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After 30 years of mostly private clinical work in the area of special education and being a parent of two, I see that the purpose of education is to create independent learners. Developing children to become adults who can think for themselves, speak up for themselves, and make educated choices.
My greatest accomplishment has been to teach a child who was born at 15.5 ounces and possessing an I.Q. of 40 by age 10, an average I.Q. being between 70 and 130. I taught this interesting child to read at the 5th-grade level, comprehend at the 4th-grade level, know all of his math facts and be able to apply them including long division and simple fractions. He went on to teach himself Spanish via his favorite video on the subject.
No one has ever done that so, therefore, it’s impossible. Right? Wrong. Not only did I get those kinds of results, I taught parents to do the same thing. They say a good outcome for a research project is to be able to have others get the same results. I modeled the learning techniques I developed for my students, to parents so they could go home and deliver the services their children so desperately needed. In fact, many of those parents needed those exercises and learning techniques for themselves. I even put together a symposium so parents understood the things that support learning like understanding biodiversity, developing perceptions, reflex integration, and imprinting the most foundational patterns for learning.
The education I received becoming a Special Education teacher involved Rote Learning and working at the Cognitive Level of the brain. Students were not allowed to move on in their learning if they couldn’t sort colors or match shapes. The problem was that Rote Learning put way too many patterns into a student’s brain. Mind you that many students in Special Education have a limited capacity to hold information in their brain. I began teaching these students in my own private practice. My focus was on the question, “So how does your brain work?” I observed and took action on what I saw. I keep getting just the right students at just the right time, going deeper and deeper finding out the most foundational patterns for learning. Not the easiest patterns to teach. I figured out a way to imprint these patterns, much like a baby bird is patterned thinking that the first thing it sees is its mother.
Schools tend to teach to the cortex or prefrontal lobe of the brain and with many repetitions, most students are able to pattern information into their mid-brain. Research has shown that for children with ADD/ADHD, the cortex of the brain is the part of the brain where the neurons are not making good connections. Dr. Lyelle Palmer of Winona University promotes teaching to mid-brain and by-passing the cortex of the brain.
Adults can relate to learning on the cortex of the brain, then pattern information into the mid-brain when they consider the process of learning to drive a car. With many repetitions, a new driver patterns information; eventually being able to drive on ‘automatic pilot’ not being conscious of where one is, yet capable of stopping if say a ball rolls out into the street.
When the research came out on Alzheimer’s, I found out that I was on the Basal Ganglia Level of the brain, not the Cognitive Level. This is considered the procedural memory level. A person with Alzheimer’s may not remember your name, but they will remember, for instance, how to do the dishes. I knew I hadn’t been working cognitively with my clients, I just didn’t know where I was in the brain until that research came out.
I believe in teaching people to make educated choices. I did this for my students as well as their parents. I didn’t just teach the parents how to educate their children I taught them about biodiversity and how foods and environmental toxins affect learning.
Things have changed a great deal in the schools since I graduated and did my year-long internship. Special Education teachers play a different role these days. We’ve moved from the ‘let’s see how we can fix this child’ to ‘let’s push the square peg into the round hole’. The attitude seems to be the harder we push, the more homework and classwork the student is given, the better. It is a ‘more is better’ world out there. Push harder, push faster in order to keep up with the ‘mainstream’.
Who bears the battle wounds of this new way of thinking? Actually, everyone suffers. When some special needs students are pushed past their limit, they are given the EBD (Emotional Behavior Disorder) label. So, how do we stop this new trend? We move from the ‘more is better’ theory to the ‘less is more’ theory of learning.
What might this ‘less is more’ theory look like? Let’s look at three examples. First is the student who leans forward and presses hard when writing. Finding ways for this student to do less writing while lightening up his pencil grip can do wonders. The second example is of piano teachers who insist their students play a song at a pace that allows them to avoid mistakes. Piano teachers do not allow students to play accomplished sections of a song quickly and then slow down for the difficult parts. A third example is a student who makes errors when reading out loud. Practicing the entire passage slowly, on a daily basis, will allow the student’s oral reading speed and accuracy to increase naturally.
The brain speed of children once talking and running is ‘full speed ahead’; therefore the brain must be slowed down in order for reading to take place. The first challenge in teaching reading and writing is to help children get control of their brains, slow them down, and integrate the right side with the left side. Children cannot prove how smart they are when their brains are going too fast. When a child’s brain is slowed you get a child who acts calmer, is less impulsive, can comprehend what is read, avoids spelling errors, etc. Steven Pinker, Professor, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, MIT and author of The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, states that “Children are wired for sound, but the print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on. This fact about human nature should be the starting point for any discussion of how to teach our children to read and write.”
As the parent of two special needs children, I watched my children’s love of learning slowly die in their early years of grade school. Even though they were considered for the gifted programs, there was always something holding them back. In my search to help my own children, I learned to look at the whole child in order to consider food sensitivities, toxicity, processing abilities, and developmental movement.
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