Have you ever had to provide a distraction? Guiding someone, or a group of people, from seeing or hearing something for the common good. It can be a noble pursuit even though it sounds like there is the possibility of deception. But remember the word is distraction.
People who can compartmentalize their mind are good at this. They provide the necessary shift from one thing to another because there is a significant reason to do so.
Case in point: One summer, I was teaching in a special summer program for high school students at U C Berkeley. I'd had some success with the I-Search paper, a kind of saturation report where students interview people to find answers and information about a question that they need to have answered. In this format, I taught various journalistic writing and interviewing skills.
I had about 15 kids in this class and they ranged in age fro 11-17. A couple of middle-school kids with pushy parents had wormed their way into the class. This proved to be no problem because most of the kids in this program were labeled "gifted" and had considerable skills and motivation. As a group, they gelled quickly, but the older kids seemed to hang out together more often than not. There were two 10 minute breaks and a 45 minute lunch break. The class ran from 10 am until 3pm, so thy were needed. Essentially, I put about 6 months of coursework into a 4 week session. It was crucial to make the class as interactive as possible since the 3 meetings a week were long ones.
One day, as I returned to the classroom after the lunch break, I noticed a group of the kids from my class all sitting together. There was something in the middle of the semi-circle they formed. It was a bird. A beautiful dove had grabbed their attention. As I approached the group, one of the kids looked up, saw me, and announced, "He fell out of that tree over there." The kids were sitting on a small grass quad sprinkled with a few trees that provided shade from the July sun. The bird appeared to be in decent shape but looking closer I saw that it may have had an injured wing. No normal dove would stick around to be surrounded by an eager, albeit overly concerned group of adolescents.
When the class resumed, all but three or four had returned to their seats. These kids remained with the bird, unsure what to do. I wondered if I could somehow make this a teaching moment? That thought passed quickly as I knew some Cal Berkeley students would no doubt care for this bird and know who to contact or what to do next. The kids decided to tell a few folks to keep their eyes on the bird and decided to place it in the nearby tree from which it originally came. Nestled in between two branches, the bird looked no worse for wear and the kids returned to class.
15 minutes later, while teaching a lesson on types of interview questions I chanced to look out the window. This classroom was at the far end of a long hallway and had one side of windows that overlooked the tree filled quad where we had previously been dealing with the bird. My students sat around a rectangular formation of tables with one side with their backs to the windows. As my students were writing a list of questions that could not be answered with quick responses, I noticed a large German Shepard running around the quad. He was agitated, but not aggressive. I thought of the bird. Before I could convince myself that the dog might be a threat to the bird I noticed the dog walking slowly by the window with that dove in his mouth!
Immediately, I knew I must distract my students. If they saw what I saw, half of them would have leaped for the door and the other half would have been too upset to continue with the lesson. Remember this is Berkeley, and these kids were, for the most part, Berkeley kids. Animal welfare was high on their list.
As teachers must do, I changed the focus of my lesson in such a way as to keep those kid's heads down on their papers. When someone would come up with a great open ended question, I urged everyone to write down the question. My goal was to keep their heads down and minds occupied for as long as it took. When it appeared the dog was no longer there, we took our break. When the kids returned, they told me that someone had taken the injured bird over to the Biology department where students knew how and where the bird could get the care it needed. Big sign, internally, on my part.
My distraction worked. I completed the lesson without losing valuable time ands the bird survived. I never found out what became of the dog.
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