When I met my girlfriend, she had been teaching for around 19 years in a public school. She took early retirement recently, but her last few years was spent in the 5th grade. It didn’t take long and I was assisting my girlfriend with her lessons. She was responsible for teaching geography and United State’s history (social studies). I started building PowerPoint slides for her to use in teaching these two subjects. I REALLY enjoyed it. Once I got her going with her PowerPoint slides, I started spending time on acquiring videos for her to present.
On the video front, one of the first things I did was to prepare videos for her about each of the 50 states. I didn’t actually make them. We found a video series that was airing on the History Channel at the time. It was called, “The States.” What this series really taught me was that a 5th grader’s attention span is about 11 minutes. When I cut the DVD’s segments into a video for each state, that was the approximate length of each.
I have discovered that my attention span consists of two different types. The first is that I am willing to give up 30 to 60 seconds of my life to watch anything. If a YouTube video sounds interesting and comes up in a search, I am always willing to watch the first 30-60 seconds. If a video can keep my attention for longer than 60 seconds, I will be willing to watch much longer.
I became aware of my other attention span during college. The class was on human nutrition and it was a tough class. It was in a lecture hall that probably sat about 1,000 people. The lecture consisted of lots of slides with the professor talking about what we were seeing on the slides. I wouldn’t say it was an exciting class, but it wasn’t boring either. What helped me get a good grade, an A, was that the professor would always do something as 20 minutes into the class that caught my attention. Just as I would start to fade, he would bring me back. I became very aware of it.
My word of advice for parents with younger kids . . .
If you are struggling to get your children to stay focused on a task, divide the task into smaller chunks. As an example, if you want them to read a book, tell them to read the first 10 pages and then to come and find you. As a rule of thumb, it is a safe assumption to think of people having 1 minute of attention span for every year they are alive. Having a short attention span is not ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), it is a product of being a child.
–Don’t Stop
Brain On 