Table of Contents

From Survival Principle #2

From Survival Principle #3

Basics of Survival

Survival Principle #1:
Realize that when you
are confused, it’s
because it’s confusing

Survival Principle #2:
Be suspicious of
numbers and statistics

Survival Principle #3:
Assume that jargon is
used to replace actual
understanding and to
close discussion

Survival Principle #4
Reject instructional principles
that reduce the child to a
mindless robot

Survival Principle #5
Break away from adjusting the
child to the curriculum; adjust
the curriculum to the child

Survival Principle #6
Track progress

Survival Principle #7
Real solutions for Real
children

page

101

111

The Power of Grades is locked into the Power of Curriculum. Children who get A’s in school are not necessarily getting it. They may do very well on tests, including the big ones with big market value, like IQ tests, state standards tests or the SAT. On these tests the pay offs come from quick, well-practiced, encyclopedic facts. But in their dedication to repeating text book definitions, facts and formulas, students and their parents can be tricked into thinking that spouting memorized bits and pieces is the same as understanding.

When students get good grades in this kind of curriculum they are learning to be robots, the Stepford children who will be “good” followers and hopeless leaders. Instead of preparing children to be sovereign citizens in a democratic and changing world, much of the curriculum in our schools rehearses them for expedient conformity with established
goals. Our children are left with a disconnected set of facts and with fragmented, authority-dependent ways of thinking.

Children with school problems might be the better learners. To their credit, some of these “poor” learners cannot adjust to the confusion created by fragmentation. They cannot accept repetition in place of understanding or compliance as a substitute for the rewards of seeing connections and meeting meaningful challenges. Some of these perfectly competent learners feel dumb because they are not able to find rewards within the fragmentation of the curriculum and the way it is tested.

Survival Principle #3:
ASSUME that jargon is used to replace actual understanding and to close discussion

The big words used to describe your child’s thinking and behavior can be more than just confusing. They can smuggle in wrong ideas or assumptions you wouldn’t accept. Oddly, often the people who use them aren’t aware that this can happen. It is important that labels are not substituted for explanations.

Survival Principle #1 tells you to expect confusion.

Survival Principle #2 tells you to expect numbers to hide and sometimes create confusion.

Survival Principle #3 tells you to beware of technical words often used instead of true explanations by people who actually lack real explanations.

These words are usually used as a way of telling parents that the
problem is with their child. They’re usually used as if they are the last word, with the idea that now that an “explanation” has been given, discussion closed. Inevitably, these words become oppressive and actually begin to mean their opposite.

EXCEPRT: ATTENTION

Attention is a balance among a number of things. Most simply, it is a balance between sampling broadly and focussing narrowly. Both are necessary for adaptive, healthy functioning. A person or any animal would need to scan the environment to get the general lay of the land and to decide where closer attention should be given. If something is important, threatening, novel or otherwise distinctive, it commands close, focal attention. When the animal is done with that, it’s on to the the next scan-focus cycle.

Attention is connected to fight-flight biochemistry and reactions. As fear or anxiety increases, focus narrows, selected detail comes to the foreground at the expense of other information and at the expense of a broader sense of the situation as a whole. In this way, anxiety comes with fragmentation and in its extreme state, rigidity. Anxiety can come with retreat into ritualistic rule following. When in danger, this could be highly functional; no time to lose in thinking things through. As anxiety subsides, the scan-focus balance would reset such that detail might fade into the background again, leaving an opportunity to perform a broader scan of the world; noticing the next thing that would require more focus, and so on.

The kind of focal attention teachers usually expect in school is the fearful, anxious kind that does indeed narrow attention but at the same time promotes rigidity at the expense of fluid, creative, flexible thought andexpression. Stimulant medication pushes children in the direction of the narrow, anxious, sometimes rigid attention that is rewarded in school.

In many ways, the children who resist this kind of attention are the healthiest. They want understanding not rigid, programmed, robotic responses. They want time to think independent thoughts. They resist anxious mimicking of what the teacher has told or shown them.

No animal could survive if he had only a narrow focus of attention. No human can think clearly or be healthy under conditions of rigid, tight, anxiety-driven attention. Uninterrupted narrow focus certainly would leave little if any room for creative problem solving, self expression or discovery.

There are some examples from math in earlier chapters but narrow attention from which children might justifiably want to escape is called for throughout the school day.

EXCERPT: STRATEGIES****MATH

This is not just an academic issue. When schools come from the point of view that brain’s inject organization into the world, then they teach brains how to use “strategies” to “construct” that organization. In reality, no strategies are needed since organization is already in the world and is free for the taking. Shades of understanding vs working memory?

Here’s how this plays out at the school meeting. The school IEP team says that a student needs more practice learning decimal computations. In reality, the student does not understand decimal notation at all or what the computations actually do to the numbers. She doesn’t know how much more you would need to make 1 if you started with .3. She could easily tell that, if you need 10 parts and you have 3 to start with, you would need 7 more. She didn’t need practice, she needed the connection between wholes, parts, size and amounts as they are naturally in the world and the symbols we use to stand for them.

The difference in instruction is huge. You teach disembodied definitions and strategies and rely on effortful working memory and forced attention OR you help students to take in natural relationships in natural ways.

EXCERPT: READING

If she does not appreciate the phonological structure of speech, it will be that much harder for her to learn orthographic structure. How will you know that the group of letters in igh together stands for the long i sound if you can’t single out the long i sound from the stream of sounds that make up a syllable?
As your child learns to read the most critical thing she must do is line up orthographic patterns with speech sounds. The key orthographic patterns are found in the RIME.
Find out about the rime and more about reading skill in Find Find the Vawol (Cherkes-Julkowski, Apache Junction, AZ: Surviving Education Guides).