Gearing Up for the New Beginning

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The registration for the Simply Smarter System Beta is coming to a close in a few days and many of us are getting anxious to start using it. I know I have lost some horsepower over the last few years and am ready to get it back. As I hope we all know, specific input with sufficient frequency, intensity, and duration is what produces change. We have a great proven tool that builds all of the processing pieces: short-term memory, working memory, executive function, visualization, and conceptualization. This is done in a totally targeted, individualized program that provides each individual with the specific input and delivers it with the required frequency, intensity, and duration for anyone who is motivated to improve.

I have all of our staff signed up and am excited to see them push forward. I plan to see everyone get better at virtually everything, improving globally. Everyone may not have the time to devote to reach a 10 or 12 or higher, but as many of our families know, even an incremental change can make a measurable difference in function. We have families that can see their child change significantly as they move from a 3.0 to 3.1 to a 3.2, on their way to a 4. One of the things I love to see is children who take the summer off from their academic programs (not something I recommend), but who work on their processing; and unlike the other children who attend school and take a summer vacation and lose about three months academically over the summer, these children often gain three to six months, and at times over a year, in their reading and math skills- way cool!

I’m also very excited to see the changes in how well programs are being implemented and how well the parents of our kids are able to organize their lives, think through the issues, and improve the overall quality of their lives as they build their processing skills.

Once everyone gets started on the SS System, early next month I would love to see people start sharing stories about their progress. “I came up a full digit in my auditory progression in just weeks!” “I moved out of the red and yellow zones into all greens across the board.” You can share your advancement on NACD’s Facebook page without revealing where you actually are, or if you want to brag, tell the world where you have gone.

I would hope that our enlightened NACD families would perceive the value of the Simply Smarter System and my vision with our foundation’s Simply Smarter Project. We can all be smarter and we all need to get smarter fast. There is nothing on the news that makes me believe that the world is moving in any great directions. We need everyone to simply be smarter soon or I’m really worried about later.

Interview with M. Night Shyamalan

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M. Night ShyamalanI’m a morning-news junkie. I get up and turn the news on in my bedroom, then go down to the kitchen to get coffee and turn on a different news channel and then go up to my bathroom to shower and get ready and turn on a third news channel. I feel I need to know what is going on in the world, I don’t need to know who shot whom at what bar last night or how the traffic is doing unless I have to drive to the airport so I skip local news and look for national and international news and stories that actually address important issues. Between a few different sources I hope to get at least an approximation of what is really going on.

This morning an interview caught my attention because it was about education. As it turned out the interview was with M. Night Shyamalan who is a movie guy—writer, producer and director. The interview was a discussion of a book that he has just written entitled, “I Got Schooled: the Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America’s Education Gap.” Since I was getting ready to go to the office I couldn’t give the program my undivided attention but I found it quite interesting.

Regarding Mr. Shyamalan, I don’t know what he goes by—is it “M” like in the James Bond movies or “M. Night” or “Night”—I don’t know because I don’t really follow much of anything relative to movies but, this fellow seemed quite bright and evidently with the help of some other bright people really looked into the subject of American education. Very often outsiders do a much better job of assessing a problem than do the experts who “should” know.

Mr. Shyamalan spoke of an event that helped shape his perception of what needed to be done in order to understand and address the inequality of education in America. This event was a discussion with a physician who taught at the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. The doctor related how he would enlighten the incoming medical students regarding health. He evidently told his students that the real key to health involved only five pieces:

#1 Get 8 hours of sleep

#2 Have a healthy diet

#3 Exercise 3 times per week

#4 Pay attention to your mental/brain health

#5 Don’t smoke

These pieces make individual and collective sense but the big point was that you have to do all five—doing only four out of five did not produce a particularly good outcome.

This “aha moment” helped Mr. Shyamalan evaluate the educational data differently and formulate a set of criteria that would produce the needed outcome in total.

This “aha moment” for Mr. Shyamalan was also an “aha moment” for me this morning. Certainly one of the most frustrating aspects of my work is getting folks to address all of the pieces—not to miss or add pieces but to address the totality of their program. I have known that a huge part of our success with children has been our understanding of and our commitment to working with the whole child and addressing the gestalt of that child. Frustration comes when families do some of their program along with “some of this and some of that.” This revelation really reinforced to me the need to do all of the pieces. I’m sure as I continue to give this more thought I will gain even more insights.

