by Todd Rose
As I moved up the academic food chain, I found that the number of teachers who genuinely appreciated my insistent questioning increased. After all, Albert Einstein himself once said: “I have no special talents; I am only passionately curious.” Had no one ever valued this pesky quality of mine, I’m sure I’d never have made my way to Harvard, where today I worry that many bright students are having their curiosity snuffed out at an early age.
What a self-defeating strategy we follow all through grade school! We encourage rigid conformity just when children’s brains are most malleable (and most open to exploration) and then try to ignite curiosity and creativity in college and beyond, once so much of the wiring is established. It’s a clear sign that we’re not thinking seriously enough about the potentially transformative power of context.
Sedentary Nomads
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If the case of the dyslexic astrophysicists hasn’t fully convinced you of the potentially transformative power of context, consider one more story—this time from the deserts of northern Kenya. Some thirty years ago, while I was suffering away in grade school in Hooper, a large part of a chronically undernourished, cattle-herding tribe known as the Ariaal broke away from their nomadic lifestyle to choose a more settled life as farmers. In 2008, Dan Eisenberg, a first-year graduate student in anthropology at Northwestern University, published his observations of what happened next.
Eisenberg and his collaborators compared a group of 87 settled nomads with 65 who were still wandering with their cattle. They tested them all for DRD4-7R, that gene variant I told you about that’s linked to novelty-seeking and other ADHD-like symptoms. Then they logged their body mass, as a measure of nutritional well-being in an environment where food is chronically scarce. They found that the nomads who had the novelty-seeking gene variant, and who had continued their nomadic lives, were on average faring much better than their sedentary cousins with the same genetic quirk.
“Our findings suggest that some of the variety of personalities we see in people is evolutionarily helpful or detrimental, depending on the context,” Eisenberg explained, using that word I like so much. “It is possible that in a nomadic setting, a boy with this allele might be able to more effectively defend livestock against raiders or locate food and water sources, but that the same tendencies might not be as beneficial in settled pursuits such as focusing in school, farming, or selling goods.” The insight, he added, “might allow us to begin to view ADHD as not just a disease, but something with adaptive components.”
It’s worth noting that Eisenberg’s study neither examined nor explained the precise reasons for the novelty-seeking nomads’ comparative good health. Those reasons, moreover, are doubtlessly complex. It could be that the gene variant influenced the nomads’ temperament and behavior, making a sedentary life as unhealthy for them as being stuck in a middle school classroom might be for an unusually restless adolescent. Still, Eisenberg cautions that the same hereditary factor is also known to have effects on other parts of the body, including the kidney, meaning that changes in urine excretion, for instance, might be an alternate explanation for the differences in the former nomads’ health. Either way, however, the finding offers a vivid argument for the manner in which the same genetic blueprint can end up as a strength or weakness, depending on the context.
For parents and teachers, Eisenberg’s research is one more reminder to guide children to environments in which they can shine. You certainly don’t need to ship your impertinent questioner off to Kenya, or even sign him up for Outward Bound. But at minimum, please make sure that child isn’t being routinely punished for traits that, in the right context and with the right support, could serve as an advantage.
The Evolution of Education
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Happily, this big idea—that it’s often not so much the kid but the context that sabotages learning—is gaining traction in U.S. education policy. This advancement is due to the work of many individuals and organizations, including two people with whom I’ve had the honor to collaborate: Anne Meyer and David Rose (no relation), who in 1984 established the nonprofit educational research and development organization called CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology).
Rose is a developmental neuropsychologist and author who also teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Meyer is a clinical psychologist and educator who studied design and architecture as an undergraduate. The two have long shared a passion for designing learning materials for students with physical and cognitive differences. Their prototype computerized books—some of the first ever created—remain on display at the Smithsonian Museum.
CAST’s evolution mirrors recent changes in the way scientists and the public have come to think about the nature of learning abilities and disabilities. It began as a clinic in a hospital, with five employees and fifteen thousand dollars in seed money, but after a few years it moved into its own offices, eventually shedding its medical orientation. Sometime around 1990, as Meyer relates, the CAST team was advancing along in its efforts to create digital books that helped eliminate specific obstacles for kids, when she had an epiphany. “We were working with one student who had a visual disability—so we had to make her buttons talk to her, since she couldn’t see them—and another student who could only use his eyes and chin, and then a third who couldn’t read very well,” Meyer says, “and we said, ‘Hey, we’re making books for Matt and Megan and Mason. Let’s make one book that works for all of them.’”
