“All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.” Rainer Maria Rilke
I was called a “fidget” and a “wigglewump” when I was growing up. I was told to sit still and pay attention. I had no problem paying attention to library books I picked out, happily swinging my legs from a chair as I read for hours. But sitting in school or worship services made my whole body feel like a coiled spring. I behaved, but it took a lot of effort. This made it even harder to understand what the adult at the front of the room was droning on about. Long car rides were even worse. I thought everyone felt headachy and nauseated while traveling, so it didn’t occur to me to report this to a grown-up. All I knew is that I wanted the car to stop moving so I could be the one to move.
We aren’t a still sort of species. Even in utero our bodies receive changing stimuli constantly. Our mother’s movements rock us in a watery world. Her footsteps send thud-like vibrations through us. Her heartbeat, along with our far faster fetal heartbeat, sets up a percussive syncopation. Her breath, speech, and digestion, plus sounds from outside her body add to this ever-changing symphony. Sound pairs with sensation, over and over, throughout prenatal development linking movement with meaning.
Within seconds of being born, a newborn will reflexively grasp a finger and turn her head to find a nipple. Within a few months she will teach herself to grab objects, roll over, and stand with support. These aren’t just motor skills; each movement builds ever more complex neural pathways in her growing brain. As Hungarian pediatrician Emmi Pikler advocated back in 1946, babies do best when given freedom of movement. In an article titled “Exercise Affects Baby Brains,” Janet Lansbury writes,
[Dr. Pikler] “studied the contrasts between the children who had been taught, propped, positioned and restricted in devices like infant seats, walkers and bouncers, and those who were given freedom of movement and allowed to develop at their own rate. Dr. Pikler found that the natural approach not only affected the quality of motor skills, but also influenced ‘all other areas of growth – social, emotional, cognitive – and even character development.’ Pikler babies, as the children in her practice were known, could be easily distinguished at the parks in Budapest, because they were ‘poised and graceful, alert and friendly, and so confidently independent.’”
Babies expend effort comparable to world-class athletes as they master new abilities. Child development expert Karen Adolph describes, in a journal article titled “What Changes in Infant Walking and Why,” what it takes the average baby to teach himself to walk.
“Walking infants practice keeping balance in upright stance and locomotion for more than 6 accumulated hours per day. They average between 500 and 1,500 walking steps per hour so that by the end of each day, they may have taken 9,000 walking steps and traveled the length of 29 football fields…. Albeit intense, infants’ practice regimen is not like an enforced march of massed practice where walking experiences are concentrated into continuous time blocks. If practice were massed, the sheer amounts of daily practice would be even more astounding (the average cadence for a 14-month-old toddler walking over the laboratory floor, for example, is 190 steps per minute). Rather, infants’ walking experience is distributed throughout their waking day, with short periods of walking separated by longer rest periods where infants stand still or play….”
It seems exhausting, yet this is what natural learning looks like. The same extraordinary level of motivation continues as the growing child teaches herself, on her own timetable and in ways best for her, a whole spectrum of abilities through direct, real world experiences. That is the way we humans learn best.
Our brains evolved to help us confront and solve problems. We can’t separate learning from the rest of the body, or from the context of an individual life, yet that’s how we expect education to work. Despite the most caring and dedicated staff, the very structure of most schools is top-down, so lessons address students’ brains (mostly left brain) rather than their whole beings. This approach rewards only those students who can most easily narrow their full-body need to DO. Replacing traditional instruction with technology doesn’t make school any more physically engaging.
Learning sticks when our emotions and senses are active because, as psychologist Louis Cozolino explains, “visual, semantic, sensory, motor, and emotional neural networks all contain their own memory systems.”
For example, studies show we don’t master a foreign language best by studying grammar and memorizing words, nor by speaking it before we feel comfortable. Instead we learn most easily and effectively when we are interested in the message it conveys, like trying to decipher music lyrics or follow an instructional video in a different language. We learn better when we have IRL experiences to pair it with, like ethnic food eaten with native language speakers. And we learn better when our bodies are active, even more easily remembering foreign words when we learn them while making gestures.
Research shows that movement, even as small as hand movement, helps people unfamiliar with difficult subjects like organic chemistry understand and remember complex topics.
We learn best, from basic skills to academic subjects, when mind, body, and emotions are involved. Such experiences help to inform later understanding. Consider an introductory physics lesson aimed only at the brain. A student is presented with a concept, perhaps on the page or by online tutorial or lecture, and then must complete comprehension questions for a grade. Contrast this with learning that’s encoded through movement, as happens in play. That same student may already have discovered the principle herself, perhaps learning about centripetal force and acceleration by whirling a bucket of water in a full circle fast enough to keep the water contained or by discovering how fast a toy car needs to go around an upside down loop without falling. These play experiences make her much more likely to retain and build on what she has learned, and more likely to understand principles when they are more formally presented.
This kind of learning sticks with us. That’s what neurologist Frank Wilson noticed when he asked people at the top of their careers about their early experiences. Musicians, mathematicians, surgeons, engineers, artists, and architects all talked about formative hands-on experiences in childhood that were entirely unrelated to formal instruction. What they gained through play and doing chores became so integral to their later success that they recalled it many decades afterwards.
The problem is, kids are immobile for much of the school day. They sit through the journey to and from school. They sit doing homework. And many times they sit through what free time they have left. The average child spends just 4-7 minutes in outdoor free-play every day. All this sitting doesn’t help to develop the vestibular system. Muscle sensors (proprioceptors) react to input from this system to tell the body where it is in space. When the vestibular system isn’t developing properly a child may seem uncoordinated, resist trying new things, be afraid of crowds, bump into people, seem inattentive, have difficulty controlling impulses, or have trouble with reading and other academics.
To develop a strong vestibular system, kids need plenty of time every day to run, jump, climb, balance on uneven surfaces, and otherwise happily move their bodies in all directions. This is important. A developed vestibular sense supports spatial awareness, focus, self-regulation, and other abilities necessary for learning. And sports practice or gym class a few times a week isn’t enough, nor do adult-run programs offer the full-body freedom necessary for this development.
Pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom writes in her book Balanced and Barefoot,
“As adults, we may feel that we always know what is best for our children. A child’s neurological system begs to differ. Children with healthy neurological systems naturally seek out the sensory input they need on their own. They determine how much, how fast, and how high works for them at any given time. They do this without even thinking about it. If they are spinning in circles, it is because they need to. If they are jumping off a rock over and over, it is because they are craving that sensory input. They are trying to organize their senses through practice and repetition.”
In an article titled “Why Children Fidget,” Ms. Hanscom writes about observing a fifth grade classroom near the end of their school day. She saw kids so desperate for movement that they were tilting their chairs, rocking their bodies, chewing on pencils, lightly smacking their heads. She tested the kids and found most had poor balance and core strength.
“In fact, we tested a few other classrooms and found that when compared to children from the early 1980s, only one out of twelve children had normal strength and balance. Only one! Oh my goodness,I thought to myself. These children need to move!
Children are going to class with bodies that are less prepared to learn than ever before. With sensory systems not quite working right, they are asked to sit and pay attention. Children naturally start fidgeting in order to get the movement their body so desperately needs and is not getting enough of to ‘turn their brain on.’ What happens when the children start fidgeting? We ask them to sit still and pay attention; therefore, their brain goes back to ‘sleep.’”
Research continues to indicate that movement is intrinsically linked to healthy development and learning in powerful ways.
Vigorous movement stimulates the birth of new neurons and is correlated with greater brain volume in the hippocampus, which plays a part in short and long-term memory.
Exercise boosts neurotransmitters necessary for attention, positive mood, and learning. It also produces proteins necessary for higher thought processes.
Studies show the sweet spot for kids is somewhere between 40 to 70 minutes of active movement a day for improved executive function, focus, and cognitive flexibility.
One study showed that after just two hours of playful activities like climbing trees, balancing on uneven surfaces, and navigating obstacles people temporarily increased their working memory capacity by 50 percent.
Overall, 60 years of research shows physical activity has overwhelmingly positive effects on kids’ mental health, cognitive abilities, and school achievement. The most fit kids are most likely to be the highest academic achievers.
Some kids can sit still and pay attention longer than others, but that’s not how we’re wired to learn best. In fact some educators point to research saying that after 20 minutes of inactivity, the neural communication networks in our brains function less effectively. And an analysis of nine studies indicate that the more time kids spend sitting, the more anxiety they are likely to experience.
Research shows kids actually fidget in order to better focus on complicated intellectual tasks. This is more noticeable in kids said to have ADHD, but it’s likely that foot-tapping and chair-scooting actually helps most kids store and process information. That’s why they are more likely to be restless working on math problems but relaxed while watching a movie or playing video games.
And several studies show that high levels of physical energy, a.k.a psychomotor overexcitability, is not only common but can be expected in highly intelligent children.
