In The Atlantic this week, parenting/education writer Jessica Lahey stresses that we need to re-discover the lost art of patience in the classroom.
 
Learning requires the ability to spend time with something– to think long and critically about its components, to contextualize its existence, to absorb its complexities and nuance. It’s a rule that applies regardless of whether you are studying theoretical physics or art history.
 
Yet, in our frenetic Twitter-paced universe, it has become increasingly difficult for people to focus on any one thing for too long. Our world is speeding us up, and the emergence of new technologies that allow every task, detail, and distraction to occur in real-time isn’t refining our attention span (it’s a plausible hypothesis for the reason behind the precipitous rise in ADHD diagnoses in children).
 
I used to never consider myself a very detail-oriented person. I cruised through several jobs as youngster where I’d commit small mistakes, forget details, misplace commas, and unwittingly move decimal points. But I had enough “grow-up-and-do-your-job” moments as time went on to teach me a crucial lesson: absorbing detail requires effort. It’s a more arduous task for some than others, for sure. But, like any other skill you want to acquire, the skill of patience requires practice. And when you practice slowing down, zeroing in, and paying attention, the results can’t help but be positive.
 
In this age– where “natural” patience is a rarity and distractions are many– we need, as Lahey stresses, to re-learn patience. We need to practice. And the place where we can practice is in the classroom.
 
As a teacher, I recall frequently complaining about my students’ lack of attention span, marveling at the fact that it was difficult for some students to read through a paragraph, let a lone a full novel (I’m embarrassed to say I was one of those teachers who quickly abandoned any fiction that was too lengthy). But it never dawned on me that– just like every other technique I was modeling– I needed to explicitly teach patience as a skill.
 
As Lahey says:
 

When I hand my students novels and other projects that require close analysis, critical thinking, and patience, I challenge them to rise above the the basic skills of word recognition and reading comprehension. I am asking them to wait. To keep reading, keep listening. To be patient and formulate their opinions based on all the evidence, and then comment on what they see and hear armed with more than a sound bite, a title, or a tweet. To spend the time and have the patience to do more than look at the world, but to see it.

 
Conceptualizing patience (and detail-orientedness, etc.) as an acquired skill, rather than an inherent talent, could be groundbreaking in getting students to progress and develop more complete understandings of the world.