13 April, 2020

Attention is not merely linear !





The calf, Egret and the Cat had something common ! They remained still in their body posture for three minutes or more.

When we play statue game with children, to get an adult or a child to be still bodily is not easy. But some animals have an unusual ability to do so.

As I was returning from the field, I noticed this Kingfisher quietly perched on a cable overlooking a stream.


I decided to watch its still posture. Except turning the neck from one side to the other, the body was still. After about ten minutes it dashed into the stream and returned with a fish between its bills and flew away to another end of the farm. I felt awful that I could not get a sharper picture from a distance. It flew away from that site before I could refocus.


I presume this bodily stillness is for a purpose for at least for some animals or avians.

This created a new sense of awareness within me. It is an inner sense of need or resolve or motivation which regulate our bodily behaviours.

Why should a child be wanting to be interested to sit for a 'table top activity' unless that activity is gratifying or novel!

Our instincts are not rational. For developmentally disadvantaged children or those who have adjustment challenges or who are preoccupied, there is a difficulty to associate cause and effect relationship. For them to imagine that to sit or to draw or play the key board would be good, involves a linear thinking. Most children have scattered thinking as they cannot overcome multiple sensory stimuli that come to them. They get easily distracted. There is also the hierarchy of stimulus control. The greater stimulus regulates the behaviour and the lesser stimuli even if they are more valuable would get suppressed as brain subjects itself to the first response pattern of a child.

To know what engages a child and to start from there is often a better model rather than making a plan for a child based on a curriculum of what a child 'ought' to learn!

M.C.Mathew (text and photo)

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