Some kids may grow out of the “fidget” and “wigglewump” stage, but I never did. I can’t even easily sit through a restaurant meal without stifling the urge to misbehave. My kids have blackmail-worthy stories about this. (Fortunately we can’t afford many restaurant meals.) Writing this essay required lots of breaks to walk the dogs, make a snack, do barn chores, talk with dear ones, and otherwise distract myself. If only today’s students were equally free to get out of their seats and move.
“The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.” ~e.e. cummings
One street over in the neighborhood where I grew up was a small pond where ducks congregated. The ducks lifted from the water with reluctant quacks when we showed up. Despite summer’s heat, the pond was always cool. Aquatic plants waved their greenish fronds just below the surface and the bottom was lined with a thick layer of muck. My sister, a budding naturalist, speculated that the muck was made up of decayed plant matter. When we waded in, our feet sunk into that thick layer of soft goo, a squishy delight for our toes.
It might occur to you that we were standing in duck poo. You would be right.
It smelled a bit when the water was stirred up, but that didn’t bother us. My sister and I would crouch near the edge watching insects. Water striders scurried on the surface. Each of their steps made a faint impression in the water as if they walked on gel. Beetles, ants, and the creatures my sister called by the fairytale name nymphs scampered through pondside plants. She liked to let insects climb up her arms. I was impressed, but too squeamish to copy her. Most magical of all were the dragonflies, their huge eyes looking back at us as they hovered on iridescent wings. This seemed like a separate world.
Eventually we had to return home. Our mother, a registered nurse who strictly adhered to standards like rigorous hand washing and early bedtimes, didn’t miss what we’d been up to. We came home spattered and stinky. But her only rule was that we strip off our clothes and scrub ourselves. She’d call from somewhere in the house, “be sure to use the nail brush!” She didn’t seem to mind that we’d walked a block away to play in a bacteria-infested pond as long as we scrubbed away all traces afterwards.
My mother was on to something.
In her book Balanced And Barefoot, pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom writes about teachers, parents, and medical professionals who are alarmed by ever-growing numbers of children who can’t sit still or pay attention; who have trouble with coordination, balance, or sensory processing; who are fearful, easily frustrated, or act aggressively. She explains that these problems can be connected to an overly contained childhood, one that has become the norm. Restrictions begin in the earliest months, when babies spend hours each day strapped into strollers, car seats, and baby seats. As they get older their movements are curbed by passive indoor activities. Even outdoors, kids are often limited to low-challenge play areas or to prescribed movement in adult-structured programs.
The push for academics, often starting in preschool, strips even more time from active free play, while elementary schools are increasingly limiting or eliminating recess. This is profoundly counterproductive. Reading readiness is strongly influenced by physical movement. So is grasping and using mathematical concepts.
It helps to understand just how closely movement and sensory input is related to development. In the first year of a baby’s life, her brain doubles in size. It reaches 80 percent of its adult volume by age three. Babies are born with vast numbers of neuronal links in their brains and spines, primed to be shaped by what they encounter. Unused networks are not activated and disappear. This is what neuroscientists call “experience-dependent plasticity.” Early experiences rich in movement (plus the nurturance and emotional warmth that set the foundation for learning) activate a wider range of neural connections. This is nature’s wisdom at work, shaping a child’s brain through experience so they develop what they’ll need for the world they’re born into.
Your baby squirms and cries after a few minutes in the high chair. He can be placated with a new food or a spoon to bang on the tray, but only for a few minutes. He wants to get to work on crawling. Your toddler resists being put in her car seat and sometimes cries until she exhausts herself. She wants to run, climb, and play. They’re both responding to an inborn need to learn through movement.
Gill Connell and Cheryl McCarthy, authors ofA Moving Child is a Learning Child, clarify. They write that neural pathways developed in the first years of life,
“determine how a child thinks and learns, but more importantly, they will shape who she becomes… her passions and pursuits, triumphs and challenges, inner reflections, outer reactions, and outlook on life…all flowing through the neural network built by her earliest physical and sensory experiences.
With breathtaking simplicity, nature has created this move-to-learn process to be both dynamic and self-perpetuating, building the body and brain simultaneously. As such, the more a child moves, the more she stimulates her brain. The more the brain is stimulated, the more movement is required to go get more stimulation. In this way, nature gently coaxes the child to explore beyond her current boundaries toward her own curiosity to acquire new capabilities.”
Overall, today’s kids show decreasing core strength and flexibility compared to averages in the 1980’s.”The more we restrict children’s movement and separate children from nature,” Angela Hanscom explains, “the more sensory disorganization we see.” That’s why she advocates sensory-rich, movement-based outdoor free play. Chasing, rolling down slopes, climbing trees, playing with nature’s play-perfect loose parts like leaves and sticks — these and other experiences build spatial awareness, balance, fine motor skills, and bodily control.
Let’s hone in on one sensory-rich experience; going barefoot. Madeline Avci, an Australian pediatric occupational therapist, explains that walking on grass, stones, and sand develops body awareness, called proprioception. Nerve endings in the feet and toes promote the development of sensory pathways, building functional movement patterns while helping children move with a sense of their body in space. When we wear shoes, the quality of sensory information is diminished. A paper published in Podiatry Management details all sorts of ways shoes, including those with flexible soles, interfere with a child’s gait, development, and posture. Walking barefoot also promotes better biomechanics, a more natural gait, and less pressure on our feet. Bones in the feet are not fully ossified until the late teen years, so the more barefoot time possible, the more naturally the foot’s shape can develop. Of course few of us are raising our families in a beachside hut where walking barefoot makes sense year-round. But Katy Bowman, author of Move Your DNA, suggests that all of us try to walk on natural surfaces like sand, rocks, grass, or wood for 10 to 20 minutes a day whenever possible, and to go barefoot at home.
Neurobiologist Gerald Hüther notes that “the most important learning experiences come to us, essentially, by way of our bodies — which means that learning is always an experience of the whole body. At the same time, every learning experience involves emotions. We are only able to learn when the so-called emotional centers in the brain are activated. These centers release neuroplastic messenger substances enabling what has been learned to become anchored in the brain ….[via] emotional activation. The most enjoyable activation we know of is ‘enthusiasm.'”
It’s ridiculous that we need science to confirm the value of enthusiasm. This is the energy each child brings fresh to the world. What they’re able to explore and experience with the whole of themselves, magnified by the capacity for awe, remains with them.
Dr. Hüther gives an example,
“Children living in the Amazon forests learn 120 different shades of green and can name them all, using 120 different terms. Potential of that kind is either used in practice or is little used. Children here can at best distinguish light green, green, and dark green. How far a potential is actually used depends on how important it is .. in a given culture…The result is that what was once a possibility, this potential, …if not used, will just wither away.”
Enthusiasm goes a long way toward explaining why children and nature go together so well. Children are themselves magic — able to shape shift into a toad or hawk, to feel what it’s like to hop nearly hidden under leaves or to glide on the air’s invisible currents. While imagination is alive everywhere, it can’t help but flourish when surrounded by aliveness. The more natural an area, the more kids have a chance to have meaningful encounters with the life around them. In fact, kids play differently in a park with play structures compared to more natural areas like an overgrown field, a row of trees, or a small creek.
As Richard Louv details inLast Child in the Woods, kids confined to structured play areas have poorer balance and agility than those who play in unpaved areas. The social dynamic changes too. Older and physically larger kids dominate on playgrounds but in more natural areas, it’s the creative kids who act as leaders. In wild places, even an overgrown lot, kids are more likely to incorporate each other’s ideas into expressive make-believe scenarios using their dynamic surroundings—tall grasses become a savannah, tree roots become elf houses, pine cones become treasure. The essence of the child comes alive. Outdoor play in natural areas is more likely to include peers of differing ages and abilities. Regular outdoor experiences not only boost emotional health, memory, and problem solving, they also help children learn how to get along with each other.
Outdoor free play also inspires kids to challenge themselves. They are things to climb on and places to explore. In pursuit of fun, kids ignore minor annoyances like cold fingers, sharp briars, stumbles. Kids face and overcome fears. Such play is linked to greater social skill, resilience, and creativity.
And if you’re interested in academic test results, time outdoors has an impact there too. Here are a few encouraging studies.
Kids exposed to more nature had higher scores of working memory than kids who did not.
Simply going for a walk in a nature area, in any weather, can significantly improve memory and attention spans improved by 20 percent after people spent an hour interacting with nature.
If pre-college test results perk up your interest, the children most connected to nature are also most likely to score well in tests including the SAT.
We also know exposure to bacteria can be a good thing. Certain bacteria found in soil, Mycobacterium vaccae, have been found to boost the release of serotonin, a neurotransmitter linked to positive mood and enhanced learning.