I apologize if everything I related about the interview is not totally accurate. I was, after all, trying to get ready to run to the office for my first Skype meeting but I think I’m being reasonably accurate. I will order Mr. Shyamalan’s book and let you know what I think.

NACD parents—please write down the five keys to health and do your best to follow all of them. I think this is right on. Take care of yourselves.

At Least We Know How to Stand in Line

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Hello from Paris! It’s 12:30 a.m. and I’m out enjoying the wild nightlife.

photo-13Not really. I’m sitting in a very hot, very humid, very closed Charles de Gaulle airport. It has been one of those very wonderful travel days. (Up at 3 a.m. to get to the airport in Bucharest, get on a flight to Paris, sit on the very hot, very humid plane for three hours before they decide it’s broken and they can’t fix it, wait around until after 8 p.m. to catch another flight. My connection left many hours ago. Eventually I will get on a plane to Salt Lake City, which I think is about another 12 hours or something. Oh, the joys of international travel. And let’s not talk about the endless lines, or if there is not a narrow corridor, generally masses of people converging on a target location.

Forgetting the mess of trying to get home, I have had a very good trip, seeing kids and families in London, Rome, and Bucharest. Got to discover “Old Bucharest” last night with one of our families and earlier in the week to visit their home outside of the city with another of our NACD families. I was really impressed by these folks. They are a lovely bright couple with a beautiful little boy named Tudor, who will be having his first birthday this weekend.

Happy Birthday, Tudor!

As always when I travel in Europe, I am impressed with how tuned in and informed many of the folks are to the rest of the world in comparison to many in the States; and I’m always so impressed by how bi- and multilingual so many of the people are. The wonderful young couple that I was privileged to get to know speak their native Romanian, French, English, and Greek. Perhaps more, but at least those, and they are economists not linguists. Most of the families I met with in Romania spoke very acceptable English.

Historically in the States we do a terrible job of not only teaching other languages, but also of perceiving that we really should do so. Growing up outside of Philadelphia, I had Italian friends whose parents or grandparents spoke Italian, but not one of them learned Italian. And that was often true of others who had family in their homes using their native languages. It would seem to be part of American/English language arrogance.

Languages as they are generally taught in our schools are really pretend, not designed with the intention of teaching you to actually be functional let alone fluent in the language. Typically schools start way too late and the curriculum constructed poorly. After my first year of Spanish in 9th grade, I had learned only one phrase, “Roberto es stupido.” It wasn’t just Roberto who was stupido; so was the teacher and the instruction. I had two years of Spanish in high school and another two years in college, but I think I learned more in a month in Spain than in four years at school. How many people do you know who took languages in school starting in junior or senior high who can actually speak the language? Fortunately many schools, particularly charter and private schools, are doing a much better job now of teaching other languages, starting in Kindergarten and, if possible, earlier and incorporating immersion as a significant focus, if not the focus, of the program.

Beyond the societal issues, research is showing that being bilingual helps build cognitive function and even can slow down Alzheimer’s. We as individuals in the US need to perceive the need to join and understand the rest of the world, to help our children understand that they live in a big world that they need to appreciate, understand, learn from, and join.

We in the US may not teach our children to pay attention to the rest of the world or to speak more than one language, read, or do math very well; but there is something our schools are good at, and evidently better at from my observations, than most of the European countries, and that is how to stand in line. Perhaps really teaching our children to speak another language or two from an early age might be a better focus. Reading would be nice too.

I hate standing in lines, any lines. Perhaps if more people were lousy at it we would find a way to minimize them—a better way. We need lots of better ways. Let’s keep creating them.

What Cannot Be Understood or Solved Gets Labeled

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Labels in SchoolWe just received this from one of our NACD moms:

I wanted to share with you a jaw-dropping experience I had today:

I was having a meeting with an educational diagnostician regarding my daughter’s evaluation for next school year. I kept voicing my concern about how I didn’t think that the school district was up to date with newest research in neuroplasticity and wouldn’t provide her with the best possibilities that are available. Anyway, I must have used “neuroplasticity” 3 times in our conversation. At the end of the meeting, she said, “I’m sure that most teachers would look up any label that a child would have and make themselves familiar with that label. Now I’ve never had a student who had Neuroplasticity, but I’d be sure to look it up!” Then she asked me if I had any other questions and I said, “Nah, I think we are done.”

