Tag Archives: highly capable

The Foundation of Education - Scissors? NACD Blog

The Foundation of Education—Scissors?

I just conducted a Skype evaluation with a parent who has a developmentally delayed, ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) child from our Beijing chapter, one of NACD’s international hubs. This mom made a remark that I have heard probably thousands of times through the years, but realizing that the issue she brought up is international and not just a US issue has compelled me to comment.

This mother of a three-year-old who cannot not dress or undress himself, one of the foundational representations of independence and fine motor skills, commented that she was concerned her child may have a fine motor problem, not because her child couldn’t remove his sock, but because the preschool he attended was waving a red flag since this little three-year-old was not yet cutting with scissors. Really!

I have long wanted to ban scissors from preschools, but if we were to do that what would they do all day? Children can only eat so much paste. What criteria could they use for success, what would they use to validate their existence?

In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I am a bit biased on this subject. In 1951 I flunked cutting with scissors. Yes, I confess I flunked. It was my first and actually not my last academic disaster. I was shamed and humiliated. I never should have flunked cutting with scissors even though I was five, I really shouldn’t have been encouraged to use scissors. But beyond that, there was actually a reason why I flunked cutting with scissors. I was left-handed and back then they didn’t make left-handed or uni-hand scissors—which don’t really work with either hand.

Cutting with scissors can actually be used as a metaphor for a number of issues with education, that being just because we/they have been using it forever doesn’t make it right, smart or neuro-developmentally correct.

I am genetically predisposed to be left-handed and left-sided and as with many of us lefties, we do not clearly demonstrate which is our dominant hand as early as right-sided children. From the get-go the world encourages us to use our right hand like the majority of the population. Back when I was starting school everyone wrote with their right hand. Right was right and left was wrong. Even though we lefties know that only left-sided people are in their right minds. In countries like China that is still the case—everyone is taught to write with the right hand.

Children typically do not strongly and conclusively demonstrate a dominant hand until they are globally, neuro-developmentally about a 5*. For children with a developmental issue, that point is often not reached until years later than their chronological peers. So, should we really be encouraging and pushing one-hand, dominant-hand activities like writing and cutting before we even know which hand the child should be using?

If children must go to preschool, how about teaching them how to actually start becoming independent. Dressing and undressing themselves might be a good start, making their bed, or even cleaning up after themselves. Montessori schools often do a good job of teaching children how to manage self-help skills and household tasks. But cutting with scissors? I can often go from Christmas to Christmas without ever touching a pair of scissors. Since when was cutting a four-year-old’s survival skill or foundational fine motor function? Perhaps its a four- or five-year-old rite of passage that they need to cut their hair just that one time to see how they look with that bald spot in front.

Ranking right up there with “cutting with scissors” is writing and we really shouldn’t just blame preschool and kindergarten teachers, we need to throw in some occupational therapists as well. Teachers and therapists—please stop trying to make little children develop one-hand dominant skills like writing and cutting before they are neuro-developmentally ready. Not until most children are neuro-developmentally about a 5* can we accurately and safely determine which is their dominant hand. Prior to that time, they can swing back and forth. Besides, what is the rush? You are often not only teaching a child a one-handed skill and pushing them toward that hand, but you are probably doing it before their working memory, attention and motor planning are up to the task. The result being that you are only succeeding in teaching them that they can’t do it properly. Congratulations, they have learned to hate it! Our NACD cardinal rule of education is that step number one is teaching the child to love whatever it is you are trying to teach. Failure doesn’t teach them to love writing or cutting with scissors.

So much of education is based on perpetuating a list of things to teach children in different grades, regardless of whether or not it is meaningful, relevant, neuro-developmentally appropriate or if anyone really expects the student to understand, assimilate or remember it. We often take little children who prior to beginning their “education” love learning anything and spend the next twelve or more years teaching them to hate learning anything—brilliant!

Part of this tragedy is that there is so much that could be and should be done with all children, not the least of which is building a neuro-developmental foundation that actually gives them access to their innate intelligence and really affects not only their education, but their ability to learn, think and communicate—their futures. It’s the 21st Century and it’s about time that the educational system understood that children have these things they carry around between their ears that we call brains and that we have the ability to develop them all, not just try to push things into them. We can build a foundation of auditory and visual processing, short-term memory, working memory, executive function, visualization, and conceptualization and overall neurological efficiency. I would love to see our classrooms and schools receive report cards based on how well they are creating children’s foundations for learning, turning children onto learning and actually educating them. And please, let’s stop making a big deal about little children cutting with scissors.