Dirt may improve our health too. For example, children who grow up exposed to a greater range of soil microorganisms have been found, in some studies, to have a lower incidence of asthma. Heck, even common bacteria on our skin have been shown to cut down on rashes and reduce inflammation when we’re cut or bruised. A child’s exposure to dirt is part of the body’s education, microbiologist Mary Ruebush explains inWhy Dirt Is Good, “allowing his immune system to explore his environment.” (She adds a caveat, saying that the soil in some urban areas may be contaminated with heavy metals such as lead. That is indeed a wakeup cry. Soil is the structure we need to feed ourselves. When it’s poisoned, so is life.)
The importance of outdoor free play is getting a lot of attention these days. Playground designers, schools, and daycare programs are far more open to the benefits of outdoor free play with natural materials. It’s no surprise that children do better with natural sensory play, places for solitude, and opportunities for self-chosen challenge. This is a step in the right direction. A few steps farther and we’ll let kids back in nature herself to play in woodlands, fields, and beaches as well as back lots, mud puddles, and all the nature around us. It’s a step in the direction of wonder and delight, maybe even in the muck of a duck pond.
“What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out.” –John Holt
Miss Gribbon set up a new teaching prop at the front of our first grade classroom — three stick figures made of metal with round blank faces and oversized magnetic hands. Each figure was about the size of a toddler, although she referred to them as “men.” She said the first figure’s name was Ones. The next, to our right, she named Tens. The last in the row she named Hundreds. She added two bright red magnetic fingers to each figures’ hands. Then she announced that One’s fingers were worth two, Ten’s were worth 20, and Hundred’s were worth 200.
I could NOT understand how identical magnetic people could have fingers worth different amounts. The hundreds man wasn’t taller than the tens man or the ones man. Their fingers were the same size. So I watched carefully as she stood them up the next day, hoping to figure out what distinguished them. Nothing. The Ones man from yesterday might be today’s Hundreds man. Their value wasn’t intrinsic to who they were. I struggled mightily to understand how one man could be worth more than another. (Story of my political confusion, even now.)
Each time Miss Gribbon rearranged the characters’ fingers she asked a different student, “What number do you see?” If they got it wrong, she asked again in a louder voice before reluctantly providing the answer. To me, math lessons seemed very similar to playing an unfamiliar game with kids who owned the game. They’d always say, “You’ll figure out the rules as we play.” By the time I did, they always won.
We continue to advance in our comprehension almost entirely through hands-on experience. Math is implicit in play, music, art, dancing, make-believe, building and taking apart, cooking, and other everyday activities. Only after a child has a strong storehouse of direct experience, which includes the ability to visualize, can he or she readily grasp more abstract mathematical concepts. As Einstein said, “If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.”
Yet right around the time formal instruction starts, children increasingly report that they worry about and fear math. Math anxiety, even in first and second graders, disproportionally affects children who have the most working memory. These are the very children most likely to show the highest achievement in math. But stress can disrupt working memory and undermine performance. Otherwise successful children with high degrees of math anxiety fall about half a school year behind less anxious students. In a study of 154 young students, about half had medium to high math anxiety.
Early math anxiety can intensify, leading to increased math avoidance and lowered competence. Over 60 years of research show that positive attitudes toward math tend to deteriorate as students move through school. More than half the adult population in the U.S. is said to suffer from math anxiety, some with math avoidance so extreme that it has the potential to damage financial decisions and careers.
Is math instruction to blame?
Innovative math educator Maria Droujkova says, in an Atlantic article titled “5-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus,” that math instruction typically follows a hierarchical progression starting with counting, then addition and subtraction, then multiplication and division, onward to fractions, algebra, and so on. Unfortunately, she says, this approach has “… nothing to do with how people think, how children grow and learn, or how mathematics is built.” She and other math educators around the world say the standard curriculum that begins with arithmetic is actually more difficult for children than play-based activities related to more advanced fields of mathematics. As Dr.Droujkova writes, “Calculations kids are forced to do are often so developmentally inappropriate, the experience amounts to torture.”
That torture is compounded by the way math is taught. Extensive research demonstrates that kids readily understand math when they develop the ability to use numbers flexibly, what’s called a “number sense.” Number sense is fundamental to all higher-level mathematics. This does not develop through memorization but instead from relaxed, enjoyable exploratory work with math concepts. In fact, math experts repeatedly point out that math education standbys — flash cards, repetitive worksheets, and timed tests — are not only unhelpful but actually damaging. These common methods discourage number sense, setting young people off in the wrong direction. In fact doing math under pressure impairs the working memory students need to access what they already know. Pressure also leads to math anxiety. There’s no educational reason to use these tactics in the classroom or at home. Greater math ability has nothing to do with working quickly nor does quick recall of math facts relate to fluency with numbers.
Add to this the burden of grades and test scores. Students today deal with a heavy load of standardized tests across all major subjects, plus tests in math class as often as every few days. They quickly learn math has to do with performance, not with usefulness and certainly not with beauty or mystery.
As mathematics educator Jo Boaler writes in Mathematical Mindsets, it’s well known that grades and test scores damage motivation and result in limiting self-labels in high, middle, and low-achieving students. Research consistently shows that alternatives to grading are far more beneficial. One study compared the way teachers responded to math homework in sixth grade. Half the students were graded, the other half were given diagnostic comments without a grade. Students who got only comments learned twice as fast as the graded group, attitudes improved, and any achievement gap between male and female students disappeared.
Dr. Boaler writes about another study in which fifth and sixth grade students were assessed three different ways. Some students received only grades, some only comments, and some both grades and comments. The students who achieved at significantly higher levels were those who were given comments only. Those who got any grade at all, with or without comments, did poorly. This was true for students across the spectrum of ability. Further research found that students only needed to believe they were being graded to lose motivation and achieve less.
Studies continue to show that students given positive feedback and no grades are more successful as they continue through school. There’s a strong relationship between teachers’ assessment practices and students’ attitude about their own potential. Unfortunately teachers give less constructive feedback as students get older and students’ belief in their own chance of improving also declines steadily from upper elementary grades through high school and beyond. Even at the university level, teaching and testing has a tendency to undermine sense-making. Students are likely to limit themselves to rigid sets of rules and procedures while lacking the relational understanding to correctly apply or adapt those algorithms to the problem at hand.
What happens when students aren’t assessed?
Dr. Boaler followed teenagers in England who worked on open-ended math projects for three years. These students were not graded or tested, and only given information about their own learning, even though they faced national standardized tests at the end of that period. A few weeks before the test they were given practice exams to work through. Although they were largely unfamiliar with exam questions or timed conditions, when tested these students scored at a significantly higher level than students who had gone through standard math classes with frequent tests similar to the national exam questions.
What happens when math instruction is even more limited?
Back in 1929, pioneering educator Louis P. Benezet, superintendent of the Manchester, New Hampshire schools, wrote, “The whole subject of arithmetic could be postponed until the seventh year of school, and it could be mastered in two years’ study by any normal child.” He began an experiment. In five classrooms, children were exposed only to naturally occurring math like telling time and playing games, while in other classrooms children received typical math lessons.
At the end of the first year differences were already apparent between students exposed to these two different approaches. When children were asked the same mathematical story problem, the traditionally taught students grabbed at numbers but came up with few correct results, while the experimental students reasoned out correct answers eagerly, despite having minimal exposure to formal math. Based on these successes, the experiment expanded. By 1932, half of the third- to fifth-grade classes in the city operated under the experimental program. After several years, the experiment ended due to pressure from some principals. Children in the experimental classrooms went back to learning from a math book in the second half of sixth grade. All sixth-grade children in the district were tested and in the spring of that year all the classes tested equally. When the final tests were given at the end of the school year, one of the experimental groups led the city. In other words, those children exposed to traditional math curricula for only part of the sixth-grade year had mastered the same skills as those who had spent years on drills, times tables, and exams. Even more remarkably, the students in the experimental classrooms were from the most poverty-stricken neighborhoods where poor school performance was common. The Journal of the National Education Association published the last of Mr.Benezet’s articles in 1936, calling on educators to replace formal math instruction with naturally occurring math.
What happens when there’s no math instruction by trained educators?
Homeschooling and unschooling families around the world devote much less, if any, time to formal mathematics instruction. There are significant limitations to research of homeschooled and unschooled youth for a variety of reasons, including a self-selecting population, so findings are interesting but inconclusive.
Multiple studies indicate homeschooling offers significant academic advantages, regardless of the parent’s educational attainment. Those tested in the last two years of homeschooling, what would be a schooled student’s junior and senior years, statistically score in the 86th to 92nd percentile. The percentage of homeschooled students who complete college far exceeds the rate of public school students.
Studies show homeschoolers taking the SAT tend to score significantly above average in all areas except math where their scores are still above average. The most recent College Board stats show mean scores for all college-bound seniors were 497 in critical reading, 487 in writing, and 513 in mathematics. For the 13,549 homeschooled seniors who took the test that year, means scores were 567 in critical reading, 535 in writing, and 521 in mathematics.
It’s hard to wade through research comparing math achievement of homeschooled versus conventionally schooled young people because much of the research includes as “homeschooled” those students who are educated using district or state sponsored programs which provide conventional-style math instruction to be done at home, which largely replicates the problems of conventional classroom instruction.
