http://www.slc.edu/adult-professional/cdi/events/
If you don't have an hour and a half (who does?), just watch the 10 minutes from about 50 minutes in to the close of the first hour. Temple Grandin talks about kids with autism, but she could very well be talking about anybody, autism or no.
And/or, from 73:09, there's a piece of her answer to the question about bullying and teasing that's absolutely fascinating to me: non-teasing environments, where she had friends, arose from shared interests. She lists a number of activities that can create social bonds for kids with autism (and I would argue kids without autism, too). I thought, these are all the things that get cut first.
Socialization through shared interests: art, theater, science, cooking, building things.
How many jails do we build, how much funding do we throw at social programs, in order to care for (or worse, simply contain) the people who get squeezed out of their own productive capabilities through a lack of support early on?
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Coming Back to the Magic Phrase
A few nights ago I read a couple of chapters of Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. The authors use examples from all different sources to illustrate their ideas, and there's some of the inevitable internal phraseology that happens (they borrow Jonathan Haidt's Elephant and Rider analogy for our emotional and rational mind, respectively, and add things like Paths, bright spots, Clinics, etc.), but it's a goldmine of simple, sensical, study-backed social science that is useful in a lot of ways.
What struck me most was this:
To pursue bright spots is to ask the question, "What's working and how can we do more of it?" Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: "What's broken, and how do we fix it?"
This one paragraph sums up a lot of what I talk about here: seeing children as broken and in need of repair, instead of working from their strengths. Seeing what kids aren't doing well, and drilling them on it, over and over, in various ways, instead of taking a moment to see what they are doing well and building on it.
As a prime example of this, I'll quote again, from this post, what the American Association of Pediatrics has to say about vision therapy: “Ineffective, controversial methods of treatment such as vision therapy may give parents and teachers a false sense of security that a child’s learning difficulties are being addressed, may waste family and/or school resources and may delay proper instruction or remediation.”
You see, a simple solution such as giving a child "magic glasses" to help them read in a more facile manner works - and it works while flying in the face of the heaping pile of research, statistical compilations, and endless maze of solutions that's grown up around learning difficulties. Low-power glasses don't change a child's ability to read; but they change a child's belief in his or her ability to read, and something so simple and powerful just doesn't fit in with all the carefully controlled studies. Doctors and education specialists conclude that since it doesn't fix what's broken, then the fact that it solves the problem must somehow be false.
No, no, and no!
Do you see? We come back to the magic phrase: people don't see what they're not looking for.
If you are not looking to see what works, you will not see anything that works as a solution. If you're looking for ways to fix something that's broken, you will always be focused on the broken pieces because that's where you started. If you start from success, your solution will be about building on success, rather than avoiding failure.
It's a simple, crucial difference. It's a switch we have to make.
What struck me most was this:
To pursue bright spots is to ask the question, "What's working and how can we do more of it?" Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: "What's broken, and how do we fix it?"
This one paragraph sums up a lot of what I talk about here: seeing children as broken and in need of repair, instead of working from their strengths. Seeing what kids aren't doing well, and drilling them on it, over and over, in various ways, instead of taking a moment to see what they are doing well and building on it.
As a prime example of this, I'll quote again, from this post, what the American Association of Pediatrics has to say about vision therapy: “Ineffective, controversial methods of treatment such as vision therapy may give parents and teachers a false sense of security that a child’s learning difficulties are being addressed, may waste family and/or school resources and may delay proper instruction or remediation.”
You see, a simple solution such as giving a child "magic glasses" to help them read in a more facile manner works - and it works while flying in the face of the heaping pile of research, statistical compilations, and endless maze of solutions that's grown up around learning difficulties. Low-power glasses don't change a child's ability to read; but they change a child's belief in his or her ability to read, and something so simple and powerful just doesn't fit in with all the carefully controlled studies. Doctors and education specialists conclude that since it doesn't fix what's broken, then the fact that it solves the problem must somehow be false.
No, no, and no!
Do you see? We come back to the magic phrase: people don't see what they're not looking for.
If you are not looking to see what works, you will not see anything that works as a solution. If you're looking for ways to fix something that's broken, you will always be focused on the broken pieces because that's where you started. If you start from success, your solution will be about building on success, rather than avoiding failure.
It's a simple, crucial difference. It's a switch we have to make.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Other Kinds of Smart
I've been heard to say that I don't like people. And that's true: I don't. As a species, I think we're rather craptastic. We destroy ourselves and other living things on a scale that is completely unnecessary, especially considering that nature already has an extensive arsenal of weather phenomena and other means of shaking things up.
