Letters from Lisa

We arrived in the south of Italy today. I am feeling increasingly burdened by the responsibility of representing the countries and their histories and cultures to the kids. Whatever impression they form will color everything else they ever learn or experience, and I don’t want to get it wrong. When I started this, I was hoping to spark some sort of fascination with traveling and other countries that would stay with the kids as they get older.

So you can imagine my reaction when one little girl raised her hand today and said, “Lisa, I was supposed to go to Rome this spring with my family, but the trip got cancelled. And now I’m going there with my class. So I’m glad I’m not going with my family - I’d just be bored!”

Okay.

Let’s deconstruct that for a moment.

She doesn’t want to go to Italy because she watched a PowerPoint presentation about it with the class, so she feels like she’s already seen it.

!?!?!?!

I don’t even know where to begin with that one. But it sure makes me want to get out of the travel business!

I’m going to take a few minutes to address a recent comment about my ADHD post - yay, comments! - so here goes:

Duane writes:

I appreciate what you are writing about this, particularly because I’ve been dismissive about ADHD in the past. However, I remain skeptical of ADHD because I’ve heard seasoned teachers exclaim that something is radically different about the short attention spans of todays youth compared to when they taught ~30 years ago. Some of this may be nostalgic recollection, but I get the distinct impression that something has changed, which naturally leads people to question if we are medicating the symptom instead of addressing the causes.

I can’t disagree. In fact, I can even think of some things that are indeed radically different than they were 30 years ago (full disclosure: I am 28 years old, so I don’t have the clearest personal memory of what it was like 30 years ago)

• A lot more kids survive today. I’ve worked with many students who were very premature and/or born with serious developmental issues. Many of these kids probably would not have survived 30 years ago, and therefore teachers 30 years ago were not seeing the resulting developmental issues that result from very premature birth, early developmental issues, and so on. Along with this, we’re seeing an increasing number of domestic and international adoptions, which tend to carry risks of developmental vulnerabilities too. Last but not least, early exposure to drugs like cocaine can alter a child’s attention span dramatically - some of the most severe cases I’ve worked with have stemmed from early drug exposure and the corresponding neglect.
• In past years, students with problematic behaviors or learning profiles were shunted into mixed-bag, sequestered-off special education classes, or in the case of older students, permitted or even encouraged to drop out or seek a vocational program rather than a diploma. Laws designed to integrate and protect students ensure that regular education teachers are seeing more and more kids in their classes who never would have been there when I was a kid. Historically, education was designed to provide an “adequate” background for the middle standard deviation of learners - there was until recently no expectation of reaching and teaching every child.
• The speed of American life has dramatically increased. When I was a kid (editor’s note: NOT THAT LONG AGO, FOLKS) we didn’t have a microwave, computer, internet, email, cell phone, mp3 player, CDs or DVDs. Everything has gotten faster and smoother, which is of course awesome (I don’t want to go back to my dot matrix printer!) but with it, EVERYONE’s attention span has gotten shorter. We look for everything to be easy and instantaneous — not exactly compatible with spending 5 years of your life learning how to do something hard, like learning to read. We are also, I believe, prone to marketing and cultural messages that teach us to be insatiable, pleasure-seeking, and intolerant of frustration.
• General attitudes and practices in raising children have changed. Children are left less and less to develop long attention spans as they are inundated with singing, moving, and “teaching” toys that overstimulate them and encourage them to be passively entertained. School age children tend to be relentlessly choreographed into lessons and structured pursuits. I also think (and this is just my opinion here) that today’s children are burdened with precocious knowledge and pursuits than before - they acquire the trappings and desires of teenagers way before they’re old enough. That makes focusing on age-appropriate things much more difficult. And on top of all this, I think many people think of schools as businesses and themselves as consumers. According to this model, the teachers are there to provide a product. When I was in school (editor’s note: really, I’m not old, honest) you didn’t have the expectation that lessons were entertainment. Sometimes we confuse stimulation with learning. Anything worth pursuing runs the risk of being “boring” sometimes, but what’s missing is an examination of what a student’s mind must be doing in order to be interested in the first place. I think we place too little emphasis upon goal-directed behavior and long term planning in our culture, and that kids are reflecting this back to us in dramatic form.