Still, several informal surveys show disproportionate number of homeschool and unschool adults working in STEM careers. And it seems that a significant number of today’s high-achievers in technology, science, and math have emerged from the homeschooling community. Their numbers include:
Erik Demain — professor of theoretical computer science at MIT and named “one of the most brilliant scientists in America” by Popular Science
Ruth Elke Lawrence-Naimark — researcher in knot theory and algebraic topology,
Francis Collins — geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health, Samuel Chao Chung Ting — physicist and Nobel Prize recipient,
Phillip Streich — holder of numerous patents and co-founder of nanotechnology company making him a multimillionaire by the time he entered Harvard,
Arran Fernandez — youngest mathematician with sequences published in Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences,
Willard Boyle — physicist, co-inventor of charge-coupled device and Nobel Prize winner.
Alison Beth Miller — first American woman to win gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
What happens when there’s no math instruction other than what young people request?
Democratic schools exist at the opposite end of the spectrum from conventional schooling. Students are not segregated by age and each student has one vote, just as staff members do, to democratically run the community. All young people are trusted to choose their own activities and no classes are mandatory, making these schools a collectively managed and open setting for self-directed learning.
Psychologist Peter Gray surveyed graduates of one such school, Sudbury Valley School (SVS) in Framingham Massachusetts. He found that young people who were not mandated to follow curricula, take tests, and receive grades “…have gone on to good colleges and good jobs…They are taking responsible positions in business, music and art, science and technology, social services, skilled crafts, and academia.” Dr. Gray notes that employers are rarely concerned about a prospective employee’s grades in algebra. Instead the traits for career success are those that graduates say were fostered by their time at SVS, such as “…a strong sense of responsibility, an ability to take initiative and solve problems, a desire and ability to learn on the job, an ability to communicate effectively, and perhaps most of all, a high interest in and commitment to the field..”
And there’s this anecdote, shared by teacher Daniel Greenberg in his book Free At Last. A group of students at the Sudbury Valley School approached him saying they wanted to learn arithmetic. He tried to dissuade them, explaining that they’d need to meet regularly and do homework. The students agreed to do so. In the school library, Greenberg found a math book written in 1898 that was perfect in its simplicity. Memorization, exercises, and quizzes were not ordinarily part of the school day for these students, but they arrived on time, did their homework, and took part eagerly. Greenberg reflects, “In twenty weeks, after twenty contact hours, they had covered it all. Six year’s worth. Every one of them knew the material cold.” A week later he described what he regarded as a miracle to a friend, Alan White, who worked as a math specialist in public schools. White wasn’t surprised. He said, “…everyone knows that the subject matter itself isn’t that hard. What’s hard, virtually impossible, is beating it into the heads of youngsters who hate every step. The only way we have a ghost of a chance is to hammer away at the stuff bit by bit every day for years. Even then it does not work. Most of the sixth graders are mathematical illiterates. Give me a kid who wants to learn the stuff — well, twenty hours or so makes sense.”
These examples aren’t meant to be anti-teaching, they are meant to broaden our understanding about when instruction is most useful and effective. That happens less often than we’d think — when the learner seeks guidance, demonstration, resources, or help. Learning that’s sought out sticks with the learner. It promotes curiosity, persistence, passion, and deep inquiry — exactly what’s needed to dig into the fathomless depths of mathematics or any other pursuit.
Math as it’s used by the vast majority of people around the world is actually applied math. It’s directly related to how we work and play in our everyday lives. In other words it’s useful, captivating, and often fun.
Interestingly, people who rely on mental computation every day demonstrate the sort of adroitness that doesn’t fit into conventional models of math competence. In a New York Times article titled “Why Do Americans Stink at Math,” author Elizabeth Green (who defines the term “unschooled” as people who have little formal education) writes,
Observing workers at a Baltimore dairy factory in the ’80s, the psychologist Sylvia Scribner noted that even basic tasks required an extensive amount of math. For instance, many of the workers charged with loading quarts and gallons of milk into crates had no more than a sixth-grade education. But they were able to do math, in order to assemble their loads efficiently, that was “equivalent to shifting between different base systems of numbers.” Throughout these mental calculations, errors were “virtually nonexistent.” And yet when these workers were out sick and the dairy’s better-educated office workers filled in for them, productivity declined.
The unschooled may have been more capable of complex math than people who were specifically taught it, but in the context of school, they were stymied by math they already knew. Studies of children in Brazil, who helped support their families by roaming the streets selling roasted peanuts and coconuts, showed that the children routinely solved complex problems in their heads to calculate a bill or make change. When cognitive scientists presented the children with the very same problem, however, this time with pen and paper, they stumbled. A 12-year-old boy who accurately computed the price of four coconuts at 35 cruzeiros each was later given the problem on paper. Incorrectly using the multiplication method he was taught in school, he came up with the wrong answer. Similarly, when Scribner gave her dairy workers tests using the language of math class, their scores averaged around 64 percent. The cognitive-science research suggested a startling cause of Americans’ innumeracy: school.
And Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin explains in The Math Gene that we’re schooled to express math in formal terms, but that’s not necessary for most of us — no matter what careers we choose. People who rely on mental math in their everyday lives are shown to have an accuracy rate around 98 percent, yet when they’re challenged to do the same math symbolically (as in standardized tests) their performance is closer to 37 percent.
One of the most widely held misconceptions about mathematics is that a math problem has a unique correct answer…
Having earned my living as a mathematician for over 40 years, I can assure you that the belief is false. In addition to my university research, I have done mathematical work for the U. S. Intelligence Community, the U.S. Army, private defense contractors, and a number of for-profit companies. In not one of those projects was I paid to find ‘the right answer.’ No one thought for one moment that there could be such a thing.
So what is the origin of those false beliefs? It’s hardly a mystery. People form that misconception because of their experience at school. In school mathematics, students are only exposed to problems that
are well defined,
have a unique correct answer, and
whose answer can be obtained with a few lines of calculation.
How can we translate all these findings into math education?
We not only need to drop flashcards, timed tests, and rote worksheets. We need to emphasize math as meaningful, useful, and connected.
A. The most statistically significant predictors of long-term math achievement, according to a study that tracked children from age three to age 10, had very little to do with instruction. Instead the top factors were the mother’s own educational achievements and a high quality home learning environment. That sort of home environment included activities like being read to, going to the library, playing with numbers, painting and drawing, learning letters and numbers, singing and chanting rhymes. These positive effects were as significant for low-income children as they were for high income children. Children who attended highly effective preschools (but not moderately effective programs) also benefited. Understanding numbers as meaningful and fun is important from the earliest years.
B. Technology innovator Conrad Wolfram says we need to go beyond computation. He suggests these four steps:
Pose the right question about an issue
Change that real world scenario into a math formulation
Compute
Turn the math formulation back into a real world scenario to verify it
C. Barnard College president Sian Beilock president says math is best learned as storytelling and done so by incorporating the body, the way children naturally absorb real world math. As neuroscientists map the brain, they find humanity evolved skills that overlaid onto areas of the brain that control the body. Math doesn’t sink in when confined to the intellect. It is drawn in through the body. We see this in studies showing babies who are able to move and explore more freely learn more quickly. “Math, Dr. Beilock says, “is a very recent cultural invention.” The part of the brain used for numerical representation is related to finger motion, demonstrating exactly why children best learn by counting on their fingers. Hand movement all the way up to full body engagement, such as walking while thinking, are actually more valuable than speech in comprehending everything from early computation to abstract concepts in physics. Dr. Beilock also emphasizes the benefits of time in nature to refresh one’s attention, leading to greater focus and comprehension.
D. Dr. Droujkova adds to this by emphasizing richly social math experiences that are both complex (able to go in a variety of directions) and simple (open to immediate play). She says any branch of mathematics offers both complex and simple ways in. It is best, she explains, to keep from chaining kids into formal equations early on. There’s an informal level where kids play with ideas and notice patterns. Then comes a more formal level where kids can use abstract words, graphs, and formulas. But it’s best if a playful attitude is kept alive, because what mathematicians do at the highest level is play with abstract ideas.
Dr. Droujkova notes that the community she founded called Natural Math is essentially a “freedom movement.” She explains: “We work toward freedom at many levels — the free play of little kids, the agency of families and local groups in organizing math activities, the autonomy of artists and makers, and even liberty for us curriculum designers…. No single piece of mathematics is right for everyone. People are different, and people need to approach mathematics differently.” Although we’ve been schooled to believe that math must be taught in a structured way by professionals, Dr. Droujkova continues to establish lively and engaging community-based, open-learning math circles that can be led by any adult. She and her colleagues make their materials open under Creative Commons license and offer online hubs with courses and resources for parents, teachers and teenagers who want to lead local groups. (See naturalmath.com) As Dr. Droujkova says in a recent interview, “math circles are magic circles.”