Meyer came up with the idea of importing to the realm of education a cutting-edge architectural concept known as “universal design,” a reference to ways of building structures accessible to all kinds of people, whether they enter in a wheelchair, a stroller, or on their own two feet. “Universal Design for Learning (UDL)” has since entered into policy lexicon as a term for combining new learning sciences research with modern multimedia technology.
Today, CAST’s scientists devise ways to support all students, regardless of background or purported disability, primarily by designing environments that represent material in flexible ways and by offering a variety of options for them to demonstrate what they know—going far beyond the standardized test. In practice, the UDL perspective includes both high- and low-tech approaches. It could take shape, for instance, as a software program that lets a second-grade native Spanish-speaker more easily understand a story by reading it on a laptop, with a text-to-speech feature that sounds out new words and provides both images and Spanish translations to define them. Yet it could also include a middle school Mesoamerican history class, whose teacher lets students choose between writing a paper, drawing a poster, or giving a puppet show to demonstrate what they’ve learned.
Meyer and Rose contend that varying the methods of both teaching and testing will help engage all sorts of kids, not just those identified as “disabled.” In other words, they see natural variability as a source of potential innovation, not a problem to be fixed or ignored. A captioned video, for instance, not only helps kids with hearing problems, but also makes life easier for students who are still learning English, or struggling with reading, or merely working in a noisy classroom. The less obvious but equally powerful benefit is that strategies that engage students who were previously tuned out, and therefore prone to disrupt the rest of the class, save precious teacher time previously wasted on crowd management.
CAST today has forty-five employees, working on both research and development and national education policy. Its book-builder program, allowing early grade school teachers and students to create their own, free digital books to share with others, has nearly forty thousand users in more than 165 countries, while it is influencing policy from the federal level on down. In a letter to Congress in the fall of 2010, U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan cited UDL as a key facet of the White House’s new education strategy, while several states had set up UDL task forces to train teachers and improve curriculum. Harvard Law School dean Martha Minow has called UDL “one of the few big
and truly transformative ideas to emerge in education over the past two decades.”
This progress has inspired Meyer to envision a day when schools will no longer rely on diagnostic labels, such as dyslexia or ADHD, because children will have options that will eliminate “disabilities” as we know them. The new high- and low-tech supports will increase their access to education just as meaningfully as a wheelchair ramp makes a classroom accessible to someone physically unable to climb stairs—which explains why some activists frame the quest to reshape school environments as a question of civil rights.
“It’s His Hair”
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Ben Foss, a legal expert, inventor, and policy wonk, is an adamant spokesman for this civil rights perspective on learning differences. As executive director of Disability Rights Advocates, he wages lawsuits to widen access to schools and workplaces for people with all kinds of disabilities.
Foss was diagnosed with dyslexia as a freckled, blue-eyed boy of eight, and bitterly remembers the spelling tests that teachers made him take over and over, and the humiliating “perp walk” to his segregated special-education classes. “The worst part about it is the internalization that you’re broken and somehow flawed, and if you just work harder, you’ll catch up,” he says today.
He didn’t speak publicly about his dyslexia until after many years of hard work and private coping strategies that he calls his “secret accommodations” got him admitted to Stanford University’s law school. It was there, in 2003, that Foss first read about an Alabama laborer, diagnosed with dyslexia, named Joe Stutts, who struck Foss as the Rosa Parks of the nascent learning disability movement. Stutts had sued his federal government employer in 1983 for having required him to take a written test to get a job operating heavy machinery. His courage inspired Foss to form an education and pressure group for people with dyslexia, which he called Headstrong Nation.
Three years later, having temporarily sidelined his legal career, Foss got a new job in the venture capital unit of Intel, where he serendipitously entered the ranks of UDL inventors. While sitting in his cubicle one day, he started playing with his cell phone and realized, as he recalls, “that I could take a picture and send it to my computer and have the computer do optical recognition and turn it into text and have it read aloud to me.” Intel helped him develop the gizmo, which was dubbed the Intel Reader, betting that it would be popular not only with people with dyslexia, but with a growing market of aging baby boomers whose weakening eyesight makes it hard to read small print. (The Reader can also adjust font size.) Foss takes pride in his invention, even as it still nags at him that it was reviewed by the online magazine Engadget as a tool “for the lazy and infirm.” On reading this, he says, “at first I thought, ‘Oh, no!,’ and then I realized I was grateful that they’d actually written down the bias.”
Foss’s combative spirit dates back to his childhood, during which it was his good luck to have exceptionally understanding parents. His mother, Susan Moore, had served in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, and applied her worldly imagination to her parenting. “I figured it was less important how my kids were doing in school than whether they were actually learning,” she says.