So, to summarize:

• There can be lots of reasons why a child doesn’t appear to be paying attention.
• ADHD is a significant inability to take adequate control over deploying, shifting, and maintaining attention. It makes sense to use the descriptor to refer to a child only when it significantly interferes with the child’s functioning. It has nothing to do with whether it’s inconvenient for teachers and parents - in fact a spacey, quiet child might be a dream to manage in the classroom but not be learning a thing.
• Just because ADHD is a reality for some children doesn’t mean that every insatiable, highly active child needs to go on medication for it. (Besides, even for kids with severe attentional issues, medication isn’t the only or full answer.)
• Using ADHD as a diagnostic label does not excuse parents, teachers, or society from providing the best learning and living environments for children or from examining our “best practices”.

Incidentally, I believe there was a lot more ADHD and other issues 30 years ago than we may realize. Except back then, those were the “lazy” or “troublemaking” kids. The ones who were told to “try harder” or that they could be doing better if they just “applied” themselves. I had a very oldfashioned history teacher in high school whose idea of discipline was to snap at kids that they would “never amount to anything” when they didn’t behave. I think schools years ago were much less welcoming and humane places than they are now. Believe it or not, we’re actually making progress. At least now a child can be told, “You have trouble with your attention controls… here are the things we’re doing to help you” instead of “You’re such a troublemaker!”

I belong to a few online knitting groups, and got this little charming tidbit from Victoria — a lady was bitten by one of Australia’s many deadly snakes while sitting and knitting. So she calmly moved to another couch and continued to knit until she could get to a hospital.

To me that is quintessentially Australian, as was her daughter’s initial reaction as quoted in the article: “Yeah mum, no worries.”

news article - warning, snake picture involved

Everyone’s got an opinion about the state of education today. We’re testing too much, or we’re not holding schools and teachers accountable enough. We’re putting too much pressure on kids, or we’re not competitive with other countries. (After all, they’ve still got more child suicides than us.) We should be teaching the timeless classics, but kids these days are naturally visual and need instantaneous “wired” information to keep up with new technology. But whatever your vision of adult life for our children, you probably think our nation’s schools are falling short. Most people seem to think so.

One common opinion that you’ll hear is that school is “boring”. Kids these days are restless! Sitting in rows, doing mind-numbing busywork, having to be unnaturally quiet… no wonder they are bursting with pent-up energy and turned off from learning. Their old fuddy-duddy teachers just don’t understand their need to be outdoors and run around and explore with their hands! And because the system is unnatural and rigid and unresponsive to the needs of children, it only looks like these kids have behavior problems, specifically Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. We stuff them full of pills, trying to medicate the spirit and energy out of them.

Hear that sound? That’s the whistle of steam coming out of my ears. I may be naturally opinionated, but few things get me riled up more than the argument that ADHD doesn’t exist and that the only reason we are drugging kids up is because teachers don’t want to work hard enough or know how to make school interesting.

First off, this is what I’m not saying:

• That all kids are diagnosed correctly and for the right reasons. As you’ll see, I prefer to deal in individual children and their unique circumstances. I am not prepared to make sweeping statements about every pediatrician and teacher in America. And I don’t think anyone else should, either.
• That schools don’t have the responsibility to be as child-friendly and stimulating as possible. I’m a teacher. I take this incredibly seriously. My classroom would be a miserable place for both the children and me if everyone was stifled, bored, and unstimulated. My class is “backpacking around Europe” right now. That’s my latest attempt to make learning fun… for all of us. Because contrary to popular belief, elementary school teachers want to have fun, too!

