tools, jobs

Justin Neuman: At the start of a session, I might pull a trick from my meditation or yoga practice and say, as we’re opening our computers, that I know how tempting it is to check our carts, our socials, our text messages. I feel the pull, too. But for the next ninety minutes, we’re scrubbing in [like surgeons preparing for surgery]. Laptops are for notes and the text. Phones are face down. If your attention drifts, notice it. Bring yourself back. The drift isn’t failure. Noticing it is the lesson, and it’s what experts do. My opening comments matter because they reframe distraction not as transgression but as training. Students begin to understand that governing their own attention is part of their education, not a prerequisite for it. I can see it in the room in little ways: in the phone turned over, deliberately, on the table; in the student’s instinct to shut the laptop immediately after we’ve searched up some supporting fact; in the occasional guilty grin of acknowledgment. What…