School-like instruction has been around less than a fraction of one percent of the time we humans have been on earth. Yet humanity has thrived. That’s because we evolved as free range learners gaining mastery as we explore, play, emulate role models, challenge ourselves, make mistakes and try again. That’s how everyone learns to walk and talk. That’s how young people have become capable adults throughout history. And that’s how innovation happens in the arts, sciences, and technology. In the long view, school is the experiment.
For many it’s hard to see beyond the school mindset because most of us went to school. So when we think of education, we view school as the standard even if we simultaneously realize that many parts of that model (also found in daycare, preschool, kids’ clubs, sports, and enrichment programs) aren’t necessarily beneficial. Narrowing the innate way we learn can unintentionally narrow enthusiasm, creativity, persistence, and the desire to dive deeply into any pursuit. It can interfere with the full development of our abilities.
My first grade math lessons taught me to equate math with fear. I went on to get good grades in the subject, but by high school my math anxiety led me to give up hopes of working in a science field. Math misery doesn’t have to be imposed on the next generation.
It’s time to free ourselves from the assumption that math instruction is a painful necessity. Approaching math in ways that are disconnected from a child’s life subtracts the meaning and the joy. It multiplies fear. Data shows and experience proves that real learning flows from the learner’s consent and the learner’s interest. We can offer math as an enlivening, beautiful tool to the next generation as soon as we free ourselves from the limitations of the school mindset.
My last few minutes have been immersive and joyful (synonyms!). It began with this hurdy-gurdy video.
I clicked on it partly out of curiosity and partly to override the moment’s earworm. While it played I looked up how much a used hurdy-gurdy costs and where I might find hurdy-gurdy lessons. I imagined myself playing in a quiet part of a Renaissance faire in a long period dress I made myself, or maybe playing between the readings of tolerant poets. John Holt’s bookNever Too Latecame to mind. He wrote about learning to play the cello at age 40, putting it down, then taking it up again more seriously at 50. This would be good for me, I told myself, then immediately recalled other good-for-me schemes I’ve never hatched due to bare-bones frugality and my roller coaster-shaped motivation
A moment came to mind. It was in Cleveland’s downtown district and I was five years old. There on a sidewalk I saw what my grandmother told me was an organ grinder. The man played music by turning a crank on a clever device. He was wearing an old-fashioned vest and hat. Attached to him with a rope was a small monkey wearing a tiny version of the same vest, holding out a tiny hat for people’s coins. I was pretty sure I’d stepped into magic for real this time. My mother wouldn’t give me anything to put in its hat and quickly pulled us away from “that filthy animal.” I’d already watched long enough to see the man had a dour expression and the monkey’s eyes were sad. I asked a lot of questions about that monkey, until grown-ups got tired of answering. Then I thought many more questions silently.
This reminded me of a picture book I used to read to my kids, Perfect The Pig, where a darling flying pig is captured by a man who makes him perform. That book ends well, probably far better than that long-ago monkey’s fate. My mind inexorably shifted to the plight of the smart, intelligent creatures we confine in crates on massive pig farms so I did what I could for animals in my care by letting the dogs out.
I did so while singing them an impromptu version of Lennon’s Let It Be, which easily lent itself to new lines in a rendition most accurately titled, Let Us Pee. While waiting on the porch I listened to birds and wondered if we’d seen the last oriole, at least until next spring. I imagined the fortitude it takes to fly 1,000 or more miles and sighed for my lack of comparable tenacity. Still waiting for the dogs’ perambulations to end, I deadheaded some flowers wet with dew. Their dampness led me to consider how all the water on Earth has been here since the planet’s birth, meaning these drops of water have been dinosaur blood, ocean waves, rain, tears, and thunderstorms. This led me to wonder, as I occasionally do, about quantum entanglement. I’m fascinated by so much of what I don’t understand, which means just about everything seems fascinating to me. I dearly want to ask an expert if every particle isn’t already entangled with every other particle.
On the way back in with the dogs a spam call jingled my phone. I made myself a second cup of coffee, decaf thanks to cardiac issues. (Caffeinated sympathy welcome.) I told myself “This will be a day of accomplishment,” which is my usual 7 am delusion. I reviewed my wildly optimistic to-do list, fully aware I couldn’t possibly catch up with manuscripts to review, emails to answer, submissions to read, and classes to plan on top of non-work things like tending our vegetable gardens and giant hoop house verdant with plants I started under grow lights back in early April’s optimism. (I love to-do lists even if mine aren’t all that interesting compared to, say, DaVinci‘s.) I do not have time to fritter away, although I do fritter. Within a few minutes, my desktop had 11 tabs open.
This is a typical ten-minute span of my life. I was never in any danger of taking up the hurdy-gurdy.
I was told I had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) by the psychologist interviewing my then seven-year-old son quite some time ago. (It appears a third to a half of children with ADHD have at least one parent with it too). Although teachers and other authorities treated his diagnosis as a problem, I explained to my son his was a different way of being, explaining that humanity has always benefitted from the gifts now labeled a “deficit.”
In deep history, our species thrived, in part, because some people in their tribes were drawn to closely observing/predicting patterns— in weather and environment, plant and animal behavior, signs of conflict in the group –people uniquely attentive to detail yet attuned to the bigger picture. The “wanderlust gene” drd4/7r is associated with ADHD and, in our long human history, may have driven cultural change as this subset of people were drawn to new ideas, different solutions, and new areas to explore. This gene regulates traits such as motivation, thrill-seeking, and risky behavior. It’s also related to a longer lifespan.
As reported in Scientific American, forty-plus years of research have identified:
22 reoccurring personality traits of creative people. This included 16 “positive” traits (e.g., independent, risk-taking, high energy, curiosity, humor, artistic, emotional) and 6 “negative” traits (e.g., impulsive, hyperactive, argumentative). In her own review of the creativity literature, Bonnie Cramond found that many of these same traits overlap to a substantial degree with behavioral descriptions of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD)– including higher levels of spontaneous idea generation, mind wandering, daydreaming, sensation seeking, energy, and impulsivity.
Research since then has supported the notion that people with ADHD characteristics are more likely to reach higher levels of creative thought and achievement than people without these characteristics… Recent research by Darya Zabelina and colleagues have found that real-life creative achievement is associated with the ability to broaden attention and have a “leaky” mental filter– something in which people with ADHD excel.
Recent work in cognitive neuroscience also suggests a connection between ADHD and creativity… Both creative thinkers and people with ADHD show difficulty suppressing brain activity coming from the “Imagination Network“
Yet we’ve pathologized this way of being, largely because it doesn’t fit as well in the narrow model of school or workplace. The very things we define as problems are instead vital aspects of human diversity
I thought of my own probable diagnosis as little more than a funny way to explain my messy desk and tendency to take on too many project. The few times I read about adult ADHD or clicked online “do you have ADHD?” self-tests, I didn’t fit into many of their problem behavior lists. I’ve made the bed every morning since I was very young. Other than my desk, my home is pretty neat. I put laundry away and make regular healthy meals and water my plants on a schedule. I assumed I didn’t have it after all. Then, a few years ago, a doctor confirmed I indeed had ADHD– the inattention type. “I can recognize it,” she said, “almost immediately. There’s a different energy in the room, a brightness, not to mention how you bring in so many aspects of a topic.” I liked having this called “a brightness.” (I have never before or since been affirmed for bringing in so many aspects of a topic.)
I recently learned that ADHD is related to my laughable clumsiness. I’ve lived in the same place for 24 years yet still stub my toes on furniture, catch my sleeves on door handles, knock books on the floor. I have so many stories of my clumsiness that my memoir, if I write one, should include the word “awkward” in the title. ADHD is related to my spatial reasoning issues, which explains why I try my darnest yet still can’t reliably transfer leftovers to an appropriately sized container and has to do with why I so easily get lost.
ADHD (and introversion) likely have to do with why I’m too jazzed up to sleep after even the mildest social event. It probably explains how energized I am by conversations, brainstorming, reading, and teaching. These are flow states for me. I focus relentlessly when reading and, when I’m lucky, writing. This isn’t well-regulated attention, but differently-regulated attention. I was the kid who read so intently she often didn’t notice the class had moved from free-reading time to math. I’m the adult who missed a connecting flight because of a good book.
I don’t have the high energy characteristic of the “hyperactive” part of this diagnosis, even though my mother called me a “wigglewump” when I was a child and my kindie report card gave me all smiles except one no-smile for “sits still.” These last few years of Skype calls and Zoom meetings have truly outed me. Now I’m forced to see myself as others see me. I itch, I shift, I look away, I drink water, I make more dramatic facial expressions than those who more calmly inhabit their virtual squares. I work hard to keep myself still. What helps me do that is movement no one can see —a foot rotating in a figure eight under the desk, lifting my legs from the chair, tightening and releasing my muscles — all to keep me present. That said, I have no trouble teaching via Zoom, especially teaching memoir writing. I can focus all day without a problem because I find people and their stories endlessly fascinating.
