Category Archives: Education

Politicians and Educators: Wake Up and Stop Screwing Up Our Kids

I finished my day today with a really terrific family. Three months ago I saw their nine-year-old daughter, Mandy, for the first time; today was their first revisit. Mandy’s parents brought her to us because of a plethora of issues, including a full range of academic problems and memory issues, being fearful and distractible, having fine motor, gross motor, and coordination concerns, avoidance behaviors, difficulty with peers, sensitivity to sounds, tics, etc.–a fairly typical mixed bag of issues.

Today I saw a new Mandy. After three months of home program/home school, Mandy advanced a full academic grade level. Her short-term memory, working memory, and executive function has moved from being of significant concern to being “typical” and should continue to move forward; her motor skills have improved; she is much more confident and tolerates the noisy world much better. These are outcomes that we tend to expect. But because of the changes Mandy’s parents have seen in her, they both decided to come in themselves for assessments and programs.

Both of these parents are smart, great people, and although they are both about 40, neither has really recovered from the experience of school.They both have issues and baggage, largely created by the school/educational experience, issues that they have been carrying around and trying (largely unsuccessfully) to cope with since their days in school. Both have poor self-esteem, are insecure, and are a reflection of our educational system–a system that, rather than helping all of us unique individuals succeed, has done an absolutely incredible job of ignoring a basic fact that we actually have brains and that there are these wonderful things called “potential” and“brain plasticity.”Neuro/brain plasticity is an innate brain function that is basic to who and what we are and what we can be, as is breathing.Brain plasticity is not a new concept or new information. It has been acknowledged since the late 1800s.It has been at the foundation of our work at NACD since the organization’s inception in the late ‘70s. So how can it be that our educational system is and has been focused on curriculum and not building and developing brains and unique individuals? The system still maintains a “the-more-we-throw-at-them-the-more-we-hope-sticks” educational model, believing that to achieve better outcomes they just need more hours per day and days per year to throw more crap at students. Then the mindset appears to be: “It’s not working, so lets’ do more of it, and let’s throw a couple of hours of useless homework on top just to make sure that the majority of kids not only don’t really learn anything, but let’s teach them to really hate learning everything and teach them that they are broken in the process.”

We all have incredible potential. Those in control of public and most private education need to forget about coming up with another 1000 reading and math programs, throwing out more books and replacing them with modifications of what they have just thrown out. Forget about throwing more random crap at kids with the hope that some of it will stick. Stop taking kids who love learning and teaching them to hate learning anything. Please acknowledge that we are all amazing and unique individuals with incredible potential. Please stop trying to fit us all into a narrow model and calling us diseased (LD, ADD, ADHD, dyslexic , Asperger’s, etc.) if we don’t fit their perception of who and what we should be and with a little attention to just the basics of developing brains and turning kids on to learning, we can change their futures and our future.

Mandy is just getting started. She’s going to be a happy, confident star, as most of our children could and should be, and her brave parents are going to learn that they are actually quite smart and that it isn’t too late for them to raise the bar and achieve, feel good about themselves, and be great.

Unlocking the Potential – From the Brilliant Baby Series

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How do we help our children achieve? How do we move beyond labels, particularly that of just being “typical/average,” to really make our children successful? Neuroplasticity–how our brains are stimulated and used determines how they become wired. Brains change. We need to make sure they change in good ways. We can build on strengths and identify inefficiencies or weaknesses, provide a child with appropriate input/stimulation, and change their brain. How cool is that?

Where Did My Brilliant Baby Go?

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From the Brilliant Baby series–

“Where Did My Brilliant Baby Go?”

In this short video from the Brilliant Baby series, I talk about how parents and educators determine how well our children access and reach their innate potential. Development is not about our children getting older; it’s about developing their brain, and parents and educators need to help make that happen. Hey, parents! Hey, educators! How well are you really doing?

More On How It Appears

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I recently wrote a post where I discussed the significance of the term “It Appears That.” This is such an important concept to me that I’d like to expound on it a bit.

