A word from the Principal
Many of the students have been sitting PAT tests this week with the older students taking five or six different tests. After such levels of concentration, there was a palpable rise in energy in the lunch room today.
This release can sometimes be seen as the lid coming off a pressurised situation. However there is another way of looking at it. Sitting tests requires an increased use of attention and whenever we give our attention whole heartedly to something, not in an intense way but in a restful manner, the result is more energy for the next activity. The exhaustion that we sometimes feel from intense concentration is more a result of our distracted ideas about the task in hand than from the simple process of giving attention to it.
Twentieth century author Simone Wiel said the following about our faculty of attention:
“Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies. Most school tasks have certain intrinsic interest as well, but such an interest is secondary. All tasks that really call upon the power of attention are interesting…
School children…should never say: ‘For my part I like mathematics’; ‘I like French; ‘I like Greek.’ They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention…
Never in any case whatever is genuine effort of the attention wasted. It always has its effect on the spiritual plane and in consequence on the lower one of the intelligence, for all spiritual light lightens the mind.
If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension.”
Peter Crompton
Principal
|
|
|
|