Emotional dysregulation can be a part of ADHD. I don’t suffer from rages or meltdowns, but whew, I’ve struggled my whole life to manage how fully my body floods with emotion while those around me seem fine. Girls and women with ADHD often mask by teaching themselves to downplay their emotions as well as minimize their movements to more acceptable ones—they chew gum, fuss with their hair, twist a ring, change posture—while boys and men are less inhibited, move more openly, and express (at least negative) emotion more freely.
I’ve been trying to fix these aspects of myself for decades. I’ve had dozens of articles published about mindfulness and adopted (then dropped) all sorts of practices to help me slow down my busy mind. I do inhabit my moments, often get immersed in my moments, but it’s a comfort to know that my skittering mind isn’t something in need of repair. It is the way I’m made. Non-linear attention lets me see all sorts of interrelationships between disparate ideas. This can’t help but shows me paradoxes and patterns that help me generate new approaches. The drawback is this doesn’t lead to clear path forward and it can really antagonize those firmly in the doing-things-the-way-they’ve-always-been-done camp. It probably explains my weird sense of humor. It’s also why I have started dozens of writing projects that, with some sustained focus, could be finished – yet instead my focus drifts to ever-newer projects.
I can only speak for myself, but all the charts, apps, and other attention hacks don’t help me. Instead they handcuff me to the stress-inducing norms of a commodified culture, where productivity and not character are the measure of a life. My son’s ADHD, by the way, didn’t impair his learning in any way once we took him out of school. In fact, it likely enhanced it.
There are other issues associated with ADHD including recklessness and addiction, but I wonder how much of this is the result of schools and workplaces poorly designed for anyone but some mythical standard person. Those who fit in, who are able to mirror back preferences held by those in charge, are “normal” while those of us who are different are expected to deal with our “disorder” or “deficit” by fixing ourselves. Yet, diversity is a bedrock of compassionate, innovative communities. All living beings on this planet demonstrate that biodiversity is essential for life to survive and flourish. Australian sociologist Judy Singer, who describes herself as one of the many women in her family somewhere on the autism spectrum, was first to call this neurodivergence — a term that beautifully acknowledges there are many different, necessary, and valid ways of being.
Salif Mahamane explains it well in this 13 minute TED talk, a talk I adore but had to watch in increments because, well, attention span.
Many evenings I look up from my spot on the couch where I’m reading, comforted by the music of snoring dogs around me, only to notice my husband staring at the opposite wall. I immediately feel guilty for ignoring him. So I put my book down and ask what he’s thinking. “Nothing,” he says, “just relaxing.” I’ve learned he means this and nothing more. Being me, I’ve wondered if he’s actually upset about something I said. Or if he’s sitting there in regret, wondering where he might be now if he’d just made a different choice? Or if he’s imagining something he plans to build or fix or do? Or if he effortlessly enters the Zen state I experience in briefs chunks when I meditate? What is he actually doing? I easily travel all sorts of mental loops rather than believe he’s really not thinking? Maybe he’s…. normal. I can’t imagine.
What society seems to favor in young people — obedience, popularity, good school behavior, robust mental health, plus good grades and test scores — doesn’t necessarily build on their inborn strengths. In fact the very things we define as problems are vital aspects of human diversity. Suppressing them hinders a young person’s full development into who they are.
Here’s some of the science behind kids who go their own way.
image: youtube
Eleven-year-old Bill was defiant and got into heated shouting matches with his parents. By the time he was 12 years old, things had gotten so bad he was in counseling for his behavior. He told his counselor, “I’m at war with my parents over who is in control.”
Plenty of us broke the rules growing up and didn’t go on to earn billions as Bill Gates did, but there may be something to defiance. In 2008, researchers got in touch with nearly 750 participants from a 1968 study. In the original study these participants had been sixth graders who’d had their intelligence, attitudes, and behavior assessed. Now the participants were in their 50’s. The researchers looked for personality traits correlated with success. They controlled for IQ, household income, level of education, and other factors. They found one particular childhood characteristic predictive of those who went on to become high achievers in adulthood — rule-breaking and defiance of parental authority.
Other studies amplify these findings, showing that teens who were truant from school, who cheated, shoplifted, or displayed other anti-social behaviors (although not serious crimes) were more likely to go on to found their own companies.
We don’t know for sure why there’s such a strong correlation between youthful defiance and adult success, but it we do know traits that make strong-willed kids seem “difficult” — things like persistence, non-conformity, boldness, confidence, intense interests, and independence- — are the same traits that in adulthood characterize leaders in business, governance, athletics, and entertainment. Strong-willed kids want to find out for themselves rather than be told, and this not only helps them resist peer pressure, it can help them think beyond conventional thinking to new ways of doing things. Like Bill Gates.
image: YouTube
Stefani wasn’t popular. According to the book Doable, she was teased, called “ugly” and “weird,” and could barely face going to school. Stefani was so desperate to transform herself from a “voluptuous little Italian girl” to a “skinny little ballerina” that she became bulimic in high school, stopping only when her vocal chords started to become damaged.
Lady Gaga is now one of the best-selling musicians of all time. Unpopularity doesn’t mean we’re likely to top the charts in 20 countries, but popular kids with loads of friends aren’t actually happier than those with just a single really close friend. Kids with larger, less intimate social networks worry, even obsess about their status, influence, and power. Instead of having close relationships, they often have many people to manage. Popularity, especially in girls’ high pressure online lives, can feel more like managing one’s self-image than being truly known to one’s friends. Studies indicate kids with few, but close friends, even one best friend, grow up to have less depression, less anxiety, and higher self-worth.
How popularity may be gained is another concern. Research shows teens (especially young teens) often try to look and act more mature than they are in order to gain peer approval, what researchers call pseudomature behavior. This can include early use of drugs and alcohol, smoking, sex, and late partying. This often works short-term to boost their popularity. Long-term pseudomature behavior is linked to a greater likelihood of serious problems in adulthood including difficulties with close relationships, substance abuse issues, and criminal behavior. And overall, it turns out those who aren’t the “cool” kids in school are more likely to be personally and professionally competent as adults.
image: Erik van Leeuwen
Michelle was a handful in grade school. “I could not sit down long enough to study and to learn,” she says. She was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD. Although she still struggled, she learned to work harder and work differently. Michelle Carter is now an Olympic champion holding the American record in women’s shot put.
Sally Shaywitz, co-director of the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity, says there’s a strong connection between dyslexia and success. Although fewer than 10 percent of the U.S. population is believed to have the disorder, a study found more than a third of entrepreneurs identified themselves as dyslexic. It’s thought struggling to get by in a reading world helps people develop skills like problem-solving and perseverance. It also gives them experience with failure early on, teaching them to take more calculated risks and see opportunities where others don’t.
Dyslexics may have other strengths as well. Dr. Gail Saltz, author of The Power of Different, explains in a CNN interview that there’s a good probability people with dyslexia are more likely to have an enhanced aptitude for visual-spatial relations. “It has to do with the wiring that makes it difficult for (a person) to read and do things in a very particular way. That same wiring permits a certain kind of ability in (a person’s) peripheral vision and processing and visual-spatial processing and pattern recognition.”
Many studies have found a link between dyslexia and creativity. Comparing scores on Torrance’s Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) between young students with dyslexia to those of normative TTCT samples indicated children with dyslexia were significantly better at generating many ideas and more original ideas.
Comparing scores on the WCR (widening, connecting and reorganizing) Creativity Test between middle school students with and without dyslexia showed students with dyslexia were better able to carry out unusual combinations of ideas. (What researchers strangely called “the peculiar cognitive functioning of people with learning disabilities.”)
And after years of seeing an association between dyslexia and remarkable artistic creativity, a school of art and design funded research to study the link. Admission to the school was extremely demanding, meaning student vocation choice relied on talent and not compensation for failure in conventional academics. Lead researcher Beverley Steffart found the student body intellectually at the top 10 percent of the population, yet three-quarters of students overall were found to have some form of dyslexia. In an interview with the Independent she said, “My research so far seems to show that there does seem to be a `trade- off’ between being able to see the world in this wonderfully vivid and three-dimensional way, and an inability to cope with the written word either through reading or writing.” “
Thomas G. West points out in his book In The Mind’s Eye that dyslexic people often have the gift of thinking in three dimensions, easily able to rotate an image in their minds or visualize every detail of a completed project. He write, “historically, some of the most original thinkers in fields ranging from physical science and mathematics to politics and poetry have relieved heavily on visual modes of thought. Some of these same thinkers, however, have shown evidence of a striking range of difficulties in their early schooling including problems with reading, speaking, spelling, calculation, and memory.” He notes such early learning difficulties plagued Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Auguste Rodin, Leonardo da Vinci, William James, William Butler Yeats, and many others. “Many of these individuals may have achieved success or even greatness not in spite of but because of their apparent disabilities. They may have been so much in touch with their visual-spatial, nonverbal, right-hemisphere modes of thought that they have had difficulty in doing orderly, sequential, verbal-mathematical, left-hemisphere tasks in a culture where left-hemisphere capabilities are so highly valued.”
image: Britannica.com
At 14, David was bored and reclusive. He spent most of his free time in his bedroom on the computer. His mother, a science teacher, didn’t push him to pay more attention to his classes at the Bronx High School of Science. Instead she suggested he drop out to homeschool so he could learn what he wanted to learn. After that, David didn’t pursue traditional academic subjects or go on to college. By the time he was 17 he was living alone in Tokyo, writing software, and providing tech help for a parenting blog.
