by Todd Rose
I agree, of course. What’s more, when I consider the way kids like Tim Blair are newly aware of their right to a genuine education—and when I reflect on how kids like Dan are getting second chances in school, thanks to a new focus on variability and context—I’ve got reason to hope that they and millions of other square pegs are on their way to a much brighter future.
BIG IDEAS
Technologies such as digital notebooks are providing new ways to support the natural variability that students bring to the classroom, thus allowing more kids to discover their talents and reach their full potential.
A combination of unprecedented pressure to cut education budgets and a strong new profit potential will make more digital learning inevitable in schools, for better or for worse.
The promise of more digital learning carries the risk that bean counters will try to replace teachers with software. That would be a big mistake. Good teachers are critically important, and new digital technologies are at their best when they remove barriers that prevent those teachers from doing what they do best.
Three features vital to the smart development of digital learning are respect for students’ variability, smart testing, and democracy, by which I mean open-source authoring.
ACTION ITEMS
Investigate your child’s school’s approach to digital learning to make sure it isn’t a knee-jerk cost-cutting strategy and that administrators maintain a healthy respect for human relationships.
Encourage your son or daughter to face and understand his or her variability. In a practical sense, it’s your first step to pursuing any needed accommodations in school. If you do it right, you’ll be giving your child a gift that will keep on giving.
Acknowledgments
From Todd Rose and Katherine Ellison:
In writing this book, we were privileged to be able to rely on an extraordinary complex system of talented supporters and positive feedback loops. We owe a large debt of gratitude to our literary agent, Michelle Tessler; editors Leslie Wells and Elisabeth Dyssegaard; and copy editor Tom Pitoniak for seeing this project through from its earliest stages. We also suspect we won the jackpot when Kerri Kolen stepped in, just before publication, to share our vision and devote her considerable talents to making sure many others did as well.
From Todd Rose:
I’m grateful to so many people in the course of my life who’ve helped me to understand myself, fall in love with learning, and, most recently, produce this book. I thank Katherine Ellison for her dedication and hard work and especially for encouraging me to be as honest as possible when it came to discussing the most difficult and painful parts of my story.
As I recall the many generous mentors who have helped me not only survive but thrive in school, I’m also indebted to Bill McVaugh, Eric Amsel, Julianne Arbuckle, and, above all, Kurt Fischer for introducing me to complex systems, for being such a great scientist and an even better human being, and for teaching me to become the best square peg I could possibly be. I also owe special thanks to several colleagues who directly and indirectly contributed their time and ideas, including: David Rose, Anne Meyer, Gabrielle Rappolt-Schlichtmann, and David Gordon, as well as Walter Haas, Parisa Rouhani, and Andrew McCollum.
My largest debt of gratitude is to my mother and father, Lyda and Larry Rose; my grandma Ruth Burton; and my wife, Kaylin, and two sons, Austin and Nathan, not only for reading and commenting on various drafts of the book, but for providing my life’s story with the happiest of endings.
From Katherine Ellison:
I met Todd Rose at a difficult time.
My eldest son, then twelve years old, was struggling in school and at home, and like millions of other parents in this predicament, I was scrambling for ideas about how to help him. Luckily for me, that’s when I happened to see a video featuring Todd’s inspiring comeback story. I looked him up at Harvard, and we talked each other’s ears off. In the intervening years, I’ve relied repeatedly on Todd’s unique ability to so clearly remember what it was like to be a deeply misunderstood kid at the mercy of an archaic school system, on his practical ideas for how to help, and more than anything else on his faith that this, too, will pass.
Today, Todd and I share the hope that our book can help other parents in similar ways, while also speeding the day when American schools become places that make our children more, not less, emotionally sound and that prize and nurture kids’ energy and creativity, troublesome as it so often can be.
