Chapter 3C

It’ll Cook Your Eyeball!

We had just finished reconstructing the Big Picture concept map, adding our next question mark that would involve the next couple of periods, and I set the piece of chalk down and picked up a pile of handouts.
“Ladies, as you know, this is biology.” I said. “Which means we are going to do something to figure out the answer to our next question. Right now, though,” I motioned toward the back of the room. “I would like you to take the sharpies that are at your tables, write your names clearly on the sides of your goggles, and come join me at the lab bench.”
There was a general shuffling as the girls did what I asked, and we all moved to the lab bench back where I had my demonstration materials waiting.
“Shift around, people,” I said. “We need everybody to be able to see.” I motioned with my arms. “Some of you can come over here to my right. I showered this morning; I promise.”
That brought a few snickers.
“Also,” I continued. “Those of us who are a little more height challenged, let’s move those folks to the front. Thank you, ladies.”
I scanned my gaze across the entire group.
“Today,” I told them. “Is going to be our first time working with chemicals. So we need to go over some basic safety rules. I think it is important that you understand why we wear goggles when working with chemicals.”
I picked up a familiar object. “What is this?” I asked.
“An egg” came the chorus of responses.
“Very good,” I replied. “It’s an egg.” I cracked it open carefully and spilled the raw egg into a specimen bowl.
And what do we have here?” I asked, pointing at a small beaker.
Several replied “Water;” while others responded, “I don’t know.” I pointed at one of the latter.
“Exactly, Foula,” I responded. “We don’t know what this is other than that it is a clear liquid.”
I picked up a plastic pipette and begin transferring some of the liquid into the specimen bowl with the egg.
“What’s starting to happen?” I asked. There were several observations that the “white” of the egg was starting to turn solid white in color.
“And what general process are you all familiar with that cause the clear part of the egg to turn white?” I mused. Hands went up this time, and I pointed to call on one.
“Cooking.” Susan replied.
“Hmm.” I mused once more. “What’s this chemical doing to the egg?”
There was a collective gasp. “Cooking it!” They all said.
“And if this clear liquid that looks like water got into your eye….?” I mused one last time.
“It would cook your eyeball!” Meghan called out in horror.
I nodded and looked around at all of them again. “Can we uncook an egg?” I asked.
There was a general look of fear as the full weight of what I was implying sank in, and I then leaned over to place my face directly above the cooking egg.
“While I myself am somewhat folliclely challenged,” I said. “I don’t have to worry about this anymore. But what might happen if some of you did what I’m doing right now—say in order to make an observation?”
I looked up to see several of them already pulling their hair back and securing it.
“Exactly.” I said. “This is why we always wear our goggles and we always tie our hair back whenever we are working in the lab.”
I put my own goggles on at that stage and waited for the entire class to catch up with those who already had their hair and goggles secured.
“Finally,” I said. “What do we need to do if we spill or have an accident?”
There was a show of hands.
“Annie?”
“Clean it up?” She responded hesitantly. I shook my head and pointed at the next person.
“Immediately tell you?” Reagan answered.
“Right.” I responded. “Look, accidents happen, and I am not going to explode at you when they do. Or think to myself, ‘OMG, how could she be so stupid?’ ”
They chuckled at that.
“I’ve got to know right away.” I told them. “Because certain chemicals require extra steps to clean up safely. It’s why it is SO important when working with chemicals to pay attention to everything we are doing.”
I checked expressions for understanding and then started to pass out the handout.
“Okay, then,” I told them. “Grab your lab notebooks, Ladies, and head out to your lab benches. Let’s get started!”

Focusing and Filtering

The brain’s attention process is highly selective, and it biases our perceptions heavily toward the problems and stimuli that are involved in our survival (i.e. food, sex, & safety).¹⁵  That is why it has always been challenging to get a small child interested in “2×2=4” or any of the rest of the multiplication table, and it is why that challenge is even greater today when your smartphone has already “memorized” it for you and can produce far more interesting input.  The brain essentially does not like to “hallucinate” about boring stuff, and because it evolved in an environment where most survival problems were taken care of quite quickly (you outran the leopard or you didn’t), the brain only pays attention to anything a maximum of 10 minutes before requiring something emotionally strong and relevant (i.e. the next piece of fruit, potential mate, or leopard) to reset the attention “clock.”¹⁶  In addition, during a prolonged problem (such as a class period during a school day), the brain pays its strongest attention only to the first of the series of potential 10 minute resets¹⁷—which one of the many reasons why “do not waste the precious opening part of the class doing routine activities, like checking homework.”¹⁸