 – Bob Doman

*We will generally acknowledge a child as being neuro-developmentally 5 when they have short-term and working memory that is commensurate with where we like to see five-year-olds. Specifically having short-term memory (auditory and visual digit spans of 5) and working memory (reverse auditory and visual digit spans of 4). Working memory is the foundation of executive function and determines complexity of thought and relates to global maturity.

Related Blog Articles:

Mila and Avery

Facundo

Making Kids Smart Isn’t Tough

To learn more about how you can work on you or your child’s short-term and working memory, check out the following links:

The Simply Smarter System (Windows/Mac)

NACD Cognition Coach – Toddler to 3 (iPad)

NACD Cognition Coach – Ages 3 to 5 (iPad)

The Road to Independence Starts with Short Journeys

Here is another video from Japan talking about how to help move children along the road to independence and become a successful adult. In my previous post I talked about how children learning to take care of their personal and self-help needs and learning to be responsible for chores is vital to their development and independence. Now let’s look a step further.

From everything I can discover, our country is a much safer place than it was 50 years ago; however, because of national media attention most people feel it’s getting more dangerous every year. We as parents are being pressured to feel and believe that the world is really dangerous and that our children shouldn’t be permitted to play alone in their front yards, let alone walk down the street to a park, or heaven forbid, walk to school by themselves. Times certainly are a-changing.

I grew up right outside of the city limits of Philadelphia in a rather typical 1950’s suburban neighborhood. Our house happened to sit on a highway, US route #1, a very busy road that happened to sit at the intersection of another busy road. I prided myself in my ability to wake in the middle of the night from a deep sleep at the sounds of tires squealing and get to my window in time to see the cars actually crash. My sister and I walked to school along and across that highway for one mile every day, starting with kindergarten, as did every other kid in the area.

At the age of eleven I started a snow removal business, having contracted with many of the families and a few businesses in the area and having hired a couple of my friends to work for me. On school nights if it was supposed to snow, I would stay up and wait for the snow and would hit the streets as soon as it started coming down, often working from two or three am until it was time to go to school. My parents were proud of my initiative, and if they had anxiety over my being out on the streets in the middle of the night, I never knew it. I suspect they might have had a twinge or two of apprehension; but if they did they kept it to themselves.

Before I start getting hate mail, let me say that I’m not suggesting that you let your kids go out by themselves and roam the streets in the middle of the night, or that you have your seven-year-old daughter take a couple of trains by herself though a busy city to get to school. But I am saying that as parents we need to look for opportunities for our kids to do things independently and take some journeys.

I’ve had a number of occasions during my meetings with kids and their parents to challenge and push the parents. When traveling to our chapters, I often do evaluations out of suites in hotels and more often than not, Embassy Suites hotels. Most of these hotels have fewer than ten floors of rooms built around a central atrium, with glass front elevators at one end. Riding the elevators is often the highlight of the child’s trip. While working out of these hotels, I have on many occasions encouraged a parent with a teenage child with perhaps Down syndrome or one on the autism spectrum or even learning or attention problems to let their child go down to the lobby and retrieve the other parent. Often the suggestion is met with shock. The child wasn’t shocked, the parent was. To put this into perspective, because of the layout of the hotel you could watch the child go down the hallway, into and down the elevator, and even look down and watch them in the lobby. It should also be mentioned that during the day when we are doing the evaluations, the hotel is pretty much empty. As many times as I have done this, I’ve never had a child have the least bit of an issue. They listened to the directions, followed the directions, and just did it. The problem wasn’t with the child; it was with the parent.

We need to give our children the opportunity to do things independently to teach them independence. Independence teaches confidence, self-reliance, and initiative, all very important, very necessary lessons for all children, whether typical or special needs.

Lest you think that I just talk the talk and don’t walk the walk, my son, Laird, who now at 27 basically runs daily operations at NACD, was hauling 40-pound bales of hay to our Scottish Highland cattle first thing in the morning, in the dark, through the snow, often at temperatures below zero by himself at the age of 5. He didn’t need to be pushed or prodded or given candy as a reward, it was simply one of his jobs and he was proud to do it. He is better for the experience.

As parents, each of us needs to look at our children and evaluate their capabilities, determine what challenges they can handle, and let them go. It’s part of our job.