What is ADHD, really? Is it just a kid being bored and restless because school isn’t interesting? Wouldn’t that kid be doing fine if the classroom were a more open, forgiving place, where kids could pursue their own interests and do hands-on work and engage in projects and experiments instead of filling out worksheets in rows? Actually, no. What you’re likely to see is a kid flitting haphazardly from thing to thing, with a trail of half-finished projects and materials strewn in his wake, barging into what someone else is doing and knocking their project over, exploding with frustration when the plan doesn’t work out because she skipped three steps in the middle. Many kids need that quiet, orderly environment in order to get anything done. Besides, as kids get older, they often want to learn — and have to learn — about subjects that can only be accessed through sitting down and looking through books. I mean, we could do a nice hands-on project about the Black Death, but we might get a visit from the Health Department. Kids need to develop the capacity to be fascinated by, and sustain attention upon, the written word (and diagram). I can’t tell you how many of my kids’ number one academic goal is to be able to read well enough to get into Harry Potter… imagine how long you have to concentrate in order to be able to do that!

ADHD is a big category, and I’ve worked with a lot of kids who have features of it. They’re all different, and some of them don’t have much in common. But allow me to give you a taste of what ADHD can look like. These are all actual examples of child behavior from my past 6 years of teaching in four different schools:

• A class of kids who couldn’t sit through a whole movie - a movie they chose and really wanted to see. TV shows and other videos would also last for about five minutes before they got distracted. (So much for the theory that too much staring at the TV causes attention problems.)
• A girl who couldn’t get the fork with food on it into her mouth because she got distracted in the time it took to pick up a piece of food and bring it to her lips.
• An active little guy who couldn’t get interested in a hands on science or art project because it didn’t involve running and jumping around at high speeds. (Until he was medicated for ADHD… then he started to love science activities!)
• Athletic kids who couldn’t participate in organized sports because they couldn’t attend long enough to learn the rules or remember which direction the goal is in.
• Kids who insult their friends and break prized possessions because of a lack of impulse control - and beat themselves up about all the mistakes that they can’t help making
• Kids who come up to me during an important test and say, “Lisa, I keep daydreaming! What am I going to do? How am I ever going to finish?”
• Kids who think they’re “stupid” or “bad” because of their difficulties in paying attention and keeping impulses under control

And I could go on. These kids are not bored. They are attention-impaired. They often get terribly frustrated with themselves and receive a lot of frustration directed at them from angry parents, teachers, classmates, coaches, teammates, and so on. They want to do well, but end up doing or saying things they don’t mean, or walking away from a project they were really interested in but can’t sustain the attention long enough to finish.

I invite anyone who thinks that ADHD doesn’t exist to work with kids who actually have it. Try teaching them a skill that has more than two parts or that requires forethought and planning. Try getting them to remember all the supplies (and safety precautions!) they need for that fantastic project they’re imagining. Try taking them to a zoo, museum, restaurant, farm, or hotel that they want to visit without them getting lost or impulsively touching something or losing track of the goal of going in the first place. It’s not as simple as “making school more interesting”. You have to pay attention long enough, and process deeply enough, to figure out what is going on in the room before you can decide whether you’re interested or not. And you have to be able to sustain attention long enough to see your work through to satisfaction, or you won’t walk away with a positive experience.

As for this whole allegation that the medical establishment is trying to push pills on kids — It has not been my experience that doctors “push pills”. If anything, pediatricians often tell parents that the kid is just a bit “immature” for his age and will “grow out of it”, which delays the child getting help for school problems that can’t wait for the years it will take for the child to supposedly grow out of it. Maintaining a child on medication is a huge amount of work and involves lots of checklists, phone calls between teachers and parents and doctors, and recalibrating doses or medicine types as the kid’s eating and sleeping and growth spurts and hormones change. It is so completely NOT a quick and easy fix. By now I hope it’s clear that there is no such thing as a quick and easy fix. These are not appliances - these are children. If you want to fix something, become a mechanic. Teaching isn’t about that.

