dissolve some of the anxiety of life and, as Paul Simon sung, be ‘feeling groovy’.