Trusting Oneself:
What, after all, does it mean to provide an appropriate education to a student? Frankly, nobody knows. Appropriate education is relative. It depends on the kid. Some seventeen-year-olds need to be able to factor polynomials and deconstruct Ivanhoe; other seventeen-year-olds need to learn to recognize common visual cues: skull and crossbones mean poison, do not touch, stay away. And there are a lot of seventeen-year-olds in between. It’s hard to tell who requires what.
—ALLYSON GOLDIN, “The Incoherent Brain”1
THERE IS A BUILT-IN contradiction in North American education that particularly affects students with attention deficit disorder: the tendency to teach everyone as if their brains all worked the same way, when the reality is that they do not. The social crisis of the growing number of children whose educational needs the present school system simply does not meet is translated into a medical problem—at best. Even worse is when the ADD child is reduced to a problem of discipline and behavior control.
The goal is to teach children to take responsibility for their own learning in a positive way. In attempting to do so, teachers have no easy task. With hyperactive children especially, teachers face almost ceaseless disruption of the classroom order. They are up against the ADD child’s attention difficulties, low self-esteem, ingrained oppositionality and deep social anxieties. They may also be up against their own lack of preparedness.
Before I returned to university to study medicine, I taught high school for three years. My teaching style was influenced by my ADD traits: I was a gifted improvisational artist but did virtually nothing to plan lessons, units, course outlines. The results reflected my methods. Some students were inspired by the freely inquisitive and good-humored, relaxed atmosphere in my classes; others who needed more structure and direction felt quite lost. I certainly did not ask myself how my teaching should adjust to the various needs of the students under my charge—it all came from me; it was teacher centered. I believe this to be a weakness of schooling throughout North America, though in most classrooms the problem may present itself from the opposite angle than in mine: too much imposed structure and discipline, not enough freedom for individuality and self-expression. The lesson plans are based on what the teacher has been told to teach, not necessarily on who the students are and what, at any given stage of their lives, they need to learn. Teaching methods do not take into account the emotional and cognitive realities of the student. Many children are left out of the loop; the ADD child is almost guaranteed to be.
I did have experience with an entire classroomful of ADD pupils as a student teacher at West Vancouver Secondary in 1969. Although nobody then had identified them as such, in retrospect it is clear to me who most of these teenagers were and it is clear to me, too, why I felt such a special affinity for them. Early in my first practicum during my teacher training year, I was thrown into the lion’s den of a classroom of students everyone had quite given up on—the “school rejects” was how they spoke of themselves. All other student teachers had broken their teeth trying to bite on this particular apple, and the regular teachers, too, had been defanged. I had to teach this Grade 9 class map making. On a complete whim, I brought every musical instrument within my reach to school the very first morning I was to teach them: my guitar, castanets, recorders, harmonicas, pots and pans, bongo drums. I also brought a candle. I asked my supervising teacher—a straitlaced but very decent man—where in the school we could make noise. I then marched the class out to the woodworking shed, distributed the instruments, lit the candle and began strumming my guitar. They all immediately and spontaneously joined in. “The rule is,” I said to my supervisor, “that you can’t be an observer. You either play an instrument, or you leave.” He left. For a whole hour the music/cacophony went on. By the end, they were dancing on top of the shed. We whooped and shouted. Not a word was said. When the bell went, I collected the instruments. Next day, I began the unit on map making. They lapped it up. My supervisor could not believe it.
I now see that I instinctively resonated with the suppressed energy of these kids, recognized that it needed expression. Moreover, I liked them, enjoyed them and did not feel threatened by them.
The following general principles will help all teachers who have ADD children or teenagers in their classrooms. The distinction between principles and techniques needs to be kept in mind here. I have no expertise to offer teachers techniques. I do believe these principles, however, are essential, no matter what technical approach one may choose. They are distilled from what has been said about the nature of attention deficit disorder in the rest of this book.
Foremost among the Hippocratic injunctions regarding the practice of medicine is primum non nocere: first, do no harm. The same ought to be the primary rule in teaching as well.