The challenge we have as teachers, then, is how to deal with the constraints of this hardwiring and to keep, hold, and reset our students’ attention to focus on the problems we want them confronting—problems which, let’s own it, are never survival problems.  Somehow, we have to create the conditions to keep the brain’s attention engaged in learning situations it might otherwise dismiss as boring.  We must find a way “to create opportunities where students truly care about learning—where the potential joy of learning shouts so loudly that it drowns out the background noise.”¹⁹

Ironically, it turns out the best method for doing this is to generate stress.  Yes, you read that correctly.  The best way to capture the brain’s fullest attention and generate the deepest learning is to create stress in the classroom.  Basically, we want to make student brains think they are confronting a survival situation, one they should care about deeply. 

But it has to be a special kind of “survival situation,” one that the brain feels confident it can “outrun,” and to understand why, we have to know more about the structure in the brain where attention resides:  the hippocampus.  This part of the brain, buried deep inside the limbic system, is where immediate awareness and memory intersect, and it is the gate-keeper to the learning process because its neurons are heavily peppered with the protein receptor for the stress hormone, cortisol, making the hippocampus extremely responsive to stressful situations.

Yet why would stress be so heavily associated with attention and learning? Because, as neuroscientist, John Medina, points out:

Our survival on the savannah depended upon remembering what was life-threatening and what was not.  Ancestors who could commit those experiences to memory the fastest (and recall them accurately with equal speed) were more apt to survive than those who couldn’t.²⁰

Those life-threatening moments, though, would also have been relatively brief (you survived the leopard and remembered how or you didn’t), and our brains evolved accordingly.  Therefore, the kind of stress we create in the classroom needs to be the right amount and kind:  bursts of stress stimulates the hippocampus, focusing attention and generating learning; while excess stress can actually kill neurons and prevent the growth of new ones.²¹  It is why PTSD is so hard to treat; the excess cortisol literally rewires the brain, and it is also why for “children who grow up in stressful environments…it’s hard to learn the alphabet.”²²

We will explore how a teacher can successfully produce the proper amount and kind of stress in the classroom next in Chapter 4.  But for now, what our knowledge of the brain’s capacity for attention clearly shows us is that to be authentically engaged in our teaching, we need to be exposing our students to difficult situations in the classroom that challenge them without overwhelming them and we need to help our students embrace these difficulties by modelling how we employ stress for our own growth as co-learners.²³

We also need to address the “dark side” of the brain’s capacity for attention which is the challenge of interference.  Sensitivity to distraction is a fundamental vulnerability of the human brain²⁴ because the ability to filter out irrelevant stimuli from our attention did not keep up in the natural selection process as we evolved our capacity to “fantasize about the future” in the prefrontal cortex.  In fact, “the fundamental limitations in our cognitive control abilities do not differ greatly from those observed in other primates, with whom we shared common ancestors tens of millions of years ago.”²⁵

What is more, the neural networks that generate this filtering half of attention are independent from those that cause the focusing half of the process.  Hence, the more distracting the input there is in an environment, the more the demand for energy increases in the brain and the less efficient it funtions.²⁶ Our brains literally have to work harder in such situations to pay attention, leaving less energy available for other functions.

Again, we can see clearly the implications for authentic engagement in our teaching.  To maintain student attention, we must create classroom environments that have the right balance between attention grabbing and attention overwhelming—which can involve anything from the temperature of the room to the quantity of content to the presence of technology—and we need to think long and hard about the workloads we create for students.  The brain alone consumes 20% of the body’s daily energy supply, and much of that is expended on paying attention.  Too much work—in or out of the classroom—can exhaust a brain to the point of dysfunction.  It is why “just one night of poor sleep can lead to less efficient filtering out of important information from junk”²⁷ the entirety of the next day.  Lastly, we must remember not to “expect (or worse, demand) adult-level, [attention] abilities from children and young adults.”²⁸ Instead, we need to work to create deliberate self-reflective opportunities to challenge a child’s attention abilities to expand in order to enable their brain’s neural networks for attention to mature.