Moore adopted several conventionally smart parenting strategies, such as educating herself about dyslexia, while encouraging Foss to take up soccer and energetically applauding any of his school triumphs, taping the best of his drawings on the refrigerator. As my own mom did, she also frequently followed her gut, even when others couldn’t understand.
Foss likes to tell about the time when he was four and his mother took him for a haircut. After seating him in the chair, the stylist asked what kind of cut he wanted. Foss said he didn’t want his hair cut at all. His mother promptly tipped the stylist and started to walk out the door with her son. “You’re going to let a four-year-old tell you what to do?” the man sputtered.
“It’s his hair” was Moore’s reply.
Several years later, while Foss was enduring his worst times in school, Moore made an even more unusual decision: She began letting him trash his room on the many afternoons that he returned home in a rage at his teachers.
“At first, I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing,” Moore recalls. “But he was very frustrated, and I thought he had so much anger in him that it would be better to get it out than have it stewing.”
Foss remembers: “I’d pull my bookcase over, smash my audiotapes, and once even threw my boom box out the window. My mom and I made a deal that I could destroy anything in my room, but the catch was that I had to deal with the consequences.”
Once again, Moore allowed Foss an unusual degree of autonomy, with an equal amount of responsibility. From the perspective of complex systems, her mothering tactics were pure genius. By allowing her son to vent his anger, she short-circuited a cycle that could easily have sabotaged Foss, had his rage built to the point that he took it out on people at school. At the same time, however, she taught him the value of self-control by making him responsible for his actions.
The approach has become a keystone of Foss’s philosophy of education. “What is education really for?” he asks. “It shouldn’t be to make you behave and be obedient. It’s to help you do what you want.” Moreover, while Foss thinks of education as a fundamental right, he considers it the student’s responsibility to understand his or her strengths and weaknesses and find the supports that will lead to independence.
Luckily, such supports are becoming increasingly common—and less stigmatized—in schools throughout the United States. Change has come slowly, however, and even today, far too many kids are getting the message, all day and every day, that they are broken, useless, and unwanted.
BIG IDEAS
There is no such thing as an average brain. Variability is the rule, not the exception.
Some of this “interesting” variability directly influences the ability to learn, making a compelling case for designing flexible environments that deal effectively with these differences.
A preference for novelty is a genetic variability that at its worst can contribute to negative outcomes such as gambling and drug and alcohol abuse. At its best, the trait can serve as the basis for curiosity, a characteristic essential to achievement and happiness. The choice between these outcomes will, among other things, depend on a child’s context.
Education policy experts have been reaching a consensus that it’s more important to focus efforts to change school environments than to try to change the natural variability of our children.
ACTION ITEMS
To most effectively help your square-peg child, start by understanding your own “interesting” variability, and how it influences your relationships and is influenced by varying contexts.
Remember to add nuance to your curiosity about your children’s behavior. Rather than ask why your child behaved in a certain way, ask why he or she behaved that way in that context.
Think about how your child’s variability plays out in different contexts. Identify at least one context where your child usually excels and another where he or she struggles.
4
Ostracized
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
—Plato
A Good Day Is When Bad Things Don’t Happen
* * *
“YOU ARE A BITCH!”
It was the first time I’d ever heard my mom curse. She yelled the words into the telephone receiver and promptly slammed it down.
Naturally, I had to see what the problem was—frankly, less out of concern for my mother’s emotional state and more to look for clues as to what kind of punishment was coming my way.
I crept up the stairs from my bedroom in the basement and stuck my head around the door to get a glimpse inside the kitchen. After hearing the commotion, my dad had come into the room from the garage. He put his arm around my mother as she leaned on the linoleum counter, looking more miserable than I had ever seen her.
At the ripe o
ld age of ten, I was already used to being the bad guy, guilty or not, so I naturally assumed that I was the cause of whatever had made her that angry. I could only just make out her words, as she murmured, “Well, I guess I lost another friend.”
Squinting, I tried to remember: What could I have done, now? Or, rather, what had they found out?
I didn’t have long to puzzle it over. My dad caught sight of me on the stairs, just as I was trying to slide back down. My mom turned her head to follow his gaze, and to my surprise, walked over and hugged me, weeping anew, and saying, “I’m so sorry.”
Eventually, she told me what had happened. Her now former best friend, Peggy, had called to inform her that she would be breaking a longtime tradition of our small town, which was that whenever any child had a birthday party, every kid of that age was invited. “Nobody wants Todd at the party,” Peggy had said. “He will ruin it.”