Teachers sometimes forget their immense power to wound. How deep classroom-inflicted emotional hurts can go, how long-lasting their sting potentially is, may be gleaned from the histories ADD adults give of their school years. Many still cringe as they recall humiliations, the cutting and sarcastic remarks of their teachers, the punishments for misbehavior they did not deliberately initiate and for inabilities they did not know how to overcome. Teachers need to remember that the ADD child, by definition, has suffered the pain of feeling cut off from emotionally significant adults, has a profound sense of shame and has—underneath whatever defiant behavior—weak and precarious self-esteem. Moreover, odds are he also suffers from some degree of social rejection. Shaming ADD children for their mistakes, inattention, slowness at grasping instructions and sloppy handwriting only reinforces their negative self-image and undermines their emotional and intellectual growth. “The class will now wait until Karen returns to earth” is a relatively mild comment a Grade 3 teacher made about an inattentive ADD child in my practice. The child came home that night, sobbing helplessly. “Mrs. N. hates me,” she said. “All the kids laughed at me.” Painful for any child, an experience of that sort is devastating for the sensitive, insecure ADD child.
In his novel In a Glass House, the Canadian writer Nino Ricci renders poignantly the private despair of a young student struggling to keep focused in an intimidating school environment. Perhaps it ought to be required reading in faculties of education:
When we did assignments my exercise book was always filled with the same hopeless errors, though Sister Bertram had explained them a dozen times, so that sometimes she’d take the ruler in hand and simply rip out the pages with a single swift jerk. And I didn’t pay attention: even though I knew that Sister Bertram would catch me out, that I wouldn’t learn if I didn’t pay attention, still I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering, because the moment Sister Bertram began to talk I’d feel the classroom slipping away from me the way a dream did in the first moments of wakefulness, and I couldn’t force myself then to hold the world in focus.
Sometimes our own responses to an individual may give us important clues about the other person. Whenever a teacher notices in himself a tendency to speak sarcastically, irritably and in a blaming way to any particular child on a repeated basis, he would be well advised to consider what behavior of the child invokes those responses. Unless he is so troubled personally that irritability and sarcasm are his general style with children—in which case he needs help either to grow emotionally or to leave the profession—the teacher might well consider whether the particular child who triggers his irritability might have ADD.
Teacher training has neglected a systematic study of attention deficit disorder, just as medical training has. How ADD is handled in the classroom parallels its fate in the medical system in unevenness: skillfully here, with uninformed incomprehension there. And yet the classroom teacher is in a front-line position to identify the problem and to initiate the task of organizing help for it. It is not up to teachers or school psychologists to confront parents with the diagnosis as a given, as in “Your child has ADD,” but they can bring the behaviors and the study difficulties to the parents’ attention as a mutual challenge calling for the partnership of school and family. The parent should be seen neither as the villain who caused the problem nor as a gendarme to enforce the school’s dictates. Needless to say, I think it entirely inappropriate for schools to pressure parents to have their children medicated. If the question is to be raised at all, it should be done only as a suggestion so that the parents may consider exploring the issue with competent medical personnel. Medications must never be a precondition for a child’s right to attend school.
Who are we trying to teach must precede what are we trying to teach as a fundamental consideration. Teaching methods must reflect the first of those questions at least as much as the second. If the student population is to include a sizable number of ADD children—as is increasingly becoming the case throughout North America—creative minds working in education need to apply themselves not to trying to fit the students into the schools but to fashion the schools around the needs of the children.
Not every family doctor, pediatrician or psychiatrist can be up on attention deficit disorder, although all should at least be able to recognize it and not to mistake it for something else. Similarly, it may be too much to ask that all teachers become proficiently familiar with the condition. Outside the ledgers of bottom-lining politicians, however, there is no excuse for school districts not employing resource people—teachers, psychologists, special education consultants and teachers’ aides—who are trained to assess the needs of the ADD child and to assist their colleagues. There have to be people in the schools who can support the classroom teacher, for example, by working one-to-one with ADD children when required. Hyperactive children often settle down when given one-to-one attention, and may need to be gradually integrated into the classroom. The immediate financial costs will be more than compensated for in the long term, not to mention the avoidance of years of emotional stress for school personnel, parents and—far from least—for the children.
The teacher who can maintain warm, nonthreatening contact with the ADD child will be rewarded with less disruption and longer attention spans, except in the most severely affected cases. Just as at home, the relationship with the child, not any cognitive goals, has to be kept foremost.
Of necessity, the teacher’s ability to provide for any one child’s attachment needs is going to be limited. No teacher will “cure” a child of ADD. But each teacher, properly informed and motivated, can make a tremendous difference in easing the path in school of any ADD child just by paying attention to the relationship. Difficult as it is for the overworked teacher in the hubbub of the busy classroom, reaching out to the child each day, even for a brief moment, will go further than any number of sternly delivered instructions.
