I’m pretty late to the game on a lot of stuff.  

I had heard people talking about noise machines and how they used “white noise” while they worked or studied.  Of course, my initial reaction was that those folks were a special case; maybe they had some sort of issue or hang-up that required such new-fangled things. 

I really didn’t know for sure what white-noise was. Surely I wasn’t a person who needed to look into it or see if it would help me.

We want to throw around letters of the alphabet and talk about how everyone has ADHD and is on “the spectrum.” Most of us don’t know what the heck we are talking about, really. It’s amazing to me how buzzwords come and go, used by people who are largely ignorant.

Let’s just face facts: we all probably have some sort of attention issue. Some folks have actual, diagnosed attention deficits.  Some have medical or psychological issues that cause attention problems. Some of us, as an elderly friend used to say, “live too fast.”  Depending on our season of life, some of us have way too much on our plate.

It’s just stinkin’ hard to pay attention to everyone the way we are supposed to. It’s hard to listen. It’s hard to attend to things. 

Being an educator for 30-plus years, I am fully aware of the struggles that face my students day-in and day-out regarding paying attention. It has been, really, my life’s work to help children overcome some of these issues. I feel like I’ve heard it all, tried it all, and modified the heck out of everything in order to accommodate various learning styles and attention issues.

One day, I heard a teacher talking about “white noise” and how she turned on such noise during testing. She said there were various videos with hours and hours of white noise on, you guessed it, YouTube!  

So, why not?  I thought I’d give it a shot. After all, when one looks up the benefits of white noise, we see that it reduces anxiety, increases focus and generally promotes well-being.

Hey, wait a minute.  What is white noise anyway? Well, all I can tell you is that it sounds like the old days when television stations went off the air. Not the beeping test pattern; I’m talking about the fuzzy snow stage. Like when you don’t have a radio station signal anymore. Static.  

But it’s supposedly something new and innovative. Who knew?

Always one to try new things to an extent, I thought I’d fire up the white noise during state testing one day.  

I Googled “white noise for the classroom” and came up with, as you may guess, all sorts of choices.  Heck, there was even some black noise and brown noise, both of which sounded mysterious and almost sinister.

I will have to check both of them out some other time.

I found one white noise video that had a lovely celestial background – sort of like the viewer was floating in space. Apparently, it would run for 10 hours straight without interruption.  

Not wanting to alarm my students, I turned the volume down, clicked play, and gradually turned up the volume to a respectable level of static.

I kid you not, I felt my pulse slow down a bit. I felt a sudden feeling of relief, a very calming and relaxed sensation. I suddenly felt like my brain was functioning at a higher level and things became a lot clearer.  

It was as if I’d taken some sort of muscle relaxer. I began to think of all the ways I could use such an immediate calming method. This was really something. I couldn’t believe the immediate effect it had on me.  

And heck, I wasn’t even taking a test.

Give it a try. Tell me what you think at marksremarks10@gmail.com.