I mentioned that even when looking at “formal” research, I question and challenge the results. Although the researchers may feel that their study has proven whatever it is that their conclusion states, we still must understand that it still doesn’t necessarily make it true. Researchers, practitioners and developers alike become vested in their hypotheses, methodologies, and products. My experience is that an individual or group will discover something that worked for someone or a few “someones,” then apply it to a few more similar “someones” whom it may help. By this time they are vested, and also perhaps have invested, in the idea or product and are perhaps “sold” on their “baby,” so to speak. Then they start using their thing with a broader and broader population and look at results through rose-colored glasses. The placebo effect would tell us that about 30% of people who use something will see, or believe they see, benefits. For those who create, develop, invest in, and make their living from this product or service, this placebo effect feedback can be sufficient to keep them believing in and promoting what they are doing. For the user the more expensive and the more difficult the product or service is to acquire, the more invested they become and the more likely they are to see benefits. One would hope that time would bring out the truth; but the reality is that once a tipping point has been reached and a significant number of people have used it or sufficient time has passed, many of these things become “true” based on their longevity. “If it has been around for this long and used by this many people, is must be true and it must be right.” (Bloodletting was used for 2,000 years–it must be good.) The list of things I have seen that have followed this pattern is very long, but the bottom line is: buyer beware. Whether it is a product for sale, a new or “time tested” medication, or a “proven” scientific paradigm, we must look at whatever is presented to us in this light and not be naïve about what we accept as truth.

Another reason we have to be careful about such programs, products, and ideas is that what may be true for one individual isn’t necessarily true for the next. One of my greater challenges has been simply describing what we do at NACD. People endlessly ask, “What is your program?” to which we respond, “We don’t have ‘a’ program.” We have as many programs as we do individuals with whom we work. We utilize over three thousand different methods and techniques, which we continually modify or replace. Our task is to understand the individual and pull from our reservoir of experience and resources to determine what is going to give us the most bang for our buck for this individual, in this family today. How can we best utilize time and resources? What are the best specific tools to use with this individual today, understanding that next week or next month it will be different? People have a difficult time understanding this because the world is full of specific programs, which may be tweaked a bit, but which are essentially the same for everyone. Unfortunately–or fortunately–no two of us are alike. Those recommending medications, diets, and “programs” for developmental issues, however, tend to treat us as though we all are.

My decades of work have taught me one incredibly important lesson: Each of us is unique. Our strength likes in our individuality and uniqueness. The more we can approach our treatment and our relationships from this perspective, the more effective and successful we will be. It would appear that as educators or providers, as individuals or as parents, we had better understand that we need to be constantly questioning, looking at the results, and determining if what we are doing is working and working well. I always believe that we can and need to continually do it better.

Down With Homework

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Our local news KSL posted an article this week, “Utah Teacher: assigned homework does not benefit kids.” The local educator and author Lynn Stoddard was quoted as saying “It’s such a strong myth in our society that teacher assigned homework is good for kids.” The post went on to list Stoddard’s reasons for his statement, which included:

It is an excessive burden on parents.
It interferes with family activities.
It puts much stress on many students.
It makes less time for other beneficial interests.
It gives children an aversion to learning.

I’ve read Stoddard’s book, Educating for Human Greatness, and found I agreed with the majority of what he had to say, which is not too surprising in that we are both proponents of student individuality and the huge role of inquiry as a primary tenet of successful education. Stoddard and I are not at all alone in our concerns about homework. Other books that I have read that discuss the negative aspects of homework are Kohn’s The Homework Myth and Kralovec and Buell’s book The End of Homework. I have been fighting homework throughout my career and believe that the vast majority of homework not only does not benefit kids, but is in fact harmful for the entire educational process.

Two of the commonly stated concerns with our children and their education are that children do not get enough exercise and they do not read. We have children getting up before 6:00 a.m. to catch their school bus; they sit in classrooms until about 3:00; get home at 3:30 or 4:00, if lucky; and then sit down to often hours of homework/busywork. So when do they get exercise? And who could be surprised that after all those hours of non-individualized, non-personalized “stuff”– much of which requires reading–Johnny doesn’t read for pleasure or read to explore his personal interests? It’s really not surprising that Johnny doesn’t read and Johnny very possibly is destined to become an adult non-reader. The value of reading is unquestionable, and creating readers should be, and is, one of the primary objectives of education. However the system is failing. The often-ineffective methods being used to teach reading by our educational system is a whole other topic for another day. It’s tragic that the two most positive influences on reading in the United States in the past 40 years have been Sesame Street and Harry Potter. It certainly has not been our curriculum-based, testing-based public education system.

Many of the current educational trends are moving in all the wrong directions. The solution to better education is not more curriculum, longer school days, longer school years, more homework, and more testing. The solution is smarter school, not more school, and more individualized, brain/child-centered education and parents– parents whose role is reading with their children, exploring with their children, or often even talking with their children, instead of fighting with their children to do their homework.

It appears that we need to fix this broken system. Down with homework!

It Appears That…

Bob Doman's thoughts on thinking and human development.

Category Archives: Education

Politicians and Educators: Wake Up and Stop Screwing Up Our Kids

Related links:

Unlocking the Potential – From the Brilliant Baby Series

Where Did My Brilliant Baby Go?

More On How It Appears

Down With Homework