All this is to explain why I’m grateful first to Todd for the opportunity to collaborate on this project, and, next, to his parents, Lyda and Larry, for their rare honesty and good will. Once again, I also thank my own circle of family and friends for all the laughs, love, and wisdom. This includes the North 24th Writers: Allison Bartlett, Leslie Crawford, Frances Dinkelspiel, Sharon Epel, Susan Freinkel, Katherine Neilan, Lisa Okuhn, Julia Flynn Siler, and Jill Storey, as well as Katy Butler, Nancy Boughey, Pauline Craig, Emily Goldfarb, and Jill Wolfson; and never least, Bernice, Ellis, David, and James Ellison; Jean Milofsky; and Jack, Joseph, and Joshua Epstein.
Notes
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific sourced passage in the book, please select the relevant link in each of the notes that follow.
Prologue
1 “The difficulty lies”: John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936).
1 smell of burning sulfur: See, for fun, Daniel Engber, “The Smell of Hell: Does Satan reek of rotten eggs?,” Slate, September 22, 2006, http://www.slate.com/id/2150170.
7 set off a tornado in Texas: Y. Udea, “Explosion of strange attractors exhibited by Duffing’s equation,” International Conference on Nonlinear Dynamics, New York, December 17–21, 1979, New York Academy of Sciences, Annals, vol. 357, December 26, 1980, pp. 422–34.
14 seven thousand students a day: See, for example, statement by the White House, March 1, 2010, “President Obama Announces Steps to Reduce Dropout Rate and Prepare Students for College and Careers.”
14 we’ve all heard legends: While Albert Einstein is frequently cited as belonging to this group of successful high school dropouts, the circumstances of his leaving high school in fact didn’t fit the normal pattern of failing grades and boredom. Two modern biographies confirm that he left his German high school early, chiefly in order to rejoin his parents, who had moved to Italy.
15 more than 80 percent of U.S. prison inmates: James E. Ysseldyke, Bob Algozzine, and Martha L. Thurlow, Critical Issues in Special Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).
15 $240 billion a year: National Dropout Prevention Network, as cited by C. A. Winter, “Learning disabilities, crime, delinquency, and special education placement,” Adolescence, Summer 1997; http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2248/is_n126_v32/ai_19619426/pg_2/.
15 5 percent of all high school dropouts are intellectually gifted: http://www.all4ed.org/files/archive/publications/HighCost.pdf. The lowest-achieving 25 percent of students are twenty times more likely to drop out of high school than students in the highest achievement quartile. See Anthony P. Carnevale, “Help wanted … College required,” Educational Testing Service, Office of Public Leadership, Washington, D.C. See also Michael S. Matthews, “Gifted Learners Who Drop Out: Prevalence and Prevention,” in International Handbook on Giftedness, Springer Science + Business Media, 2009, DOI10.1007/978-1-4010-6162-2-24.
16 originated in early-nineteenth-century Prussia: Henry Geitz, Jurgen Heideking, and Jurgen Herbst, eds., German Influences on Education in the United States to 1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
17 as many as 36 percent will drop out: Sam Goldstein and Anne Teeter-Ellison, Clinician’s Guide to Adult ADHD: Assessment and Intervention (San Diego: Academic Press, 2002).
17 half of all U.S. prison inmates: Clyde A. Winters, “Learning disabilities, crime, delinquency, and special education placement,�
� Adolescence, summer 1997, cited at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2248/is_n126_v32/ai_19619426.
Chapter 1
21 Not once throughout my first two years: Susan Shur-Fen Gau and Huey-Ling Chiang, “Sleep Problems and Disorders among Ado lescents with Persistent and Subthreshold Attention-deficit/Hyperactivity Disorders,” Sleep, May 1, 2009.
25 “the Rosenthal effect”: See, for instance, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, “Teachers’ expectancies: Determinates of pupils’ IQ gains,” Psychological Reports 19, no. 115–18 (1966); Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectations and Pupils’ Intellectual Development (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968).
Chapter 2:
43 my mom’s sister, Betty: This is an alias.