It should be superfluous to point out the importance of play in childhood, except for a frightening trend in North American education to forget the value of play. A New York Times article in 1998 reported that some new schools in the U.S. are being built without playgrounds, on the theory that recess and play are a waste of time that divert the students’ attention and energy from important learning tasks.2 “We are intent on improving academic performance,” the superintendent of schools in Atlanta, Georgia, told the Times. “You don’t do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars.” This mind-set ignores decades of research in education and in developmental psychology. Specifically in managing ADD, the problem is to introduce more play—more physically unstructured time, more freely flowing creative expression—into the classroom, not less.
As my experience with the Grade 9 class of “school rejects” demonstrated, ADD students have a volcanic amount of pent-up kinetic energy. Allowed some creative outlet, even if at first without a specific outcome in mind, much of this energy can be channeled constructively. The problem, again, is not so much how to motivate the child as to find the way to unlock his intrinsic motivation. To foster creativity, the main thing is to honor the intention and the effort rather than to evaluate the result. The student encouraged in following her own creative inclination and secure in her relationship with the teacher will, sooner or later, want direction and correction, will want to learn how to improve her work by means of disciplined effort.
In these days of cash-register approaches to education funding, the first subjects to be dropped—after teachers’ aides, school psychologists and other essential personnel are declared redundant—are the creative courses: music and art. A CBC radio phone-in program in British Columbia recently devoted an hour to the question of whether the creative arts in public schools are expendable. That the question is even raised as a matter of public discussion is a sad commentary on the times, given how close to the human heart and soul aesthetic and musical expression are, how meaningful they are in most people’s lives and how important they are to healthy psychological and even neurological development. On the social level, the denial of arts education simply helps foster a culture of consumerism rather than of self-expression. Especially for the ADD child, impoverishing arts programs means blocking an essential channel for emotional growth and creative outflow.
An ADD student being examined under time pressure is not necessarily being tested on knowledge as much as on his ability to write examinations. A poor mark may reflect not a lack of knowledge, only a prefrontal cortex malfunction under conditions of examination stress.* A failure under such conditions predicts nothing about the student’s ability to apply his knowledge in real life. The exam situation may therefore need to be rendered flexible for him: he may need more time, or he may need to write the test under single supervision, away from the distraction of the classroom or examination hall. In this way, what he really knows will be tested. In many jurisdictions in the United States, such conditions are already mandatory for ADD students, up to university level. The Canadian system is far behind in this regard, and seems stubbornly intent on staying that way.
With homework too, the special needs of the ADD child must be kept in mind. The long-term goal of fostering her ability to do applied, consistent work need not be sacrificed, but if this child must complete assignments early in her school career the same way as her classmates who are not neurophysiologically tuned out and distractible, she will experience only failure, discouragement and a chronic sense of inadequacy. If exceptions cannot be made for a particular few children in a classroom, perhaps a more general relaxation of rigid rules and expectations is needed. There is little to suggest that this would do the long-term development of children any harm.
The role of the parents in structuring a calm, supportive and organized home environment is crucial. Without that, the school will be facing a constantly uphill battle. On the other hand, the school cannot wait for the parents to resolve all their home problems before embarking on its own efforts to help the child.
“Your book has helped me see more clearly what schools can and cannot do,” Mary Watson, a specialized early childhood educator from San Francisco wrote to me after reading the manuscript. “A teacher cannot really replace a parent in her ability to give unconditional positive regard. The classroom situation just doesn’t work that way—teachers have to judge, to encourage, and they feel the need to criticize. Nevertheless, I do think that understanding the student is itself transformative. Sometimes just the attentive attention to the student is helpful. First, I have to have trust in people—in the children to do what they need to do. But also, we need to trust ourselves and our own experience. I don’t think we can be with others, really, without that. I think somehow this is also the basis of what you are saying. It takes tremendous trust to let go the ‘shoulds’ or the wanting to be ‘cured’ or the wanting to ‘cure’ others of all the troubles in life. A teacher who understands ADD can best help students by supporting them to find their own unique way.”
Nature has its own positive agenda, which is at work in all of us. The point in education, as in medicine, is not just in knowing how to interfere with nature, but—most important—how to observe it without interference, how to help it unfold.
*For a fuller explanation of the prefrontal cortex shutting down under examination pressure, see chapter 25.