When a child begins to gain control over his or her attention, finally, it doesn’t mean that everything is now fixed. You have to deal with a child who is focused in the world for the first time, and who doesn’t have much idea of what she’s missed up to that point. Kids who were spacey and disconnected before suddenly notice that the other kids aren’t really nice to them, or that they’re way behind academically. They stick with things long enough to get frustrated, but have to start developing frustration tolerance for the first time. It’s often a rocky and emotional experience for the child, parents and teachers. The medicine, if it works, puts the child in the driver’s seat, but doesn’t teach him how to drive. That comes through instruction and experience. Again, no quick fixes here.

I’ve seen kids jump grade levels in reading and math within a few months, since they’re using all of their energy to attain the academic goals and are finally connecting with the material. And then I’ve had kids who didn’t respond at all, or just got irritable, and ended up not staying on medication at all. It just depends on the situation. That’s what you’d expect when you are dealing with live human beings, with different needs and life experiences and body chemistries.

Point being, it’s not simple, and I really dislike when people pretend it is. I think it’s disrespectful to trivialize the issues that people face when they have attention problems by saying that those problems don’t really exist, or that it’s all the fault of one thing or another. It’s so impressive what these kids (and adults too) are able to accomplish and handle, but heartbreaking when you see the misunderstanding and suffering that can come with it. Hopefully the kids I’ve worked with will grow up to have their own understanding of what ADHD means to them, and gain a sense of mastery over their own environment and destiny.

I’ve probably commented before on the absurd sublime snippets of sort-of-English that spambots regurgitate into blog comments in a strange effort to sell products. Here’s a nice one:

He was not stranger-like, being rather inaccessable and heroic-sized than strongly built, but in sheer day trading information of squamuloso-incana and patrons he sliped almost perfectly womanish.

Aside from the reference to day trading, it sounds almost surrealist and poetic. I think Lewis Carroll was born too early and missed his calling.

I asked the kids to submit — anonymously, of course — responses to the following question: How do you know if someone is smart?

Some of the responses I got:

• A smart person reads fast.
• A smart person raises his hand a lot.
• A smart person answers a lot of questions.
• A smart person is a good speller.
• A smart person knows a lot about science.
• A smart person gets a lot of problems right in math.
• A smart person knows a lot of words.
• A smart person is nice.
• A smart person is funny.
• A smart person is brave.

It was highly instructive for me to see the answers - and not at all surprising. Certainly the responses hit on a number of hot-button issues for our kids, such as reading fast, spelling, knowing what words mean, and raising your hand in class.

I wonder what your average group of American adults would say, if asked this question. I wonder, even, what I would say. After being a teacher for a while, my childhood definition of “smart” has completely gone out the window. What I thought was really important has turned out not to be, and some other skills that were never emphasized to me as a child have suddenly hit the forefront.

We’re going to have a class talk about this tomorrow, because apparently some kids have been given the message, in some cases pretty blatantly, that they aren’t smart. And honestly, it makes me angry. I graduated from an Ivy League school and I have a master’s degree, but I can just imagine how hurt I’d feel if someone called me stupid. Even though I know I’m not! So how is a little kid expected to feel? Especially a kid who’s had trouble with school or school subjects?

To me this is one of the big problems with the cultural atmosphere we’re currently in. It’s all about competing, seeing how you measure up, reaching some arbitrary standard. I get a bit of a respite from that, being outside the mainstream, but obviously the attitude of the “real world” is creeping in. At some point it’s inevitable that kids start to question who they are, not just in and of themselves, but in relation to everyone else. And if they don’t appear to measure up by the benchmarks that society sets for them, that can feel pretty cruel.

In general, I think education rushes kids to some arbitrary finish line that no longer makes sense. Especially considering how many adults take their time figuring out what they want to do in life or switch career paths several times. People live longer now. We’ve got more time to figure it out. So what is the point of pushing kids into a narrow school timeline the way we do? Or holding them back, if they’re ready to move forward? Why do we insist on these rigid age groupings, when there is clearly so much variation in kids’ development?

I’ll tell you why. $$$$$. We spend a lot of it on education, but we spend a lot more of it on other things. And maybe it isn’t realistic to spend more on education. But could we spend it better? Yup. Could we organize things differently? Sure. Are we really making an honest attempt to figure out how to do that? No, not really. We just keep giving the kids tests, to see if it’s really as bad as we think it is.

