True Philosophers

The best thing about working with exceptional learners is their natural curiosity. Particularly students with learning disabilities, who seem to be disproportionately eager for knowledge in conversation. Those same kids whose teachers often say he doesn’t want to be here during conventional classroom exercises are the ones who are bubbling fonts of information and ideas during casual conversation.

Why might this be?

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that the experience of missing out on core learning modalities, whether due to reading disability, receptive language disorders, attention disorders, or some other deficit -- I've come to believe that the frustration over that gap in their learning abilities makes them more eager to absorb knowledge in the manner most appropriate to them.

Remember when your parents told you not to go in that room? It’s kind of like that: access denied is access desired. So, instead of the stereotype of the learning disabled student as in need of trade school or vocational learning, in need of a job, let’s think of these students as being sorely in need of knowledge.

Just like everybody else.

The word philosophy is usually applied to a way of thinking (my philosophy of weight loss or the philosophy of our company). This misses out on the basic origins of the word: philos (love) + sophos (wisdom). The philosopher is not the one who has the wisdom, the philosopher is the one who loves the wisdom. And I believe there is all the difference in the world between the two. 



"much learning does not teach understanding" -- Heraclitus

westward, look, the land is bright!

It's hard not to be overly-concerned with outcomes when you're teaching. There is a special, awful, crumbling feeling that descends when you realize that the kids are not getting what you want them to get. My natural instinct has always been to try harder. 

The best teachers recognize what they do and don't have control over. Can we control learning? I'm not really sure. We can present our lessons, our activities. We can motivate and inspire our students. But can we actually control and refine every piece of information that goes into their brains? No. Should we try to? 

No!

 

Great teachers realize that they are in control of the teaching, but only the student can be in control of the learning. And that vast, awe-inspiring process of learning is subtle, complex, and unpredictable. Like the third stanza of the poem below, the waves of our teaching might not always seem to be breaking through into our students' understanding. That's okay, the poet tells us, because we don't know what inlets of growth and development are surging up around us, outside of our power. 

The final stanza is absolutely stunning. The sun may rise in the East-- and instruction might begin with the teacher -- but daylight falls across the earth, and learning occurs in wonderfully unpredictable ways. 

Say not the struggle naught availeth

Say not the struggle naught availeth,
   The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
   And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
   It may be, in yon smoke conceal'd,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
   And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
   Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
   Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
   When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
   But westward, look, the land is bright!

Arthur Hugh Clough

1849

Towards a Definition

I would like to take a moment to work on a definition of “Exceptional”, since I know that phrase might make some people cringe. There is a loud set of voices out there who object to the “over-exceptionalizing” of America’s kids. On the one hand, you have educational researchers condemning Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences as impractical and unscientific (people like this, for example). On the other, you’ve got English teacher (and son of the legendary biographer) David McCullough Jr.’s commencement address: You’re Not Special. And with a faltering economy, the standard line towards education and child-rearing has become: but will he get a job?

In a climate like this, someone like me had better have a good answer to the question: what do you mean by exceptional?

Fortunately, I think that I do.

My own school experiences involved a series of reversals as I tried to keep up with the standards of each academic institution. I attended the private elementary school where my grandmother taught. It was a great school and she was (and is) a great teacher, and I was a motivated learner. I won prizes for reading and writing and made academics a priority.

In the seventh grade, I transferred to the (well-regarded) public junior/senior high school in the small town where my family had recently bought a house. It was a good school with good teachers and a strong tradition, but within a few days there I sniffed out a change in values. The highly-regarded students here were athletes, not scholars. I shifted my priorities 100% to athletics and, over the course of about a year, became a “jock”.

I played football and track and was able to, more or less, fit in. Academics were a permanent afterthought. I took mid-level courses and managed to avoid any serious attention to my learning until the 11th grade, when I made exceptionally high scores on the SAT.

It caused a minor sensation among my friends and teachers, who had grown used to an image of me as a pleasant, academically unserious jock. Suddenly, I stood out. Admittedly, I liked the attention, but I had also been trying to avoid it and it was an uncomfortable time for me.

Many of the football players “did” Spring Track under the coercion of the coaches, who wanted us to be in the weight room and staying fit for the fall season. I was with the big boys, the “Tankers”, pretending to throw the shot put competitively but mainly just hanging out on the green grass in the middle of the track, enjoying the New England summers and watching the more serious athletes compete.

 It was much more of this: 

than this: 

 

One afternoon, shortly after my SAT scores were publicized in the local newspaper, I was at “practice”, sitting on a chair in the middle of the track. The school principal, a kind and slightly awkward man with an unfashionable beard for the time, showed up at practice. It was hot, in early June, and I remember watching him walk across the lawn in his suit and jacket, looking distinctly uncomfortable. As he made the long walk across the green oval, I had a sinking feeling that he was coming to see me. I remember how long that walk seemed, and how much I dreaded his attention.