45 “working” memory: On the relationship to academic achievement, see R. G. Alloway, “Investigating the predictive roles of working memory and IQ in academic attainment,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 106 (2010): 20–29.
47 “learned helplessness”: For multiple articles, see http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/lh.htm.
51 “an underestimated force in education”: Video of Wilhelm at http://wn.com/Jeffrey_Wilhelm_on_Is_school_boring.
51 Thom Hartmann: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom Hartmann.
52 that didn’t stop me from hating the Ritalin: Compliance is a serious problem in ADHD medications. San Francisco–area pediatrician Peter Levine, a leader in ADHD treatment for Kaiser Permanente, says children stay on the meds an average of only eighteen months.
53 My mother never tried to get my school to pay: By federal law, schools are supposed to provide thorough diagnostic testing when there is evidence that a child might have a learning disorder.
56 children with major disabilities: http://febp.newamerica.net/background-analysis/individuals-disabilities-education-act-overview.
60 ineffective at best: One of my favorite articles on the bad effects of corporal punishment is this one, by psychologist Alan E. Kazdin, past president of the American Psychological Association: http://www.slate.com/id/2200450.
Chapter 3
65 “what you see and hear depends”: The quote is from The Magician’s Nephew, written between 1949 and 1954. The first study of MRI brain scans on humans was published in 1977.
66 to shoo away loitering teens: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/23/high-pitch-only-teens-can_n_98304.html.
67 studying a group of talented astrophysicists: For a review of the original theory, see: M. H. Schneps, T. L. Rose, and K. W. Fischer, “Visual Learning and the Brain: Implications for Dyslexia,” Journal of Mind, Brain, and Education 1, no. 3 (2007).
70 “the wick in the candle of learning”: M. J. Kang et al., “The wick in the candle of learning: Epistemic curiosity activates reward circuitry and enhances memory,” Psychological Science 20 (2009): 963–73.
72 wrong about the broader question: An interesting look at just this broader question is Todd Barrett Kashdan and Mantak Yuen, “Whether highly curious students thrive academically depends on perceptions about the school learning environment: A study of Hong Kong adolescents,” published online, October 23, 2007, Springer Science + Business Media.
74 In 2008, Dan Eisenberg: Eisenberg was the lead author on a study involving collaboration with Ben Campbell, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee: http://informsciencenetwork.com/anthropology/latest-hyperactivity-evolve-survival-aid-nomads-2350866a; http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2008/06/ariaaltribe.html; http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/8/173/abstract; and interviews by phone and e-mail with Dan Eisenberg, winter 2010.
76 “We were working”: There’s a striking parallel here with Buddhist teachings, which advise that it takes “skillful means” to teach wisdom to people who vary so much in their capacity to understand. The same truth, said the Buddha, may be understood through no less than eighty-four thousand “Dharma doors”: http://www.buddhism.org/Sutras/3.
78 influencing policy from the federal level on down: In collaboration with Harvard Law School, Boston College, and others, CAST has led a federally funded project that has culminated in the writing of the first-ever National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard, or NIMAS. NIMAS, which has the force of federal education law, requires publishers to develop textbooks and other learning materials in a flexible digital format so they can be quickly transformed from a single source file into Braille, e-text, human-voice narration, and other accessible formats.
79 Ben Foss: Learn about the advocacy group Foss created and watch his terrific video about dyslexia at http://www.headstrongnation.org/; http://www.ldonline.org/firstperson/Benjamin_Foss.
79 Stutts had sued: http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/694/666/116830.
80 “for the lazy and infirm”: “Intel Reader reads books to the lazy and infirm (video),” posted by Vlad Savov, November 10, 2009, Engadget.com: http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/10/intel-reader-reads-books-to-the-lazy-and-infirm-video.
Chapter 4
90 an estimated 13 million students: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/8375091/Barack-Obama-shares-childhood-tales-at-bullying-conference.html.
91 President Barack Obama presided: http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/03/10/obama.bullying/index.html. The White House also launched a website, www.Stopbullying.gov.
