Activity 4.4

Chapter 11: Attention
Summary
In this chapter, James explains his theories on attention and how teachers should instruct based on attention tendencies. He begins by explaining the difference between passive (spontaneous) and active (voluntary, requiring effort) attention. James discusses how teachers can attain and maintain attention in their students by both making subjects interesting and through the use of external methods for subjects that cannot be made interesting.

Connection 1
"Elicit interest from within, by the warmth with which you care for the topic yourself"(James, 1983, p. 56).

Dr. Usher has asked us at least once to recall our favorite teachers and what made them such. This quote from James clarifies what, in my opinion, is a characteristic of the best teachers and classes I've ever had. If your teacher does not care about the subject or topic he or she is teaching why should the student care? My favorite teachers were teachers who incited passion for a topic in me by demonstrating keen interest and passion in the subject themselves.

Connection 2
James' explanation of active and passive attention made me recall a concept from the Mayer (2012) article. With James' chapter on Attention it almost seems as if he is speaking to a learner's motivation. Mayer discusses motivation several times in his article but one passage that really stood out to me is Mayer's discussion of generative processing. According to Mayer generative processing "depends on the learner's motivation to exert effort to learn the material" (Mayer, 2012, p. 92). Therefore, I took this to mean that even if a learner must exert effort to pay attention if the learner has the proper motivation they will still learn the information.

Chapter 14: Apperception
Summary
Though I often get confused by James, I do really enjoy his "voice." With this chapter, James is using his particular voice to try and clear up confusions for teachers about apperception. According to James apperception is taking in information. What we perceive is colored by what we already know. Further, that at a certain point it becomes difficult to change the way you perceive things because of the influence of past information.

Connection 1
After conducting the perceptual activities for this week and then rereading James' Apperception chapter I came across this line, "We overlook misprints, imagining the right letters, though we see the wrong ones" (James, 1983, p. 78). It's amazingly true that our minds do just this. We've seen words over and over again and when things are slightly wrong our brain supplies what we know is right from our memory; ignoring that which does not make sense.

Connection 2
"In admitting a new body of experience, we instinctively seek to disturb as little as possible our pre-existing stock of ideas. We always try to name a new experience in some way which will assimilate it to what we already know" (James, 1983, p. 78).

As I read this excerpt my mind was immediately brought to Piaget's theory of assimilation. Clearly, James and Piaget had similar ideas about the process of constructing and categorizing knowledge.