Ask my daughters when they know I’m writing, and they’ll tell you it’s when they hear a heavy Bach organ fugue playing from the home office (AKA my 21 year old daughter’s former bedroom who now is in college). Can music help us focus on academic tasks? Scientists seem to think so (link to article). What do you feel like or do when you multitask? Is music in the background distracting? What do you do when you multitask? Is it reasonable and possible?
Just this week teachers and I were discussing that if one wants to survive as a teacher (reference was being made about student teachers), multitasking is a survival/coping mechanism. You know the routine. Take, for example, in the morning as students are coming in to your classroom:
• Take attendance
• Answer notes from parents
• You’re called over the intercom from the office to answer a question
• “Tommy, get to work!”
• Collect field trip permission forms
• Scan the room to make sure everyone is on task
• And on and on and on.
This week on NPR’S Your Health reports that scientists say that switching rapidly between tasks actually, although it doesn’t seem like it, slows us down. The brain loses its connections and soon can forget what it was working on. Distraction, thus, can take over and we soon have to remind ourselves what we were working on in the first place.
The “executive system” of the brain (which, boo hoo, decreases in volume as we age) helps the brain decide which things and tasks we need to zero in on and assists in suppressing information that is not necessary at that moment. Oddly enough, that is the area where I’d get my worst headaches at the end of the day from teaching! (Click here for more information from NPR: Go)
For more reading, click on the links above.
