A few things –

Wendy, I know I’m touchy on this, but let me tell two stories. First, when I first received TTS and writing support – via a laptop, I had professors who said, “please sit in the back so you don’t distract people.” That was really cruel. Second, I once had a SpEd teacher say all her kids had been banned from the computer lab because one had tried to strangle another with the keyboard cord. At first I was about to suggest wireless keyboards, but then I realized that we wouldn’t ban other things – books, pens, etc. so why this? I’m quite certain the MBTA doesn’t want its Motormen reading books while operating trains either. You don’t ban books though.

Carl, If I could rename it I’d say “Attention-Discrimination Hyperactivity Difference” ADHD is “hypofiltering” while Autism might be “hyperfiltering” – it is a question of how we filter and prioritize incoming stimuli. I also tend to suggest a real evolutionary benefit to “hypofiltering,” better in the hunt, better in battle, better at knowing that that cloud is dangerous even while ‘focused’ on planting. Better at learning a wide range of things.

I can offer the Gramscian perspective. Most teachers are “traditionally attentioned” and have succeeded as such. They apply pressure to maintain the academic system of traditional focus because it maintains their position of power. Switching fully to what I would like would change the universe of “winners.” Wendy might lose while I might finally win. The trick is to construct an environment which expands the universe of winners. This requires real care, offering real choices (not “sit in the front row if you want to do this”). I’m not suggesting that its an easy path to negotiate.

I try to think about classes as total learning environments and to recruit the students to become more aware of education as a complex interactive process. As part of that, in addition to ‘normal’ coursework I ask students to keep a field journal of their observations, experiences and reflections of the class. (I don’t read them until I’ve graded all their other work.) Often despite lots of prompting the journals are pretty thin and stereotyped: students seize on a narrow range of conventional stimuli and loop monotonously on them. I don’t want to romanticize what’s obviously a wrenching sensory/cognitive overload, but it’s clear that both takingitoutside and Ira experience the classroom with much more phenomenological depth. You guys’ journals would break the curve. Looking at Ira’s novel excerpt it seems strange to call the syndrome ‘attention deficit’, since what he describes looks more like the product of attention surplus.

In a way the student who sees all the things Ira and takingitoutside see is potentially my ideal student. I feel now like I want to do even more to negotiate a productive engagement with those kids I always love who are all over the place, and that laptops are just one possible tool to accomplish that. In what ways can a kind of multi-focal distraction be a real asset to a class? Ira, how is it even possible to begin that dialogue if students with these abilities and challenges seal themselves behind a shield of prickly stigma management?

Ira, re the MBTA thing, I was just challenging an overgeneralization, not making an argument. Calm down. 🙂

Re making technology sound dangerous: I can see why you’d think that, but in actuality, I use/talk about technology in the classroom quite a bit. I just know my students and the context of my classroom. I didn’t say my solution this term was what everyone should do; I simply stated that I did it, thinking it might be useful to someone else as an idea to consider implementing based on the context of his or her individual classroom.

And, sorry, the MBTA situation is a nonsensical argument. “Astronauts have to wear spacesuits” does not equal “students must wear spacesuits.” Your classroom, theoretically, is a place of information exchange, not a transit system.

Well, it depends on what you mean by “workplace.” The MBTA (in Boston) is planning to ban T operators from having their cellphones with them on the job (and for good reason).

I have been anti-laptop for the past few years, but I’ve been considering moderating my views because I recognize the value of having such easy access to information at our fingertips. I decided on a policy this term of allowing laptops in class on the condition that the user sit in the front row. No one took me up on it.

Classroom architecture could indeed solve some of these questions. If everyone’s around a square or circular table, it’s a bit harder to see more than the laptop next to you, for example, whereas in a large lecture hall, you may have 5-10 laptops in view.

I just wanted to add thoughts as another “ADHDer.”

Almost everything other students do in the classroom distracts me, and always has.

If Tim will indulge, let me quote two paragraphs from my novel:

“The problem is this. Say that you are in a classroom. In that classroom, hundreds of things are happening every minute. People are talking, people are moving, papers are rustling and pages are turning, the air from the ventilator is making the flag move, chairs are squeaking, there may be fish in an aquarium that are swimming while their air pump bubbles or the classroom hamster running on an exercise wheel in its cage, someone will sneeze or cough or drop their pencil and reach down and pick it up or pick lint off their sweater or pass a note to the person next to them ? there might be things hanging from the ceiling that are slowly turning, there is dust floating in the sunlight coming through the windows, and of course there are fluorescent lights that are actually, this is true, blinking on and off sixty times every second. Plus, there are probably hundreds of words and dozens of pictures on the walls, each intending to grab your attention, there are patterns in the floor and on the ceiling tiles, there is the grain of the wood on your desktop sometimes marked with scratches and writing that other students have put there, there are books all over the place with words on them and the hardware that holds your notebook together. Then, outside the window and in the hall outside the door are millions of other things ? cars and birds and planes and kids at recess and clouds going by, or even more amazing ? rain, or a person walking past the classroom door, or just the way that power lines and phone wires hang between each pole. And finally there is everything about you ? from the feel of each piece of clothing against your skin to whether you are hot or hungry or thirsty to the tag at the back of your shirt that is scratching your neck to listening to the funny little noise of the blood running through your ears or trying to find a pattern in the weave of the fabric of your jeans and what could be more incredible than the shapes on the bottom of your sneakers and how dirt sticks into them.

“All of these things are going on. One of those things might be the teacher talking or one might be the test you are supposed to be taking. But in each of those cases that is still just one thing and there are, obviously, so many things. And the point is that even if I??m supposed to know which of those things I should be paying the most attention to, even if I??ve been told ??five hundred times for God??s sake,?? it still doesn??t work. It??s still like having a dozen people standing around me all yelling different things at once. Later people told me that because I paid attention to so much stuff it made me a good cop; maybe so, but it does not make you the favorite of any teacher.”

I guess I bring this up because the issue you describe is a somewhat different one, and yet the same, as with all other “disabilities” we are at an intersection between who you are (or I am) and the environment in which a task must take place. So, undoubtedly you know all the standard answers – sit in the front row, sit in the back corner, and sometimes those work and sometimes not. So, perhaps without specific disclosure, based in “preference only,” classrooms might have sections – multitaskers and singletaskers, for example. Amtrak has quiet cars, club cars, regular cars. Its the same kind, different needs being met within the same system.

I’m interested because your experience is the opposite of mine. In undergrad classes I have to ask students to bring laptops. In my grad courses the laptop in every hand in essential to the conversation, as we all look things up, share documents, research, books to read, questions. In my grad courses we also, of course, have few readings actually available in print form – students must choose to print documents out if they want paper versions. While undergrads (not in things I teach, but) are still stuck with expensive, instantly antiquated textbooks.

But a large part of what you describe I would call “instructional failure.” If everyone brought a pen and paper to class and the instructor had nothing for students to do with that, “bad” things would happen. Pens would be twirled, paper airplanes folded, notes passed, pictures drawn. Instructors which do not make constant use of the information technologies in the room – “could you look that up?” “could you share that?” “we’ll use Google Docs to share thoughts” “look it up, see if what I just said is true” – are creating the situation you describe. The students are simply reacting to their environment.