Dream It and Do It

dreamsLast night I turned on the TV and there appeared a familiar face.

A couple of decades ago I worked with two families who had daughters. Jen and Stephanie had some pieces to work on, but both had high hopes and ambitions. Stephanie from the get-go had only one target—acting. Her friend, Jen, was interested in a variety of things both academic and musical, performing and excelling in voice and violin. The girls created a competition in the one thing that they could go at head-to-head, which was processing. The friendly competition resulted in fantastic auditory processing ability, and both girls were able to develop digit spans into the upper teens and, at times, a notch above.

Long story short, Jen went to college at 14, and two masters’ degrees later has a fantastic job in the tech world, is a concert violinist and a singer in a professional opera company, living her dreams. And Stephanie? Well, there she was on my TV.

Dream it and do it.

There is Some Hope for the World

liaBetween hearing horror stories about what is happening in education from our families, as well as reports and studies and seeing the results first hand day in and day out from our families, there are some glimmers of hope that we might survive in spite of our governments and institutions.

As much as I care about all of our kids with developmental problems, I am on a larger scale really concerned about our future as a society. We have wars going on all over the planet, people seem to find new reasons for killing and harming each other, and technology keeps giving them faster and easier ways to do it. We have people starving, people who lack even the basics needed to sustain life. One would think that in 2014 we would have some clue as to how to live together and help and support each other on this tiny planet; but evidently we don’t.

There are obviously a lot of things that need to be done; but we certainly do need to make everyone smarter, and we really need to help some people become really smart. We can help more of the people get it and some of the people really wrap their heads around the problems and start really fixing them.

Today I saw a glimmer of what can be. I saw a beautiful young lady who gave me hope. At her last evaluation I encouraged her family to buy her her very own set of encyclopedias. She likes to read—a lot. On good days her digit spans are hitting 12, and today her math was testing at high fourth grade, word recognition at college level, and reading comprehension at tenth grade level. She carries around medical books for casual reading, and today she needed to tell me about what she thought were the three most interesting spinal diseases. Cute, sweet, great sense of humor. (With an impish grin of her face today—just to mess with me—she said she thought that TLP was causing her tinnitus. Then she laughed.) She’s doing wonderfully physically and starting to get into doing chores. Great kid. And, by the way, she’s five! Five! Meet Lia.

There is hope for the world.

Learning Isn’t Tough

Learning isn’t tough. It actually can and should be fun and easy. It never ceases to amaze me how our schools can take learning, which can be so much fun and comes quite naturally to all of us, and make it all so very difficult, so painful, and fail so many of our children in the process.

I just saw one of our families who came out to Utah for their two “typical” girls to go skiing on the “best snow on Earth” and to get their evaluations and new programs. Both parents work full time and manage the girls and their short programs as they can. Both of the girls have been doing program since they were about two months old. The girls showed me their stuff at their evaluations, and both are doing very well; but big sister GiGi really showed off. GiGi had an auditory digit span of 5, and her reading tested out at the level of the average child in the nation in the middle of third grade. She has excellent language skills, is quite conversational, bilingual, and was skiing independently on her first day ever on the slopes. GiGi, during her little sister’s eval, sat quietly and read to herself, quite the mature young lady. All and all a great child whose little sister isn’t going to let her get too far ahead. One other rather significant piece of data in the equation is that GiGi is only three years old!

I also just received an email from Lyn Waldeck, one of our evaluators based outside of Dallas. Lyn has raised and home schooled five boys, while working with/for NACD since 1993. Lyn’s boys have all done exceptionally well, and she and all of us at NACD are very proud of all of them. Today’s news was that Grant, Lyn’s youngest, will be starting college classes this fall at fourteen! Grant attended school this year for his first and only school experience so he could get his feet wet in a classroom before taking college classes. He will be attending a really cool STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) school and will be off and running, chasing after his very successful big brothers.

We have seen many of our NACD kids enter college at fourteen and go on to have very successful college experiences and excel in their professions. Learning isn’t tough, but school often is. Someday we might succeed in fixing our very broken educational system, but in the meantime, parents, you had better take charge. Whether your child attends school or not, parents still need to assume the primary responsibility for their child’s education, and, of course, a little NACD program and guidance never hurts.

We are really proud of all of our exceptional children and their exceptional parents.

Related links:

“Raising Expectations”
NACD Guide to Child Development & Education – NACD Bookstore