91 “dispel the myth”: Obama backed up his words with a pledge to in clude $132 million in the 2012 budget to combat violence and the bullying of children, providing grants to state and local governments under the Education Department’s Successful, Safe, and Healthy Students program.
91 a great deal of recent research: http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/content/bullying-statistics-2009.html; http://www.pascack.k12.nj.us/70271919141818/lib/70271919141818/Bullying_Statistics.htm; http://students.com.miami.edu/netreporting/?page_id=1269.
91 where bullying is most common: “Bullying Behaviors Among US Youth: Prevalence and Association With Psychosocial Adjustment,” Tonja R. Nansel, Ph.D., The Journal of the American Medical Association 285 (2001): 2094–2100.
91 than if I’d been a girl: “Predictors of Bullying and Victimization in Childhood and Adolescence: A Meta-analytic Investigation,” Clayton R. Cook, et al., School Psychology Quarterly, 25, no. 2 (2010): 65–83 (1045–3830).
91 as a boy with learning struggles: See this blog by Marlene Snyder, Ph.D., Understanding Bullying and Its Impact on Kids With Learning Disabilities or AD/HD, http://www.greatschools.org/special-education/health/823-understanding-bullying-and-its-impact-on-kids-with-learning-disabilities-or-ad-hd.gs.
91 About one in five victims: S. M. Swearer and B. J. Doll, “Bullying in schools: An ecological framework,” Journal of Emotional Abuse 2 (2001): 7–23.
92 “I wake up and my stomach”: Student Advisors for Education, Read This When You Can: Stories and Essays by SAFE Voices (San Francisco: Parents Education Network, 2008).
92 both types of pain activate: Ethan Kross, et al., “Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2011).
93 “For 99 percent of the beasts”: http://www.dana.org/news/cerebrum/detail.aspx?id=638.
93 bullying dumbs you down: Scientists hypothesize that the stress of being bullied depresses immune functioning through the action of the stress hormone cortisol. See, for instance, Emily Anthes, “Inside the Bullied Brain: The Alarming Neuroscience of Taunting,” Boston Globe, Nov. 28, 2010.
94 shoot down as far as the second percentile: http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2007-06470-007. Learning is simply not a priority: Research that should come as no surprise has found that students involved in bullying and victimization are less academically engaged. See, for instance, “The Association of Bullying and Victimization with Middle School Adjustment,” Tonja R. Nansel, et al, Journal of Applied School Psychology, 19, no. 2 (2003). Other research has demonstrated that, over the long term
, the cortisol response can impair the brain’s prefrontal cortex, a key tool in self-control. A child who perceives himself as under threat for a long time will typically become hypervigilant, emotionally reactive, defensive, and quick to anger.
94 a diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder: See, for example, http://aacap.org/page.ww?name=Children+with+Oppositional+Defiant+Disorder§ion=Facts+for+Families.
96 I put a big smiley face on my miserable life: The story of my visit to Goldstein highlights one of the biggest limitations of the whole clinical psychology enterprise—the significant possibility that the patient (particularly a disgruntled adolescent patient) isn’t telling the truth. There was really no chance that I was going to open up to a guy I’d never met, whom I’d been taken to see for the express purpose (at least in my opinion at the time) of discovering what was wrong with me. At the time, I assumed Goldstein’s report would be available to anyone who wanted to see it, so why shouldn’t I have guarded my privacy?
98 someone had to detach and deescalate: Lyda’s parenting decision is supported by research showing that kids in conflict with mothers maintain higher levels of cortisol through the school day. See G. Rappolt-Schlichtmann et al., “Poverty, Relationship Conflict, and the Regulation of Cortisol in Small and Large Group Contexts at Child Care,” Mind, Brain, and Education 3 (2009): 131–42.
Chapter 5
109 “Opposite Todd”: The Seinfeld episode in fact aired in 1994, one year before I figured out this approach on my own, but I credit the show for the brand name.