He finally made it over and, when I realized that he was making it over for me, I got out of my chair and made a token effort to meet him. I don’t remember if we’d ever talked before, but he shook my hand and said he’d heard about my test scores. We had a few minutes of halting conversation before he said, with an ironic candor that I’ll never forget: well, considering how well you did on the test, maybe you should consider pursuing...that...rather than continuing on with [and here he took a hilarious, meaningful glance towards the shot put ring] this.

I didn’t know what exactly “that” was, but I had already come to the same general idea myself. I’d stopped pursuing opportunities to play college football and instead focused on finding a college where I could thrive academically. I was lucky enough to find one, and luckier still to be able to attend while accruing a student loan debt that has been only marginally crippling over the past eleven years.

In college I went to the other extreme, returning my focus to academics after a few months of adjustment during my Freshman year. Like in elementary school, I won academic prizes and took pride in my academic accomplishments. We were all Liberal Arts majors, there, though, and after four years, if you didn’t want to go on to law school or on to further academia, the world of work and commerce was still something of a cipher.

I got lucky, though. I responded to an ad in the Santa Fe newspaper for a part-time job at a boarding school for students who learned differently (I truly had no idea what this was) and got a call from the Academic Director, asking if I wanted to apply for a teaching job instead.

Still unsure that I wanted to be a teacher, I was convinced that I wanted to work at this school by the drive up. Nestled deep in the Pecos Wilderness outside of Santa Fe, with the Pecos River running along the road to school and across the front lawn of the school itself, this was truly one of the most beautiful spots I’d ever seen. No matter what the job is like, I told myself, I want to work here.

Of course, the job was terrific. The students had a grab bag of learning disabilities: attention disorders, dyslexia, dysgraphia, non-verbal learning disability, autism spectrum disorders, and more. Some of them didn’t have any diagnoses at all. What they all had, though, were incredible minds, personalities, and spirits. And I started to realize, even in that confused and confusing first year of teaching, that success for me meant finding ways to enable them to experience success. Which didn’t mean “dumbing-down” content to their level. It mean bringing the content to them in an appropriate package.

It meant letting the attention kids do something first, and then read about it. It meant giving the spectrum kids everything in lists and bullet points, and letting them utilize the same. It meant letting the dyslexic kids listen to everything the rest of us read and speak everything the rest of us wrote. It meant getting to know you, as a person and a learner, and finding out what information looked like to you.

Developing a method with these kinds of kids took years of experience and lots of exposure to great teachers and colleagues. One of the best things I did was take classes at the University of New Mexico with a woman named Elizabeth Nielsen, who taught her graduate classes by doing with them every single activity she advised them to do with their own students. Only after we tried something did we ever discuss the theory behind it.

I’ve worked with students who are learning disabled, gifted, and both. I’ve taught them English, Reading, Math, Science, Chemistry, Physics, and Biology. I’ve guided them through career searches and on river trips. I’ve had them in my home and visited them in theirs. There are not a lot of general descriptors you can apply to them, although there are some general strategies you can employ in helping them grow.

Etymologically, to be an exception means to stand out. These individuals may sometimes do things that are incredibly illogical. They may be, at times, frustrating, exhilarating, boring, petty, noble, stupid, and brilliant. But they are absolutely exceptional, they are absolutely special, and they absolutely stand out. Sometimes they are outstanding, and sometimes they are just “out, standing” (ha!), but this is the group of students who need extra attention. And they deserve it, too, because they’re also the group of individuals who will change the world.

The Danger Room

Thanks to the movies, most people know that Marvel’s X-Men are a band of mutant kids who were trained and raised at Charles Xavier’s “School for Gifted Youngsters”. It sounds quaint; the sort of place where you would never expect super-powered dynamos to be quietly training to fight the massive powers of evil.

I always thought of Xavier’s as the ideal school. Mainly because of the “Danger Room”, which was a room where all manner of holographic and robotic ne'er do wells could  be brought out for the superheros-in-training to practice against.



In one issue, the writers explained this constant in-flow of artificial bad guys for the students to destroy as being the product of Charles Xavier’s own gifted mutation -- telepathy. For the students to be able to train in the Danger Room, Xavier had to telepathically project all of the obstacles into their field of perception. They would fight, flip, blast, and smash the figments and then, with nothing to clean up, go on to their next class.

I’ve always thought that superheroes, Marvel superheroes in particular, served as a good analogy for exceptional kids. Of course the comic books are fantasy, but Stan Lee’s vision of turning weaknesses into super-powers is an inspiring one for any teacher. Here’s an article I wrote about it back in 2001.

