Chapter 8 & 9

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In the chapter Laws of Habit James discusses what teachers should encourage students to do in terms of the formation of habit. He emphasized that habits are part of our make-up and that the nervous system is what we use in the acquisition of the things that we deem as positive or advantageous to automaticity. My question here is if this is what we aspire to, where does creativity play into this picture?

James stated in the text, " Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in the moment of their forming but in the moment of their producing motor effects that resolve and aspiration communicate the new set to the brain." (p. 35) Runco & Pritzker (1999) listed habit as a barrier to creativity. Creativity it would seem to me is spontaneity of the individual. When we make an act a habit then we can no longer look at it as creative. I guess it would only be creative in the stage in which according to James prompts a "motor effect."

The mention of association of ideas to that which is native or acquired bring to mind the thought of teaching students in ways that they can associate the information to real life situations. James in Chapter 7 explained that teachers should vary their association of ideas when they instruct students. He also stated that teachers should also vary the way that they pose questions to students. This is very interesting to me simply because it connects with the notion of teaching so that it connects to real life situations. In this instance the connections of ideas has to change because the real life situation of students also varies.

The connection of ideas can be difficult for students with Specific Learning Disabilities in the area of writing. These individual typically have difficulties with formulating ideas in written work. The association of these ideas to a creative sample of work for these individuals is not an easy task.

William James: Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some Of Life's Ideals

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William James gives teachers lots of issues to ponder. However, quite a few question stand out in my mind. The one that keeps coming up for me is, how does an unconscious thought or action move to our consciousness? William James talks about the fact that even our consciousness is "unclear and hazy." (p. 9) If this statement is true then how can he say that consciousness leads to knowledge and action?

In our discussion in class on the definition of learning, we discussed unconscious and consciousness as it relates to whether a person has learned a particular thing. We could not concretely decide if learning is a conscious or unconscious effort because we realized that somehow we remember things that we were not consciously paying attention to. This made us question whether remembering something meant that a person has actually learned it.

James mentioned in the text that a person couldn’t just sit quietly without some sort of action. Listening involves some sort of physiological response. He proposes that even if a person sits and does nothing but listen he or she is moving their eyes and thus moving some of the muscles within their body. (p. 18) Is this an example of conscious or unconscious process? It would seem as if the explanations also lead to more questions.

There was also mention of the connectedness of psychology to teaching. James admonished teachers that the very things that they are taught to focus on is the unimportant thing as it relates to educating the young. According to James, teaching and psychology are as equally important, neither more important than the other. Teaching involves the task of just "supervising" the process by which the child is learning (p. 20). If this is the case then are we saying that learning is innate? If an individual lacks the "innate" capability then are we also saying that they are incapable of learning?

Even further, James proposed that any acquisition is just an addition to or a substitution of what a child by nature already knows (p. 20). "The teacher's art consists in bringing about the substitution or complication, and success in the art presupposes a sympathetic acquaintance with the reactive tendencies natively there." (p. 20) In the case of special education and specifically those individuals with intellectual disabilities, the teachers are given the task of training individuals to perform functional skills that are not "native" to them. So if a teacher just sits back and guides the learning, these specific skills may not be acquired and these individuals may only be able to adapt to their environment with very little successes.