ROLLO MAY was an American psychologist whose life and career spanned most of the twentieth century, and whose wide-ranging intellect produced more than a dozen books on subjects from love and beauty to anxiety and violence. His work crosses many disciplines and trades in big ideas. In 1975, he published The Courage to Create, a slim volume of reflections based on a series of lectures he had delivered about the sources and meanings of human creativity. In that book, he tells a detailed story about a time when he was working on a difficult problem for his doctoral dissertation, and was stuck at a theoretical impasse that had him completely stymied. Exhausted and frustrated, he left behind his books and papers for the day and walked out into the streets of New York City. “About fifty feet away from the entrance to the Eighth Street station,” he explains, the solution to the problem leaped into his mind. The intellectual floodgates then opened up for him:
And as quickly as that idea struck me, other ideas poured out. I think I had not taken another step on the sidewalk when a whole new hypothesis broke loose in my mind. I realized my entire theory would have to be changed… I was convinced there, on the street—and later thought and experience only convinced me the more—that this [was] a better, more accurate, and more elegant theory, than my first.1
May’s explanation for this experience draws from language about the role that the unconscious takes in breaking through the barriers of our conscious mind, a theoretical construct that doesn’t match very well with the way psychologists understand and talk about the brain today. But the story he tells should be familiar to almost anyone who does intellectual or creative work: stepping away from external sources and into some space where the mind can wander freely leads to a productive breakthrough. All of my own intellectual insights come in these moments: standing idly in the shower, hiking in the woods near my home, washing dishes at the sink, pulling up weeds in the yard.
In Part One of this book, I argued that time spent with our digital devices has not architecturally diminished our attention span. But that doesn’t mean that the hours we spend scrolling through feeds might not be having an impact on our lives that deserves careful consideration—including potentially depriving us of lightbulb discoveries like the one described by Rollo May, and perhaps experienced by you as well. Neuroscientist Moheb Costandi argues that our brains have tremendous capacity for change over the course of our lifetimes, as they respond and adapt to our individual experiences and our environment. “Your brain is, to a large extent, unique,” he writes, “custom-built from the life experiences you have had since being in your mother’s womb, to meet the demands you place on it today.”2 (He also echoes Daniel Willingham in noting that such changes occur within the constraints of what he calls our “neurological substrates,” or core features and functions of the brain, such as our memories or attention systems.) The challenge we face in the age of omnipresent digital distractions is that we are narrowing the kinds of life experiences we are giving to our brain and reducing the demands we make of it. We no longer ask it to grapple with idle time (in which we turn to our social media), or navigate our way through the built environment around us (for which we use our GPS), or memorize basic knowledge (for which we use Google). We limit our opportunities for connection with the physical people around us when we immediately turn to our phones in public settings (such as a classroom), and we limit our opportunities for creative thinking if we expect it to come only through digital work (such as internet searching).
We have gained much from the role that our devices play in our lives. But even as we recognize the productive power of our time in the digital world, we should also recognize that gains sometimes bring losses. The learning of our students will be most effective when we expand the context in which they do their thinking; it should include engagement with digital resources, dialogue with the students around them, and times when their brains have the opportunity to work quietly behind the scenes, as Rollo May’s brain did on the streets of New York City. Our role as educators should thus include providing a full range of opportunities for thinking, especially when so much of our students’ time outside of the classroom is spent with screens. Their plastic brains are being shaped largely in the presence of those screens; we should view this as negative not because screens are bad, but because excessive time with them is limiting their access to other forms of thinking. A parallel argument is made about the extent to which screen time may be harmful for younger children: not because screens are necessarily bad, but because they eclipse the time that children could be spending outdoors, engaging in imaginative play, and socializing with one another.
Outside of the classroom, both we and our students swim in a sea of digital devices, instant news, social media connections, and digitally mediated conversations. Inside the classroom, we have the opportunity to give students another kind of experience—one in which they engage fully with one another and with the experiences we have created for them, forcing their brains into the kinds of unexpected and unfamiliar spaces that lead to new learning. In a 2013 essay in Harvard Magazine, art historian Jennifer L. Roberts explains that the pace of life in the digital era means that she feels compelled to think more about the pace of her students’ learning experiences. In doing so, she is drawn especially to “the slow end of this tempo spectrum… creating opportunities for students to engage in deceleration, patience, and immersive attention.” She articulates her reasoning for this by pointing to the ways the student experience outside of the classroom moves with increasing rapidity:
I would argue that these are the kind of practices that now most need to be actively engineered by faculty, because they simply are no longer available “in nature,” as it were. Every external pressure, social and technological, is pushing students in the other direction, toward immediacy, rapidity, and spontaneity—and against this other kind of opportunity. I want to give them the permission and the structures to slow down.3
Just like Joanna E. Ziegler, whose teaching practice I cited in the Introduction, Roberts not only wishes for increased attention from her students, but she also provides the structures that support their attention. Prior to completing a research project on a painting of their choosing, students spend three hours viewing the work—a time span even Roberts acknowledges is “painfully long.” But that long and painful immersion in a painting, she explains, can lead to startling new insights, both for her and her students.
My colleague Esteban Loustaunau, an inspiring teacher of Spanish language and literature, wrote an essay a few years back for Inside Higher Ed, in which he argued that teachers have to be willing to allow their classrooms, at least at times, to become a “retreat space” where we step away from our scripted behaviors and become fully present to one another.4 In a similar way, I have been arguing in this book for a conception of the classroom as a retreat space from distraction, where we make deliberate efforts to do the hard work of using our attention in support of our learning. Retreats are often challenging at first, as people find themselves unmoored from their usual surroundings and connections. But slowly, gradually, they settle in and learn to see the world, and their lives, with new clarity and insight.
The classrooms of the twenty-first century have the power to bring such insight and clarity to the lives of our students by giving them safe and supported spaces where they can pause from their distractions and engage with us, with one another, and with the fascinating questions of our disciplines. Teachers today have to think creatively about how we educate students in a world of rapid transformation, which seems likely to continue. Like the poet, we invite our listeners to step back from their unthinking routines and habits and look more closely, pause and attend, reflect and respond.
“To pay attention,” writes Mary Oliver, in a phrase that captures well the vocation of the teacher today, “this is our endless and proper work.”5