by Todd Rose
I’d taken a close enough look at myself by then (with the help of that “D’oh” journal) to know I wasn’t lazy, but rather very easily bored, meaning that I wouldn’t do well in the long run without more intellectually challenging work than stocking shelves or hawking cell phones. My dad had patiently explained, more than once, that I needed a lot more education before I could get that kind of a job. So I made up my mind that summer that I would return to school, as he had done, and that this time I’d make it count. I then proceeded to bask in this honorable newfound resolve, while doing nothing to act on it, for the next several months.
Back to School
* * *
I’d taken my GED exam within a couple of months after I’d dropped out of Layton High. Yet whenever the subject of the next logical step came up—that is, whether I’d continue my schooling, specifically by registering at the local college, Weber State—I always had some excuse for procrastinating. We couldn’t afford the fees. I wouldn’t have the time—after all, I was already so busy at my latest job, selling chain-link fence throughout the state, that I barely saw Kaylin and Austin during the week. Kaylin finally got fed up with me talking out of both sides of my mouth, and one morning while I was at work, borrowed some money from her parents and drove over to Weber State to sign me up for two night classes. The first of these was to begin the following Monday.
Kaylin chose the courses at random: Chemistry and English, as I recall. When I got home late that evening, she casually said, “You might want to go down to Weber and pick classes that you actually want before it’s too late.”
This was just the spur I needed to move forward, particularly after she told me the money she’d paid was nonrefundable. When I arrived at the registration office, however, I discovered that most of the classes were already full. What’s more, even though Weber State theoretically offers open enrollment, the registrar informed me that my abysmal high school grades and test scores limited my eligibility for most classes. For the first year, I’d only be able to take courses offered off campus.
With such limited options, I managed to pick two classes that caught my interest: Economics 101 and Interpersonal Psychology. In choosing this way, I was heeding more of my father’s good advice. It might have made sense to start out at Weber by getting the general requirements out of the way. But my dad had advised me to start out instead by taking classes that genuinely interested me.
“You don’t have very good study skills,” he had reminded me, as if I didn’t already know it. “But your main problem is motivation. Pick classes you know you’ll be interested in, and you’ll figure out the study skills along the way.”
I’ve had many occasions since that time to appreciate this timely advice. For me, the hardest part of learning always boils down to figuring out why I should care. Other people’s expectations matter to me, but they rarely clinch the deal. I need to build up my own reasons to engage. But once I jump over that hurdle, I’m good to go.
I already knew that I cared about economics and psychology, not incidentally because both subjects were directly relevant to the trouble I was in during that transformational year. But by tremendous good fortune, I soon got another reason to care, in the form of Julianne Arbuckle, my psychology professor. From the first day of her class, I’d been determined to behave like a new person: a star student, who listens closely, nods sagely, and takes copious notes. To my delight, she treated me as if that was who I was. The two of us formed a thriving mutual admiration society that lasted right up until she assigned the first homework … and I failed to turn it in.
I’d reverted to my bad habits, choosing a two-night video game marathon with my brother over completing the assignment. Yet when Professor Arbuckle realized my homework was missing, she walked over to my desk with a look of concern.
“Todd, this isn’t like you,” she murmured.
“Lady, this is exactly like me,” I wanted to answer, although, thankfully, I kept my mouth shut. She offered me one more day to complete the assignment, without penalty, and I realized I couldn’t bear to disappoint her for a second time.
Then, a few weeks later, Arbuckle’s apparently distorted image of me popped up again, after I’d skipped her evening class. It was my wedding anniversary, and I’d opted to take Kaylin to Salt Lake City for dinner, despite a raging snowstorm. Even so, a rather novel sensation—guilt—compelled me to try to make it back for the last part of the three-hour session. When I arrived, the class was empty except for just one of my classmates, who was reading her textbook at her desk. She looked up and asked me immediately if I was all right, adding, “Professor Arbuckle was so worried about you that she canceled class.”
I paused to absorb this. My teacher had assumed that something terrible had happened to me—because, of course, I would have never skipped class without telling her in advance. Was this really possible, that someone could see me in this light? I accepted that it was and happily shouldered this new burden of living up to my teacher’s image of me.
The Difference a Mentor Can Make
* * *
In subsequent years, and always with the memory of Professor Arbuckle in mind, I’ve been fascinated by the ongoing research into the importance of mentors not related by kin in young people’s lives. There’s a great deal of evidence that resilience is not, in fact, an inborn trait, as it has widely been assumed, but rather is the product of (you guessed it) a complex system involving a positive feedback loop, in which a child becomes strong at least in part due to other people’s belief in him. Support for this perspective comes from a forty-year longitudinal study of 210 resilient children on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Among other findings, the study showed that few of the children who turned out to be resilient had experienced prolonged separations from their primary caregiver during the first year of life; many were oldest children; none had a sibling born before they turned twelve; and all developed a close early bond with at least one caregiver, sometimes a grandmother, older sister, or other relative in the extended family.
