In the eight talk James talks about the development habits and how they are second nature. He discusses how teachers should use/create habits to help them in the classroom.
In this talk the passage that I liked the most was, “to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.” I am very much a creature of habit. I didn’t realize how bad until I hurt my right arm and had to learn how to do pretty much everything differently for a little while. When he talks about turning as much as we can over to automatism, I agree because it does make life easier. But is it a good thing to be such creates of habit and automatisms that we are not able compensate when a change needs to be made? Not saying I wasn’t able to, just would hate to think what it would be like if I was so automatic I wasn't able to modify or make changes.
But consider our automatic capabilities SAVE us from so much stress and insanity in our lives. In fact, if most of our processes were not automatic, we would be hopeless and lost.
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