As education reformer Alfie Kohn explains, “Research has repeatedly classified kids on the basis of whether they tend to be deep or shallow thinkers, and, for elementary, middle, and high school students, a positive correlation has been found between shallow thinking and how well kids do on standardized tests. So an individual student’s high test scores are not usually a good sign.”
Research also links higher grade point averages to less innovative or creative work overall. What’s being tested is has so little to do with the adaptable, creative, critical thinking necessary for today’s world that employers like Google, Apple, IBM, Bank of America don’t emphasize grades, test scores, even college degrees the most important criteria in the hiring process. Actually, studies show that high test scores in school don’t necessarily predict any of several hundred measures of adult maturity and competence. Increasing test scores, however, were found to be directly related to interpersonal immaturity.
We’ve known this for a long time. Back in 1985, the research seeking to link academic success with later success was examined. It was appropriated titled, “Do grades and tests predict adult accomplishment?” The conclusion? Not really. Grades and test scores only do a good job of forecasting a student’s future grades and scores. They do not necessarily correlate with later accomplishment in such areas as social leadership, the arts, or sciences. And they are not good predictors of success in career advancement, handling real life problems, or maintaining positive relationships.
That’s true in other parts of the world as well. Students in China who achieve the highest scores on college entrance exams have been found to achieve less in life after school than those who scored lower. All this test pressure, to decrease a child’s chances of success!
image: Britannica.com
Another boy named David struggled with anxiety and compulsions. His repertoire of tics included rocking, counting his steps, and hitting himself on the head. Teachers were particularly frustrated by his urge to lick light switches. David was also witty and a close observer of people. He dropped out of college, did odd jobs, and dabbled in art throughout his 20’s, finally finishing an art degree in his early 30’s. When he was invited to read one of his humorous essays on NPR, David Sedaris’ career took off. He’s now the author of nine bestselling books and his speaking tours sell out each time he travels.
In an article titled “Misdiagnosis of the Gifted,” Lynne Azpeitia and Mary Rocamora explain that gifted, talented, and creative people “… exhibit greater intensity and increased levels of emotional, imaginational, intellectual, sensual and psychomotor excitability and that this is a normal pattern of development.” These attributes, however, are often misunderstood and mislabeled by teachers, parents, and therapists as mental health disorders. They may try all sorts of interventions in hopes of normalizing what are essentially symptoms of an exceptional individual.
As Ms. Azpeitia and Ms. Rocamora go on to explain, “For the gifted, inner conflict is a developmental rather than a degenerative sign, because it drives the gifted person forward to replace current ways of thinking and being with those of higher level development. This type of positive disintegration is characterized by an intensified inner tension between what one is and what one could be. This dynamic tension is what fuels the creative person’s complex inner life and provides the impetus for growth and development.”
All sorts of studies have found links between creativity and mood disorders like anxiety, depression, and compulsions. One such study followed participants in the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop. For ten years researchers tracked 30 participants in the program along with 30 people matched in age and IQ who didn’t work in creative fields. Close to 30 percent of the control group reported some form of mental illness. In contrast, 80 percent of the writers suffered from some form of mental illness.
According to neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, author of The Creating Brain, creative people are often skeptical of authority and prefer to make up their own minds. They are more drawn to questions than answers, and may find rituals help them cope with ambiguity. Feelings of alienation, fear, and depression are common and can themselves drive even greater creativity.
We talking about a different kind of genius.
Mathematician Eric Weinstein says conventional educational gets in the way of genius. Genius is associated with high-variance, and such variance is often found in people who are diagnosed with dyslexia, ADHD, and other differences. Dr. Weinstein says they aren’t suited to conventional educational systems, and explains,
“If you look at the learning disabled population they very often are the most intellectual, accomplished members of society… These are the individuals who are going to cure cancer. These are the people who are going to create new multi-billion dollar industries… How much genius is squandered by muting the strengths of these populations?”
Standardized expectations don’t allow us to see that our differences are a necessary part of who we are. That isn’t to minimize the difficulties people experience as they struggle to grow up and find their way, but it can help us to accept each person as a unique constellation of traits, abilities, and inclinations. Instead of emphasizing what we perceive as a young person’s weaknesses, we can build on their strengths. Instead of forcing them to “make up” for what we think they’re missing we can let them explore what enchants them. Instead of insisting on one narrow path to adult success we can throw the definition of success open to what each person makes of it.
“A child’s greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action and morality.” ~LevVygotsky
You probably know the old cliché about kids playing longer with the box a toy came in then the toy itself? It’s true. Child development experts in the UK asked 2,000 parents to compare their children’s interactions when they used devices, toys, and free play items like cardboard boxes. Almost twice as many parents said their children preferred playing with boxes than gadgets and 46 percent of children enjoyed playing with boxes instead of other toys and games.
Plain cardboard boxes are enticing because they’re free-form playthings. Beyond classic toys like wooden blocks, many best-selling toys don’t spark much open-ended fun. That’s because children play in less creative ways with toys based on popular movies or shows and play more passively with toys that make sounds, move, or otherwise perform. On the other hand, a wrapping paper tube can become nearly anything — a cane, magic wand, snake, lightsaber, boundary marker, whatever imagination chooses.
The natural world is full of playthings. Sand, sticks, dirt, water, pinecones, leaves, logs, flowers, and rocks have inspired children’s imaginations for ages.
So can pretty much anything kids are able to lift, drag, climb on, line up, dig with, join together, pour, dump out, take apart, swing around, push, or otherwise use as curiosity leads them. That is, as long as they have two key elements in their favor:
children are given permission
children are afforded the time.
Playground designers Vicki Stoecklin and Randy White write,
“The world once offered thousands of delights of free play to children. Children used to have access to the world at large, whether it was the sidewalks, streets, alleys, vacant lots and parks of the inner city or the fields, forests, streams and yards of suburbia and the rural countryside. Children could play, explore and interact with the natural world with little or no restriction or supervision.
Research on children’s preferences shows that if children had the design skills to do so, their creations would be completely different from the areas called playgrounds that most adults design for them. Outdoor spaces designed by children would not only be fully naturalized with plants, trees, flowers, water, dirt, sand, mud, animals and insects, but also would be rich with a wide variety of play opportunities of every imaginable type. If children could design their outdoor play spaces, they would be rich developmentally appropriate learning environments where children would want to stay all day.”
Back in 1971, architect Simon Nicholson wrote an article in Landscape Architect titled “How Not to Cheat Children: The Theory of Loose Parts.” He contended that most of us grow up, are educated, and live the rest of our lives in environments that stymie the imagination. He describes them as “static and impossible to play around with.” Instead of taking part in real planning and using real materials, “…children and adults and the community have been grossly cheated and the educational-cultural system makes sure that they hold the belief that this is ‘right.'”
For most of us the problem starts with tight restrictions in childhood.
As kids, we’re not allowed to build or make things except within certain tight parameters (following instructions for a craft project is permitted, upending chairs to make an obstacle course is not).
We can’t experiment with variables in unexpected ways (“Don’t make a mess!”).
And we have limited experiences with exploration and discovery (“Stay on the playground, no climbing the trees.”). This inhibits creativity and inventiveness early on.
Sand belongs in the sandbox?
Mr. Nicholson’s theory of loose parts is this,
“In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.” In other words, kids have nearly infinite ways to play when they have access to materials that can be used beyond a specific purpose.
Young children often use playthings as if they’re loose parts. A child combines a toy dinosaur, plastic teacup, dress-up scarf, and a few blocks into vivid and fully realized play on his own. Rules like keeping the tea cups with the tea set and putting away all the blocks before getting out another toy may keep the room neater but it also cuts down on much wider possibilities for play.
Kids (all of us, really) are more inventive and playful when our environments offer lots of variables. Open-ended materials let us transform simple materials into complex ideas. We play at what we’re most drawn to understand, right at the tantalizing edge of challenge, in ways unique to each of us. Recognizing this, more and more day care centers, museums, and playgrounds are starting to soften restrictions and offer loose parts for play.
At one day care center, children spend a large part of every day in a large fenced outdoor area, even when it’s raining. There’s no play structure with swings and slides, and few toys other than small wagons and plastic figures. There are, however, all sorts of loose parts for kids to use.