I’m afraid that this story typifies the current state of affairs. Training for those who work with educational and developmental problems is much more about labeling and categorizing than about addressing and fixing problems. The educational system and other disciplines that “help” us with our children and to take care of ourselves perceive that they are serving us if they can successfully give us a label. It sounds a bit better if it is called a diagnosis, but it is still a label; and once given, we are often categorized and a corresponding prognosis assigned. As this mother’s story has so well illustrated, it’s not about understanding and addressing a problem; it’s all about what you call it.

What cannot be understood or solved gets labeled, and then solving the individual’s problem often becomes less imperative, and the focus becomes how to make “appropriate” accommodations.

Psychologist: “Mrs. Smith, we have done comprehensive testing and we now understand why your son isn’t paying attention and is distractible. He has ADHD.”

Mrs. Smith: “What is ADHD?”

Psychologist: “That means he can’t pay attention and is distractible.”

Greater and greater percentages of our children are being labeled every year, and according to the professionals, they have diseases. Because they have diseases, they are all kind of the same; and because they are all kind of the same, then they need to find the cure that fits all of them; and until they find the cure, your child is essentially incurable. Having an incurable disease means that they can perhaps treat/mask the symptoms, but until the cure is found you’re kind of out of luck. Not.

What about your child being a unique human being, a person who has never existed before on the planet?

What about that thing that makes our brain development possible, and which wires each of us uniquely, and which is affected by everything we see, hear, feel, smell, taste, and think? Neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is not a disease; it’s not a label. It is that thing that makes each of us who we are at this moment and which makes us a little different every millisecond. That thing that also affords us unlimited potential.

Neuroplasticity:

Understand it.
Believe it.
Take advantage of it.

Stuck in a Rut

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It’s still snowing in Utah—it’s April, what happened to spring?

I recently had the opportunity to teach a friend visiting from the warm climes of the south how to drive in our Utah snow. To be honest, I’m not sure there was a lot of teaching; it was more like a lot of shoveling, and with the aid of some helpful ice fisherman, a lot of pushing and pulling to get the car out of a ditch.

For her first snow-driving lesson, I decided to pick a place without other vehicles, buildings, or people to run into. So we went up to a nearby lake and used the road leading to the boat ramp. It had just snowed and there was about a foot of new snow on the road. The road to the ramp looked perfect. Only a few ice fishermen had driven on it, so the snow was still rather pristine and there was not much of a tire path created in it yet. When I put my friend behind the wheel, my instructions were for her to get a feel for the snow, experiment with a little acceleration, stopping, starting, little movements right and left—to just get a feel for it all, but to stay in the center, watch out for the ditches on both sides, and drive to the end of the road. She did really well. Actually she did really well for about 10 seconds. Without any real ruts yet in the road, and with only a couple squiggly pickup tracks, it only took a tiny turn off center and a little acceleration to put us in the ditch. It would have been a whole lot easier for her if there had been good ruts in the snow. Once she was stuck in the rut, she could have easily moved forward and reached our destination.

The idiom “stuck in a rut” is all about negative connotations, but I think we need to reexamine and perhaps change the meaning to something like: to establish a path, a direction, develop a plan, and stick to it.

I had about eight months last year when I was stuck in a diet/exercise rut. I established a really good diet and exercised and lost about 25 pounds and felt great. As long as I was stuck in my rut I was super. Unfortunately the holidays came, lots of entertaining folks at home and in restaurants while on the road and just a bunch of stuff. I kept wiggling out of my rut, then lost it altogether and gained most of the weight back and lost the corresponding health benefits. I haven’t been in a rut, I’ve been out of the rut and need to get back in it. Hopefully I think I am back now.

Think about changing your perception. Create a path for your children, for yourselves, and work hard to find and get stuck in your rut. You might get to where you want to go a whole lot faster.