However, I also find on a smaller level that we have the capacity for incredible creation. It's heartening, the little moments of kindness that are everywhere if you look for them. It's probably why I like working with small children so much: they are as surprisingly, spontaneously creative and kind as often as they are otherwise.
Kind or otherwise, in destruction or creation mode, the thing about people is, we need each other. We're social creatures, for better or worse. We are not able to meet all of our individual needs by ourselves: we need help from each other, whether it's to meet basic survival needs (food, shelter), emotional needs, spiritual needs, and so on.
So what, may I ask, is the point of educating everyone to have the same skills?
Because you see, we all have different skills and strengths. You can see it very early on, even amongst siblings, the different personalities and qualities that people have. Yet our educational system very clearly favors a particular kind of hands-off, head-only, reading and writing intensive means of approaching things.
What you end up doing is robbing individuals and communities both by limiting the skill sets people can draw from to get things done. Our needs don't change just because we're ill-equipped to meet them.
What happens to A., a child in my class two years in a row, who has such fine control over his body and such an eye for manipulating small parts and fixing things? If given an opportunity to be physically active, and to be the person other people come to when they need something repaired, he might flourish. But he'll get to school and be discouraged from using his hands (except to write), and he'll gets antsy, and his tenuous social skills will be broken down instead of strengthened, because he can't perform well in that environment.
What happens to a countless number of children whose strengths lie outside the narrow range favored in schools? The kid who can make his friends feel better but can't quite add quickly enough; the kid who can choreograph and lead her friends in a dance but can't be bothered to read assigned stories; any number of kids whose skills tend toward social, emotional, physical, philosophical, anything that can't be expressed on composition notebook paper. They are suckled on the lie that they're not good enough.
The reality is, we need every kind of smart we can get. Yes, we need people who can write coherently. Yes, we need people who can calculate various things quickly and accurately. But we also need things to write about, and reasons to make calculations. We need those skills to be in the service of people whose strengths provide the fodder for the writers and calculators; the artists, the entrepreneurs, the athletes and the entertainers, and so on. We do ourselves no favors by suppressing all the other kinds of smart that make us, as individuals, more happy and healthy, and our communities stronger and more resilient.
However, I also find on a smaller level that we have the capacity for incredible creation. It's heartening, the little moments of kindness that are everywhere if you look for them. It's probably why I like working with small children so much: they are as surprisingly, spontaneously creative and kind as often as they are otherwise.
Kind or otherwise, in destruction or creation mode, the thing about people is, we need each other. We're social creatures, for better or worse. We are not able to meet all of our individual needs by ourselves: we need help from each other, whether it's to meet basic survival needs (food, shelter), emotional needs, spiritual needs, and so on.
So what, may I ask, is the point of educating everyone to have the same skills?
Because you see, we all have different skills and strengths. You can see it very early on, even amongst siblings, the different personalities and qualities that people have. Yet our educational system very clearly favors a particular kind of hands-off, head-only, reading and writing intensive means of approaching things.
What you end up doing is robbing individuals and communities both by limiting the skill sets people can draw from to get things done. Our needs don't change just because we're ill-equipped to meet them.
What happens to A., a child in my class two years in a row, who has such fine control over his body and such an eye for manipulating small parts and fixing things? If given an opportunity to be physically active, and to be the person other people come to when they need something repaired, he might flourish. But he'll get to school and be discouraged from using his hands (except to write), and he'll gets antsy, and his tenuous social skills will be broken down instead of strengthened, because he can't perform well in that environment.
What happens to a countless number of children whose strengths lie outside the narrow range favored in schools? The kid who can make his friends feel better but can't quite add quickly enough; the kid who can choreograph and lead her friends in a dance but can't be bothered to read assigned stories; any number of kids whose skills tend toward social, emotional, physical, philosophical, anything that can't be expressed on composition notebook paper. They are suckled on the lie that they're not good enough.
The reality is, we need every kind of smart we can get. Yes, we need people who can write coherently. Yes, we need people who can calculate various things quickly and accurately. But we also need things to write about, and reasons to make calculations. We need those skills to be in the service of people whose strengths provide the fodder for the writers and calculators; the artists, the entrepreneurs, the athletes and the entertainers, and so on. We do ourselves no favors by suppressing all the other kinds of smart that make us, as individuals, more happy and healthy, and our communities stronger and more resilient.
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