Short Attention Span Theatre

Over at Musings about Life I wrote a post regarding what I like to call "Short Attention Span Theatre" (SAST) and how it relates to writing.

"Sounds like a joke? Well, it was. I'm not the person who coined this phrase. I gleaned it from some comedian back in the '80s. However, as much of a joke as it was, it has become a way of life today. Everything is thrown at us in rapid fire--from commercials to tv shows to writing. Nothing should be too long because for some reason, the idea is that humans have a very short attention span and if you don't keep it short, your audience's mind will wander. (And they wonder why ADHD is a problem?...)"

I'm writing this post specifically to address the problem of ADHD as it relates to SAST.

If I had a dollar for every teacher who intimated my child had ADHD, I could buy myself a nice meal. Almost every teacher she had hinted around that she needed to be tested for this malady. Every year but one from kindergarten to sixth - when I finally took her out of public school. (And the one year where no one mentioned ADHD was a year when her teacher was so close to retirement, she couldn't have cared less about her students.) One teacher didn't bother to hint, but point blank told me my daughter had ADHD. I ignored them all. It was plain to me she didn't have ADHD, but when everything comes at a child rapid fire--from the television which most people blame, to the textbooks themselves--it's little wonder kids can't keep themselves on task.

Oh, I admit I fell down on the job when my daughter was young. I used the TV as a babysitter, and I wasn't picky about what I let her watch. She would spend hours in a PBS-coma, glued to Barney like he was a watch swinging in front of her face. Then she would leave home and go to preschool where everything is bam bam bam - do this for ten seconds, move on and do that for ten seconds. Then it was regular school, where the walls are splashed with a million different posters, and colors, and the textbooks are just as bad. So, fault those first few years runs 50/50.

Finally, I woke up and paid attention to my child's mental growth. I shut the TV off, ditched the videos, and tried to make my life a bit less SAST. It calmed her down a lot. (A LOT) But still she was hammered at school. I couldn't look at her textbooks and keep any level of concentration myself; I can't imagine what those things do to a kid's brain. Every page is splattered with tidbits of info along the sides, and blurbs dotted here and there - sometimes with important information and sometimes with unnecessary trivia.

I don't know which came first - ADHD or SAST - but it seems to me they feed each other.

Is it any wonder our kids can't pay attention?