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Here's why I think that yesterday's video is profound. As it alludes to at the very end of the video, it says a lot about perception, and what we miss when we're focused on something else. This is important in many avenues of life, but I'd like to focus on my profession, since that is where my mind always wanders first. That profession is education. And I can see how this video is relevant in two ways.
IN A GROUP SETTING: From an educational standpoint, the video is a parable of a teacher's world. Most teachers are in front of a classroom of 20 to 30 students and a time, and that teacher is concentrating on one thing--teaching whatever concept is at hand. While the teacher is focused on this, other things are always happening in class. The last four years that I was in the classroom I was a mentor teacher for first year teachers. Part of that responsibility meant that three times a year I was out of my classroom and spent the entire day in the first year teacher's classroom observing. And I was always shocked at what the first year teacher would allow the students to "get away with" while I was in the classroom. Some students would be asleep. Some were obviously cheating. Others were ignoring the teacher completely. Why wasn't the teacher doing something about this? The answer was simple: those kids were the moonwalking bear. The teacher didn't see them at all.
WITH AN INDIVIDUAL STUDENT: And it's not just in group settings that this video has merits. It also applies to how a teacher views an individual student, too. Especially when that student has been identified as an exceptional student of some sort. For instance, if a student is identified as having a specific disability--say, a behavior problem--the teacher may focus undue attention about that aspect of the child to the exclusion of other aspects. Holy cow that sounded jargonish! Let me try again: If a student is a known behavior problem, the teacher may look for the student to be a behavior problem and in the process of focusing on that behavior problem may miss something else about the student. Maybe he has a tremendous creative side that comes out on occasion. The behavior problems are the white team and the creative spark is the bear. It's there in plain sight for anyone to see, but not if you're focused on making sure that the kid behaves.
An interesting experiment to try, by the way, would be to show the video with the sound off and WITHOUT the instruction to watch the white team. I wonder how many people then would see the bear?
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