Xavier was able to mimic the exact real-life scenarios his students were going to face. To me, that’s a pretty cool teacher. I’ve always wanted to guide and design my students’ experiences such that the tasks they confront are not merely academic. I want to get them out of their comfort zones and into the kind of learning that translates into life. I want every student to have her own Danger Room.

Finding a Niche

Let me start by saying that I pronounce it “nitch”. Usually I like to pronounce french derivatives properly but I can’t walk around saying “neesh” all day -- this is Texas, for crying out loud.

When we use the word, we’re generally describing satisfaction with a job or a lifestyle. A friend tells me: I’ve finally found my niche! And there’s a reason she sounds so happy about it. John Dewey said:

To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.

When ecologists talk about niches, they aren’t just talking about an animal’s habitat. They’re talking about its “job” in that habitat. This includes all of its activities, relationships, and effects on the environment. For example, the red fox below is a highly adaptable species that has hundreds of niches throughout the world, depending on its habitat and the other animals nearby.

No matter where the fox lives, it’s always going to have certain fixed traits: it will always be a fox. But the role it plays varies drastically depending on where it’s found (desert, forest, mountains, etc) and who else is around (predators, prey, humans). While the species never changes, the niches often do.

With exceptional kids, who don’t always thrive in conventional settings, we often spend a lot of time helping them figure out who they are. And this is a vital, vital task. But it’s only half the job.

When an adult is out of work, he will take the time to revise his resume, reflect on his last job, and maybe take stock of what skills he’s developed over time. He will consider himself carefully. But more than anything, he’ll stare at the job listings. He’ll put out feelers and requests. He’ll survey the territory.

Kids need to do what we do as adults -- they need to survey the territory. They need to explore the world of commerce, of culture, of service that is human society. They need to see what niches are available and find the one that lines up best for themselves.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to work with a talented team of educators, parents, and students to develop a program aimed at getting kids out into the community. They would think about what they were good at (their aptitudes) and what they enjoyed (their interests), and then we would all work together to identify careers at the intersection of the two. We would help them find their niche.

The students went on visits with artists and engineers, marketers and designers, veterinarians and tax assessors. They visited museums, laboratories, hotels, retail stores. They sat in on international conference calls and design meetings. They fixed watches and detailed cars. One boy beta tested video games. Another student practiced laser hair removal. Another got high marks in a statistics lab at the UT School of Business. The breadth of the students’ experiences was only limited by their interests and aptitudes. They were able to explore a dozen or more niches.

And this process of discovery is what my post is really all about. In evolutionary theory, a species has many thousands of years to adapt to its niche. In human society, we have about eight years (from high school graduation) before economic pressures become intense. If we’re lucky. A lot of us have no years, or very few.

But with these exceptional kids, the distance from here to the horizon seems exceedingly long. Many parents tell me that they’re worried their kid will stay at home forever. And some of these are the parents of gifted kids! They just can’t see imagine what the future will bring, and that uncertainty breeds a lot of fear.

So here’s the thing about the human social ecosystem -- society: there are thousands, millions of niches out there. Some are obvious and lend themselves to being systematized and standardized: nurses, doctors, teachers, CPAs. All of these and more have a full and rigorous standardized system and path to the career. Of course, within those job descriptions is a sea of possible lifestyles to match all of the lives they encompass.

Our challenge is help these kids find their niche, and we won’t do it by dwelling on their weaknesses. We have to help them find their aptitudes and their interests. We have to help them find their strengths, but we also have to find out where in society those strengths can be of service.

Ultimately, the process of the Career Connections program was wonderfully simple. First, a student would take a survey locating their top few “career clusters.” Then, having identified their top three potential “clusters”, they would make a master of list of careers they were interested in. We would always encourage them to look all “around” a career -- for example, medicine is not only doctors and nurses and home construction is not only architects and builders.

Now the real work began. We went to google maps and zoomed in to a range we were comfortable traveling (our habitat). Then we searched for “daycare” or “cosmetology” or “marketing” or whatever career cluster the student was exploring. And up came our prospective mentors on the search.

Using a script like this one: Call Scripts, the students would methodically go down the list until they set up their visits. The celebration in the classroom after one of the students confirmed a visit had the feel of a corporate sales office. Making the calls to arrange their visits became one of the most challenging, rewarding tasks of the program for many students. They worked together to create the script, encouraged one another to make the call, and supported each other when they encountered a rude person at the other end. (Yes, that happened occasionally. No, we didn’t die from it.) I tried to impress upon them a simple formula: 

                                  one “yes” is greater than a thousand “no’s”.

To prepare for the visit, students researched their mentor and the company. Some students liked to have a list of questions prepared in advance, while others preferred to let the conversation naturally.

On the day of the visit, students dressed professionally and were dropped off at their mentor’s office. They were responsible for finding the mentor and making appropriate introductions (no hand-holding here, they needed to forge their own relationships). They, along with their mentor, created the experience while they were there. Inevitably, they were positive.

