Reflection: when I am abroad with students, or teaching outdoors with them at home, I require them to pay attention to their senses.

This is interesting to me: why do we need to pay attention to our senses? Don’t our senses call our attention to themselves?

But perhaps we fall into habits of NOT paying attention to our senses so that we can do other things like walk to the next class, drive to work, etc.

Our tehcnologies make it easy to prioritize the visual, especially as it is rendered in two dimensions on a rectangular screen.

And the auditory, especially in isolation from an environment, mediated through headphones.

Often, while we are together, I will ask my students what they smell.

And it can be a challenge for them to put into words what they are perceiving through olfaction. We notice the extremes, the highlights, the sudden changes. We don’t mind the ordinary.