“Resilience is not only an individual matter,” writes the science journalist Katy Butler. “It is the outward and visible sign of a web of relationships and experiences that teach people mastery, doggedness, love, moral courage, and hope.”
Parents can and so often do move mountains for their kids, as mine did for me, yet there comes a time when it is absolutely key for someone on the road to adulthood to earn the respect of another adult, who doesn’t necessarily have to have faith in him. And although you can’t manufacture such a relationship for your child, you can play an important supporting role by seeking out environments that lend themselves to this kind of interaction. Some situations, such as college, are ready-made for meeting mentors, but you needn’t wait for your child to turn eighteen. Look for after-school sports or clubs or summer internships that provide lots of chances for older kids and adults to be role models.
Julianne Arbuckle played that vital role for me, teaching me that social expectations can work both ways. Back in middle school and high school, my teachers and fellow students got into the habit of expecting me to fail, making it easy to do so. But Professor Arbuckle, who saw me afresh, expected me to succeed, and that was all I needed, at that pivotal point in my life, to start doing so. For the first time in my life, I started asking myself what it would take for me to truly change my behavior, while also recognizing the need to manage my context to support this goal. (Incidentally, just to drive home the point about feedback loops turning small changes into big outcomes, I should say that when I graduated from Weber State, I told Professor Arbuckle about the defining role she had played, and guess what? She only vaguely remembered the interactions that were ultimately so meaningful to me.)
As part of my new context-management plan, I realized that I’d give myself my best chance of success by surrounding myself with other people who believed that I could succeed. I also knew that I needed a clean break from my past. So from that point on, I made it a ru
le to avoid any class where I’d run into someone from high school, someone who still thought of me as how I was then.
I also continued to take care in selecting my classes, cherry-picking only the ones with particularly engaging teachers, or material that was so interesting to me in itself that I trusted I’d stay the course. And, toward the end of my first year at Weber, I made another difficult, highly personal, and ultimately strategic decision that I know helped me reach my full potential. Nearly a decade after I was first prescribed stimulants to treat the symptoms associated with ADHD, I began to take them regularly.
Rethinking Ritalin
* * *
I’m going to digress for the next several paragraphs, given that the use of stimulants is, hands down, the most controversial topic in the field of attention and learning differences. And I certainly agree that it should be so. For one thing, every medication has side effects. (The most common downsides of stimulants are sleep problems, stunted growth, and cardiac risks for children with preexisting heart problems.)
Another important caveat is that stimulants are only one potential tool, and never a cure-all, for symptoms associated with ADHD. They don’t work for everyone, even when side effects aren’t a problem, and in any case, doctors report that most kids stop taking them after only about a year. This “lack of compliance,” in what strikes me as rather Orwellian medical parlance, is normally ignored in debates about stimulants, yet is likely a major reason why federally sponsored researchers have found that opting to treat ADHD with stimulants on average doesn’t reduce the risks of dire long-term outcomes for kids with this diagnosis. Specifically, it won’t, again on average, make kids more likely to graduate from school, avoid addiction to drugs and alcohol, and stay out of jail.
That’s not to say that stimulants can’t help certain people in certain contexts. For myself and many others, stimulants can help limit the extremes of impulsive and distractible behavior. Still, the limits of what they can do reflect one of the main points I’ve made throughout this book—namely, that behavior will always depend on much more than biology, altered or not.
I do realize that parents faced with the decision of whether to medicate a child have a more nerve-racking challenge than I did. You’re taking on the responsibility for another person’s developing brain, and you cannot take that burden lightly. I made my decision as an informed adult—so deliberately informed that I ended up taking a whole course in pharmacology at Harvard, where I wrote my term paper on the neural mechanisms of stimulants and their impact on cognition and behavior (and, incidentally, it’s so boring you would need stimulants to read it). Among other things, my research reassured me of the safety of taking stimulants, despite the prevalence of wildly erroneous scare stories, usually circulating on the Internet, that would lead you to believe the drugs can cause cancer, depression, and other serious health problems. None of these alleged risks has empirical support, despite decades of research. At the same time, the choice of whether to medicate a child behooves parents to be keen-eyed detectives. There are so many ways to arrive at an ADHD diagnosis, and while research suggests the most common of these is via a family legacy (that is, genes), there are still many things a parent can manage in a child’s environment, including diet and exercise, that can help reduce symptoms, sometimes to the point where medication isn’t needed. Ideally—and even though it’s a costly and time-consuming process—families should rule out other possible problems before giving medication to a child, especially since they can mask symptoms and make it seem like a problem has gone away even though it hasn’t.
