Between kindergarten and the third grade, I apparently had a very poor attention span. I’m pretty sure that if I were a kid in today’s society, I’d have been diagnosed with ADHD, and be put on medication of some sort, but since I wasn’t, we’ll just say that I was a typical kid who erred on the side of hyperactive, and it reflected in my performance in school.
Anyway, the most frequent evaluative remarks I would get during those years of contemporary schooling were along the lines of “needs improvement with paying attention, listening to and following directions.” Such sentiments would reflect in my report cards where I would apparently have low marks in those exact behavioral categories, despite the fact that I was doing pretty well in the actual educational aspect of school. It got to a point where my mother engrained the fear of god into me that paying attention and listening to and following directions were the most important categories to excel at when considering the next report card.
But since effort is one thing, and actual results are a completely other thing, there was a report card where it was more of the same thing; poor marks in paying attention and listening to and following directions. My mom apparently hit a boiling point and beat the shit out of me.
In a way, it could be said that such aggressive parenting might have worked, or maybe it was just a fact that I was actually growing up a little bit. When I hit the fourth grade, something clicked, and although I can’t say that I ever got straight A’s (science was always my Achilles heel), I was posting up excellent grades from then until the eighth grade when teenage rebellion began to kick in but that’s a different story.
The point is I think as I grew up I eventually learned the importance of paying attention, and personally I think I’m a pretty astute person these days. More than I may lead on at times, but I like to think I’m fairly decently aware of all the obvious things going on around me at any given time, and this goes back to that recent post I made about spatial awareness too. It’s the littlest things too, like approaching an intersection, noticing the opposite crosswalk timer is ticking down to zero, and not having to break my stride because I’ve learned the timing of the lights from simple observation, and I walk right past crowds of ambivalent students and working stiffs and get to Starbucks before any of them do.
Based on how often I witness people not paying attention to the world all around them in all sorts of scenarios and applications, it makes me wonder if these people got as poor marks in school as I may have had. And if they did, did any of their parents put forth the effort to beat the importance of paying attention into them? Probably not.
It’s not that I condone parents applying physical violence onto their own children, but I like to think that it works when done correctly – sparingly, as a last resort, and purely disciplinary. All joking aside, I think I turned out pretty well, because my mom instituted disciplinary ass kicking for me failing to improve on my shortcomings. Sometimes I look around at people, and think that they might have turned out to be better, sharper, more astute human beings if perhaps their parents had done the same to them too.
