I recently read some posts on the damaging effects of interruptions and wanted to explore this in the context of my current job – sysadmin across multiple k-12/ks1-5 educational environments – and offer some thoughts on how to change things.
First off, the core educational environment itself is pretty much built around interruptions. You generally have a single teacher in a room of a few dozen kids. I’m simplifying here, but the teachers essentially have particular targets to hit each lesson (“teach this thing”, “make sure the group produces this result”, etc) and these lessons are typically somewhere around an hour long, though from what I’ve seen these lessons are shrinking in length to squeeze more different material into a day/week. Teacher
A teacher has an hour to achieve a goal before moving on to the next goal with a different group. During this hour, they will typically outline the thing to be done or learned, then work with the class to help them get there. This naturally results in questions (interruptions) continuously. It’s in the teachers best interest to answer these questions well to ensure that individuals maintain pace with the group, but paradoxically the more questions that are asked the slower the group can move forward, as spe