Once you are convinced that your child has a genuine learning or behavioral difficulty, you’ll need to be a smart consumer when investigating potential treatments. Beware, in particular, of hucksters who tell you that your child has a “disorder” that can be “cured” with the help of a brain scan, a magnetic mattress, or any other usually expensive gimmick. But beware, just as much, of the hurried pediatrician who encourages you to try stimulants before ruling out other potentially helpful strategies.
As a young father juggling classes at Weber, I evaluated what I knew of the risks and benefits of stimulants and felt reassured that the balance was in my favor. Stimulants, as I’ve found, both by self-observation and research, are useful above all for one well-defined issue common to people like me. When we’re not internally motivated to focus on something, we have to work a lot harder to stay on task in order to complete the work at hand. Midway through my first year at Weber, I could see it was taking me three or four nights to finish routine homework that other students could wrap up in a single evening, just by dint of their greater ability to keep their butts in their chairs. Whenever I’d get bored, it felt much too easy to wander off and play Nintendo, or read to Austin, or do any of an infinite number of more appealing things. So I looked to stimulants initially as a simple tool for a particular purpose—to help me finish assignments. In the process, I got into better study habits, which in time began to feel more natural to me.
I still take Ritalin today, despite some mixed feelings about it. Like most people, I want to believe that I’m in control of situations, and don’t like the idea of sharing that control with a pill. On the other hand, I’ve come to see stimulants through a different lens, as merely one, albeit important, tool at my disposal—a way I’ve learned to help manage my environment to suit my particular brain.
Big Man on Campus
* * *
By my second year at Weber, my life had become a lot more challenging. Nathan, my youngest child, was born in 1996. Kaylin was taking care of the two kids full time, and money was tighter than ever.
I’d cut back my hours working off campus and applied for student loans so I could devote more time to study, although I also spent about ten hours a week working as a teaching assistant. The plan worked well: I’d become a straight-A student, now allowed to take all my classes on the main campus, and would graduate, two years later, with a 3.97 grade point average. This record earned me an academic scholarship, which paid for my tuition and books.
In all my classes, by this time, my teachers looked to me as one of their star students, and I behaved accordingly. I still occasionally blurted out comments in class, but, strangely enough, in this new context I was no longer seen as the annoying class clown but as this bright, creative person, full of ideas worth sharing. To this day I continue to be amused that some of the same behaviors that got me in such trouble in grade school could be seen by my college professors as so brilliant. On more than one occasion I was even told that my wit added so much to the class! It’s one of the best examples I can think of for the rule that context matters.
I ran for and won a spot on the student senate, and went on to convince Weber’s exclusive honors program to accept me as a member, meaning I could take advanced courses in a special building on campus. Not only did they let me in, but on graduating, I was named the honor student of the year.
While this was gratifying, what meant much more to me that year was the extraordinary empathy of a faculty member named Bill McVaugh, who noticed not only my academic record but how much I was struggling to keep my grades up and provide for my family. Without telling me, Professor McVaugh taught an extra course at the school to get funds that he used to hire me as a research assistant. That selfless act allowed me to quit my day job and focus harder on my studies.
Success bred success, and in the midst of it I discovered something I never would have believed for a minute back in high school. I actually enjoyed learning.
This revelation made me increasingly ambitious about my future. I wanted to continue with my education, going on to graduate school, and I knew just what I wanted to study: the science of learning itself, and what makes it easier or harder for people to achieve. Nothing I’d learned in my classes so far had resonated with my own experience. I was convinced there was a lot I might discover to help school be less of an endurance test for students like me.
Because no one
in my family had ever attained more than an undergraduate degree, I realized that I needed some outside advice. I ended up interviewing several faculty members at Weber University about what they thought I should do. Eventually I decided to apply to no fewer than thirteen schools, a choice I didn’t make lightly, considering the application fees. One of these was Harvard.
I never would have considered such a long-shot goal if I hadn’t been encouraged by my mentor and advisor at Weber, Eric Amsel, chair of the psychology department. Professor Amsel was friends with a Harvard professor named Kurt Fischer, who had just become director of a new interdisciplinary venture, the first of its kind at the university, called Mind, Brain, and Education. Professor Fischer was known as a leader of a growing movement to apply biological and cognitive science to education. I researched his work and was excited by how much I shared his perspective and goals. And as I’d later discover, we had something else in common in our blue-collar childhood. Fischer’s dad, the son of German immigrants, had been a salesman, truck driver, and vending machine technician. His son was the first member of his family to attend college in the United States. Unlike me, however, Fischer had had a positive experience in high school, which he attributes to a lucky break, when as a youth, he won a scholarship to a high-quality private school. When it came to mainstream public education, however, Professor Fischer and I shared a keen desire to help reform it.
Working with him would obviously be a dream, not least because in the doctoral program, I’d have an unusual degree of independence and freedom to work in multiple disciplines. Still, I wondered if it was fair to Kaylin and the kids to risk the $120 application fee. As it was, we were all already eating much too much instant ramen.