Obviously there were a thousand little details to be ironed out, but that gives you the big picture of the program. Feel free to email me if you are interested in trying out something like this for your own child or classroom. Remember that, no matter what your child’s exceptionality, there is a nice in this world for her. You may need to help her create it, but there is a place and a job for everybody on this Earth.






                                                                                                                                                      -- MH

A Great Tailor Cuts Little

One of the great frustrations of dealing with exceptional kids can be their apparent lack of balance. Not literal balance (although that can be a common enough case), but an apparently imbalanced set of aptitudes and abilities. Of course we all have our strengths and weaknesses, an exhausted and exasperated parent sighs, but why are hers so extreme?

This is an illusion. The extreme divergence in an exceptional kid’s skill set is not an imbalance but a striving towards balance. When a physical system is balanced at the cellular level, we call it homeostasis. Exceptional kids are capable of a homeostasis too, but it’s not to be found in the classical educational approach, which strives to remediate their weaknesses through direct instruction. Rather, we need to train our teachers to follow the Taoist maxim:

A great tailor cuts little.


Maybe things are getting a little abstract. Let me give you an example:

I took my first job as a Language Arts and Reading teacher at a private school for exceptional kids in 2001. Fresh out of undergraduate with a degree in Philosophy and literally no experience with, nor ideas about, working with kids with disabilities, I was in over my head. The most glaring problem I could see was that the kids with dyslexia could not read.

This seemed to be something worth investigating further, so that summer I took courses in a Reading Remediation program called Sounds and Syllables. It was a classic “Orton-Gillingham” based program that approached the “dyslexic problem” thus: these kids are not making the sound-symbol connection in written language. They must be trained through direct instruction, in a multisensory manner, to make those connections. And so we “therapists” would methodically take our students through the alphabet, teaching them each phoneme in an auditory, visual, and written manner. And this, we supposed, would teach them to read.

Before I go any further, let me say that we always made progress. These programs do work, and if a student goes diligently through the requisite two to four years of language therapy, he may catch up to grade level and even go on to be a conventional reader.

But she is not supposed to be a conventional reader.

Let me repeat that: she is not supposed to read conventionally.

Recent brain scans of successful dyslexic readers revealed something extraordinary. “Normal” readers learn to read out-loud first, then we “mouth” the words, then we “hear” the words in our heads, and finally the words no longer “make” any sounds in our minds. But on a PET scan, they still do. On a PET scan of a normal reader, reading lights up auditory sections of the brain. This is because, although the words are now “sub-vocal”, we still process written language in much the same way as we do spoken language.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The study looked at two types of dyslexic readers: those who had mastered reading and those who hadn’t. The PET scans of those who had not mastered reading tasks looked highly similar to those of “normal” readers: lots of activity in the auditory parts of the brain. But the scans of dyslexic readers who had become proficient readers showed something entirely different.

Dyslexic adults who had become proficient readers had no activity in their auditory cortices. None. Instead, reading for them activated the temporal and frontal regions of the brain, associated with analytical and nonverbal thought.

They had become proficient readers not by direct instruction of what was “easy” for the rest of us, but by developing those areas in their brains which were capable of reading.

There is a lot of literature out there on this topic. These articles are a good place to start: Oxford Journals and this article by Abigail Marshall.

Think of the implications of these findings. The successful dyslexic readers out there have learned to read in a different manner than the rest of us. Not better, not worse. But different. Visual. Abstract. Logical.

These kids are aware of their shortcomings. We do not need to attack their deficits head-on with intensive remediation to try and get them to think “like us”, in conventional manners. We may have success in doing so in the classroom setting for a time, but they will either revert back to their own ways or spend the rest of their lives trying to read the way they were taught rather than the way that makes sense to them.

The development of these exceptional minds does not need forceful intervention. It needs delicate guidance and gentle encouragement. It needs careful, thoughtful assessment of their strengths and an iron-clad commitment to helping them develop those strengths. Because no matter how much we attack their weaknesses in school, to be successful in life people need to exploit the strengths they’re born with. As teachers, it is our duty to refine and encourage those strengths.

A great tailor cuts little.

A closing thought:

So much of special education is dedicated to remediation of weaknesses and shortcomings. We write stacks of IEPs that explain how we are going to address students’ areas of weakness.

Why don’t we take a different approach?

Why don’t we acknowledge that a lot of these kids are going to struggle in certain areas as adults, too. Why can’t that be okay? As the adults, the mentors, the guides in their lives, can’t we spend our time helping them find a place in the world where their strengths will be of the most advantage?

The idea of an evolutionary niche is that a species develops the traits that will help it best survive in a given environment. As educators, it is our job to help students compare their traits and their environment and find the place where those best intersect. It’s what they’ll be doing for their whole lives, anyway.