Why Today?

Every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday for the past seven weeks, I have woken up at approximately 8:30 AM in order to make it to my 9:00 AM Electromagnetic Fields class on time. My alarm clock is set for 8:12 AM, allowing for two satisfying whacks of the snooze button before I must officially wake up for the day. Since I shower before I go to bed at night, my morning routine consists of getting dressed and grabbing a pop-tart (preferably strawberry, with frosting) before snatching my backpack from the foot of my bed and heading out my apartment door on my way to class. 

After climbing three stories to the top floor of RIT's Kate Gleason building, I make my way to room 3149, and claim my seat. I habitually slouch into the fifth seat on the right, in the second row from the front of the class. Lucky for me, the hard blue plastic seats are just rigid enough to prevent me from drifting back to sleep in the middle of my fifty minute lecture. 

Surprisingly, I don't often find myself distracted or tired in this class, despite it being my earliest class of the quarter. A lot of this has to do with my professor, since she presents difficult and bland material, like "the magnitudes of complex reflection coefficients in matched transmission lines," in a way that keeps my attention. She uses a good mix of step-by-step variation and worked out examples which thankfully keep me from zoning out.

Last Tuesday, while in Electromagnetic Fields, I lost all concentration. My professor had started a new topic, dealing with the input impedance in a transmission line. I took down about a half-page of actual notes, before I found myself drawing this: 

What made me drift into doodles on this day, but not any other? I did some research, and come up with two separate answers. The first explanation is a lack of sleep. According to Kathleen Nadeau, Ph.D and Director of the Chesapeake ADHD Center of Maryland, simply one night of inadequate rest can "give you symptoms that resemble ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder), such as forgetfulness and difficulty maintaining concentration."

The second possible cause of my drifting attention that day has to do with the material being presented. As I noted before, my professor was beginning a new topic, and was presenting a lot of theory. She kept writing what seemed like an endless stream of formulas on the whiteboard without stopping to summarize or to do a numerical example. Since the lecture failed to switch gears to an example, or some other way of presenting the material other than flatly lecturing on generic formulas, my attention wandered.

Perhaps a combination of the bland theoretical material, and a lack of a good night's sleep prior to the lecture led me to doodling that morning, or maybe I just felt like drawing a dinosaur. Either way, the potential causes for this lapse in attention are worth taking note of. Maybe acknowledging these things will help to keep me from drifting off in class as often as I do.....or maybe it will just make my doodles that much more interesting!

Quote courtesy of CNN.