I don’t know of any country that really has a better system than ours, so what I’m advocating is not that we try to be more like Japan or France or wherever else. Some systems are more efficient, but more kids commit suicide. Some systems squeeze more kids through, but overrely on rote learning and funnel kids out who don’t master the material in a certain amount of time. Certainly American education is ambitious and far-reaching in scope, and it’s admirable that we’ve gotten to the point where we take it for granted that we will have a system that reaches everyone, and that can handle anyone’s needs. We have the goal in mind, just have gotten stuck in the way we set things up originally and don’t see a way out. Yet.

I think it’ll change. I just wonder how many more generations of kids are going to walk away thinking they’re stupid before it does.

We’re off on our whirlwind adventure through Europe. Today was Denmark. I hope we didn’t disturb the class next door too much by screaming at the top of our lungs while “riding” the rollercoasters at Tivoli Gardens.

I’ve been using a lot of photos from my own travels whenever possible, because the kids get a real kick out of posing for pictures with “me”. Today it went to a bizarre new level when they asked if I’d pose for a photo with myself.

So here you go.

I know there’s some sort of time travel violation going on here. Oh well. I’ll probably have my science fiction writing credentials revoked for this. All in the name of education!

Lisa Fischler, live, February 24th
KGB Bar on East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave)

I’ll be regaling the crowd with Australia tales. Pencil me in!

Q: So, we meet again.
A: Thanks for that insight, Captain Obvious.

Q: Cranky, aren’t you?
A: Course I am. In fact, I’m pretty riled up.

Q: Should I ask?
A: Don’t bother. I’ll just tell you. It’s raining!

Q: Will you melt?
A: No… It’s raining, which means that everyone’s brandishing umbrellas. And you know what that means. Pokes in the face! Drips down the back, sideswipes and metal skeletons littering the streets. People ought to have to pass a roadside test and carry a license before being unleashed with potentially lethal weapons in crowded areas.

Q: Right. You aren’t too sleep deprived.
A: Look, some of us are considerate and just wear a hood. There are options, people.

Q: You’d hate Bergen, Norway. They sell umbrellas in vending machines out on the streets.
A: I know. And cameras, too. So at least if some lout scrapes your forehead, you can get it on film.

Q: We are lucky it didn’t rain at all while you were there.
A: It was swelteringly hot and sunny. My berries from the farmer’s market melted inside the bag. I have a picture of the thermometer at the top of the mountain.

Q: What did it say?
A: I don’t know, it was in Norwegian.

Q: The number, not the words.
A: Ah, about 30 Celcius.

Q: That’s 90 degrees Fahrenheit, isn’t it.
A: Yes. You’re a clever one, aren’t you?

Q: Excuse me. Where was my umbrella? I need to find it so that I can hit you over the head with it!
A: Now we see the violence inherent in the system!

Q: Stop quoting Monty Python at me!
A: Put the umbrella down first!

Q: Oh, go to bed.
A: Fine! I will!

I hate my internet connection. Or as it should be more accurately called - my internet DISconnection. Sure, it claims to be signed on — it even boasts of its “Excellent” signal strength — but in reality, my requests for web pages and emails are lost in the netherworld of virtual space. Sometimes, in a rare moment of clarity, it will say I am “out of network range”. Sounds like a new genre for New Age books - people who have lived through Out of Network experiences. Of course, I am not out of network at all. Just out of PATIENCE!!

I have SO MUCH work to do this weekend. I’m putting together a class newspaper, planning a European vacation for the kids, AND writing report cards. Welcome back, vacation’s over!

But it does feel seriously good to be in the land of the living again. I can brush my teeth without wondering whether I’m breaking something. At least anything important. Everyone I meet also seems to have a wisdom tooth story, so I am learning a lot more about people’s dental health than I ever thought possible.

