As a teacher one of the most aggravating things is when you give explicit directions and kids get them wrong. “Put your name on the topmost left line on the paper” – seems perfectly clear but either kids will ask “Where” or “My whole name?” or they will put it below the first line, not on top. Why can’t they just follow directions? It’s tempting to think they aren’t listening or being lazy.
I was recently reminded of how hard it is to follow directions in my yoga class. Most of the people in this class have been coming for ten or more years to this same teacher, and most of us are at least over the age of forty and most of us seem like sophisticated New Yorkers who’ve managed a thing or two in life. And yet. I have started to notice just how often people get things wrong, and not just the humorous, “No, Susan, your other left foot” confusion of right and left. Our teacher may spend two or three minutes being quite specific about the placement of the foot on the outside of the hip in a seated position and fully half of the class will not budge when she repeats the direction and yet they are doing it wrong. She will repeat it. No one moves.
What’s going on? With kids, it’s easy to find fault: either they’ve got ADHD or they’re being lazy or disrespectful. But when I noticed accomplished adults doing the same things, I thought about it more deeply. Following directions, it turns out, has a lot of components: listening, understanding, acting, assessing and fixing. And each one of those components has a lot of complex things going on beneath them - the assumptions, accommodations, and abstractions of listening alone are pretty mind-boggling.
It turns out we are doing a lot of work when we’re listening and following directions, and if grown-ups aren’t very good at it, then I wonder if we can be a little more generous to children in classrooms when they stumble too? (And teachers especially, I invite you to watch at your next faculty meeting: how well do teachers themselves do at listening and following directions???) Perhaps difficulty focusing doesn't have to be either good or bad: perhaps it is a feature of communication, one that we can notice without judging and criticizing.