The Making of a Teacher - 1905 Author:Martin Grove Brumbaugh Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill HOW MAY ATTENTION BE SECURED? have now tracked our fact through sensation, perception, and consciousness, to attention. What will attention do with it?... more » This question cannot now be answered wisely. We must first study this power of attention. It is most significant. Is it always the same? Is it easily controlled? Is it always active? You should at this point make note of the power of attention as it manifests itself while you study these words. Do you focus on this line your entire attention? Is it easy for some outside fact, calling through the senses, to destroy your attention? Can I readily shift your attention? What peculiar quality in this discussion seems to hold your attention most steadily? What can you most readily give up, what do you find yourself holding to most tenaciously ? In the preceding chapter the question was raised: " How may attention be secured ? " The answer to this is important, because, as we have seen, without attention there is no fixedness in thought. This will be apparent to anybody who will for a moment consider the stream of thoughtthat passes under the focus of consciousness. It is one minute one thing and another minute another thing, and so on through an almost endless series. It is not to be understood that there is no connection between the different percepts in the stream of thought. There probably is, but the connection is oftentimes so subtle that we fail to recognize it, and in general it is of such a character as to make it practically useless for educational purposes. It is only when attention arrests the stream of thought, and holds Strm8ofnpetrcept. the foCUS of Consciousness upon one distinct aspect of this stream of thought, that anything like vivid, connected thought arises in the soul. It is, therefore, of the u...« less