From the looks of things, 2006 is going to be a busy busy year…

In a few more days, my class will be leaving for a 19-day backpacking tour of Europe. We’re starting in Scandinavia, circling down towards Greece and Italy, then up through the Alps and ending with Spain and Portugal. The kids are extremely excited and have already made their packing lists. In the meantime, I am gathering all of their documents together and planning our meals and sightseeing.

I don’t think I’ve had this much fun planning a curriculum since… ever.

I’ve created a new blog just for my knitting projects. That way I don’t clutter this page up with photos and random musings about stitches and needles and end up sounding like I’m an emergency room doctor.

Go here: Knitting Fiend

The address is knittingfiend13.blogspot.com, for those of you playing along at home.

And now, for nostalgia’s sake, here are a few last photos of my latest finished products:

Today’s the first day since my wisdom teeth came out that I’m not in incredible pain. It’s an unbelievable feeling, not being in so much pain. I’m breathing deeper, smiling more. It’s as if the world faded out into gray for a while and has now bloomed into glorious (if wintery) color.

You can’t think straight when you’re in pain. You get about halfway through a thought — “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if — OUCH! Has it been four hours yet? I want to take another pill! What if I have an infection? What if my bottom jaw is falling off?” It’s hard to take it in stride as a normal feeling, since the very function of pain is to alert the body that something is wrong and needs attention. But if there’s nothing you can do, or nothing more you can do, you’ve got to just live with the pain until you heal.

I once taught a kid who had reduced pain perception. It wasn’t obvious at first - and he had no clue that his body was any different, of course - but then one day he ran headfirst into a brick wall. (Not the most coordinated child.) I ran to him, fearing that he had a concussion, and he just sort of blinked and looked up at me and said, “I just ran into a wall!”

I was nearly hysterical. “Rodney, doesn’t it hurt?”

He shrugged and said, “Yeah, I guess…” and was about to wander off to play until I grabbed him and made him sit down for a few minutes, until I could be sure that he didn’t have a head injury. It’s dangerous, not to be able to feel pain. Let’s say he really did have a concussion or injury, but didn’t feel it - he would have been in a great deal of danger, running around on the playground and not seeking relief or rest.

Another kid in the same class broke his leg on the playground a few months later. It was a freak accident - another child fell on top of him, and his thigh bone snapped. It shouldn’t have been a broken bone, but this child was so skinny and underweight that his bones weren’t strong enough, so the weight of a fellow 4 year old was enough to really hurt him. He wasn’t verbal enough to tell us that his bone was broken, but I knew something was very wrong by the way he was crying and not getting up. The school nurse was a substitute and didn’t know him, so she didn’t understand when I kept insisting that this wasn’t just normal crying for him. The pain he was in prompted him to act in a way that could get him help. Otherwise, we never would have known that he could have sustained such a bad injury from such a fleeting, seemingly innocuous little accident. I spent the next few days trying to convince the other child in the accident that he was not responsible for his classmate’s broken bone. Kids fall - what can you do? This year in my class I had a kid break his collarbone on a playdate while playing football. It wasn’t anyone’s “fault” - just a freak accident.

So, I’ve been trying to see my pain as useful. As a result of being in pain, I haven’t tried to overexert myself or eat foods that my mouth isn’t ready for. Unfortunately, I’ve also lost a lot of sleep and shed more than a few tears and worried a bit too much about whether everything’s “fine”. I quickly discovered that the prescription painkiller didn’t so much kill the pain as kill my conscious awareness of it - and I have been searching for the right combination of pain medicine all week. Finally, finally, I think I’ve figured it out. So I can go back to work tomorrow after my week of vacation (some vacation!) without being overly distracted or immobilized by pain.

I’m getting the stitches in my mouth out tomorrow afternoon. Anticipating that that’s probably going to hurt quite a bit. But definitely not as much as the actual surgery did!

I’d say, on a scale of 1 to 10, that I was an “8″ once the novocaine wore off (I didn’t have any general anesthesia - I was awake) and probably a 5 or 6 for most of the days following, not in the least because I was getting a lot of headaches to go along with my toothaches and gum aches and jaw aches. Now I’m down to about a 2. Feels great!