Two girl have made a bridge over a muddy area with a row of milk crates. They pound twigs with rocks until the wood crumbles into fibers, mix it with mud they scoop up with spoons, then arrange it on tree branch slices. A group of four-year-olds drag a few planks over some bicycle tires, running and jumping on the tippy boards in a game that seems to be about danger and rescue. Many kids are playing in little enclosures they’ve made from tarps hung over low tree branches or within a circle of logs. These child-made places are nearly empty some days, other days they’re brimming with activity. The most popular spot seems to be a large pile of dirt in a far corner, left there when a utility line had to be dug up and repaired. Some kids pour rivulets of water from the top of the pile, watching it snake down the uneven surface. Others put sticks in the dirt, arrange rocks on it, roll balls down it, and make ramps leading up to it. One little boy ran up and down the pile, but stopped when he saw he’d nearly stepped on another boy’s plastic figure. He crouched down next to him and they both buried, discovered, and reburied the toy a few times before flattening a path in the dirt with a measuring cup and letting the figure drive a measuring cup car on this de-facto road.
Here, children seem to require minimal involvement from their teachers. Instead they’re learning to play cooperatively — disputing and solving disputes, sorting and building, and mostly pretending. They’re also growing more physically adept while teaching themselves hands-on lessons about math and science. There’s no need for adults to keep loose parts organized, no need to step in and instruct, no need for a full day of pre-planned activities.
Similar to the center where Teacher Tom works. Visit his wise and instructive site for more.
Loose parts evoke more inventive play in older children as well. A two-year Australian study of primary school children found that adding objects like crates, buckets, pool noodles, and hay bales to their schoolyard caused sedentary behavior to drop by half while kids played with more enjoyment, imagination, and vigor.
Other studies have found that creativity and problem-solving soar when children use naturally occurring outdoor materials in their play, a contrast to adult-provided props so common in children’s lives. As researcher Dana Miller writes in an education journal article titled “The Seeds of Learning,”
“Our research presents compelling evidence that providing children with open-ended natural materials fosters imagination, creativity, and symbolic (abstract) thinking. When they are working with open-ended materials children get to decide what those materials will become, explore interesting ways to manipulate the materials, and how their use of those materials may change during a dramatic play scenario. Children get to search for just the right material or object to represent something in their minds, and through that use and the functions they assign to those materials, children display their brilliance.”
It’s easy to incorporate loose parts into children’s days. There’s no need to buy specialized loose parts and carefully sort them into containers after play. Along with some classic open-ended toys like blocks, construction sets, dress-up, and art supplies we can say yes to all sorts of other free-form materials. Many are probably already at hand.
And pay attention to temporary circumstances that crop up, giving kids in your family and in the neighborhood the opportunity to play around a tree that fell in a storm, a pile of dirt left after construction, or the rainfall that turned your neighborhood park into a puddle-rich haven for imagination.
One of my four beloved and gifted children (a son I won’t mention by name here) didn’t care much for proving himself in school. This is the boy who, at two years of age, maintained an interest in styles and brands of vacuums, even requesting a trip to Sears for his birthday to linger as long he liked in the vacuum section. He commonly asked me questions I didn’t have answers for, like “Do bees have intestines?” and “Do trees feel cold in winter?” When he was three he discovered that bones have Latin names. Then he pestered us to find out those names so he could memorize them. Before he was four he used grown-up tools to build things and take things apart.
He was unfailingly warm-hearted, eager to help, highly creative, and endlessly curious. Family, friends, even acquaintances told us his obvious giftedness meant he needed experts to guide his education.
Gifted kids may not show their abilities early
When Lewis Terman’s Genetic Studies of Genius followed nearly 1,500 young people with high IQ scores, he missed two future Nobel prize winners —William Shockley and Luis Alvarez, whose scores were too low to qualify for the study. In fact, many Nobel laureates did not show exceptional ability in childhood, and some actively disliked school.
Albert Einstein (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1921) did well in subjects he liked, but refused assignments that bored him, preferring to read and tinker with building sets. He wrote, “It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.”
George Bernard Shaw (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1925) attended only a few years of school. He wrote, “…there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison.”
Richard Feynman (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1965) was a late talker and by his third birthday he still hadn’t spoken a single word. He read avidly on his own but described his grammar school as stultifying, “an intellectual desert.”
John B. Gurdon (Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, 2012) labored on despite what his teacher wrote about him after his first semester of biology when he was 15 years old. “I believe Gurdon has ideas about becoming a scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous; if he can’t learn simple biological facts he would have no chance of doing the work of a specialist, and it would be a sheer waste of time, both on his part and of those who would have to teach him.”
My son’s kindergarten teacher seemed unwilling to acknowledge that he was already reading. The only child in his class whose reading ability was championed was a girl whose parents were both physicians. She was brought to the front of the class so she could read to her peers from picture books in a regular display of her precocity. My child, son of a blue collar father, was expected to complete rote pre-reading worksheets reinforcing words like “run” and “jump” along with the rest of the class.
A recent study confirms wealthy elementary students are much likelier to be placed in gifted programs than their lower-income counterparts, even when those students attend the same school and show the same levels of academic achievement.
We miss most gifted kids
Students are typically tested for giftedness when they’re nominated by teachers. For a variety of reasons, including unconscious racial and class bias plus a tendency to mistake compliance for potential, research shows teacher nominations miss over 60 percent of gifted kids. This is a shocking number.
Researchers concluded their 2016 article in Gifted Child Quarterly with a strongly worded statement.
“The authors of this article are on record in opposition to a model of gifted education which begins with an attempt to “identify the gifted,” because we believe that the usual conception of giftedness as a trait of individuals, with stable manifestation across academic domains, lifespan, and educational arrangements (cf., Peters et al., 2014), is not educationally useful though it is scientifically interesting.”
From kindergarten on, my son was not all that interested in school. He drifted along, easily able to ace tests but not all that interested in getting through assignments that didn’t interest him. Now I see that as integrity — like so many other young people who remain true to themselves within larger institutions. At the time I was told this was nothing but laziness.
Gifted kids may not easily fit in the school setting
They may be labeled as difficult, even medicated to make them easier to manage. Psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski’s research links five types of “overexcitability” to giftedness, each one hard to accommodate in a typical classroom setting.
Intellectual overexcitability: Relentless questions and a drive to go deep into concepts.
Imaginal overexcitability: Doodling, daydreaming, unable to let the imaginary world go.
Sensual overexcitability: Strong reactions to sound, texture, taste, touch, sights.
Psychomotor overexcitability: Rapid talking or fidgety behavior, urge to expend energy.
Emotional overexcitability: Sensitivity to and difficulty “getting over” emotions.
Research done by Ruth Karpinski indicates giftedness is also associated with mood and anxiety disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity,,autism, and physiological diseases that include autoimmune disease, environmental and food allergies, and asthma.
Studies consistently show that personality traits associated with creativity are hard to manage and therefore discouraged in the classroom. One study found the second grade children who scored highest on tests of creativity were also identified as those who were disciplined the most.
There are various estimates, but it’s thought that a quarter of gifted students are considered underachievers and as many as 18 percent drop out of high school.
Through the years my son got mostly A’s and B’s in school. Although teachers appreciated that he was polite and quiet, they told us he was “underachieving” and “poorly organized” and “wasn’t applying himself.” When we asked to have him tested for the district’s gifted program we were told he didn’t qualify because his teacher didn’t recommend him. The teacher said she didn’t recommend him because his work was unfinished or hastily done too often. It didn’t matter that he was reading high school level books in second grade (at home), it mattered that he followed the rules. When they finally agreed to pull him out of class for an IQ test his score came in at 118. Bright, not gifted. I knew that wasn’t an accurate assessment.
We rely too much on tests
The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, the longest-running longitudinal study of gifted kids, tracked 5,000 high-potential individuals — some for over 45 years. It demonstrated the pitfalls of standardized tests and talent searches because these approaches miss many gifted kids in poor and rural areas. It also found the types of tests used were too limited. Teens who excelled in spatial ability were among those most likely to go on to produce more patents and professional publications than their peers, meaning students who simply test well in mathematics or verbal ability but high in spatial ability have exceptional potential in STEM fields.
As Tom Clynes explains in “How to Raise A Genius: Lessons from a 45 year Study of Super-Smart Children,” published in the journal Nature, spatial ability is largely built, from infancy on, through hands-on exploration such as helping with varied tasks, playing with loose parts, using maps, doing puzzles, having questions answered by demonstration, using tools — building potential by doing. Not doing assignments on paper or screen.
So we took our son to Case Western Reserve University for more professional testing. He was there for hours. He was found to be profoundly gifted in all sorts of areas. Overall IQ score came in at 151.
Even with those results our award-winning school district said that he didn’t meet the performance standards necessary for the gifted program. Nonetheless, they grudgingly admitted him. This was a good program with highly qualified teachers, and it increased his enthusiasm somewhat, but he still didn’t see the point of schoolwork. Teachers still told us he was “underachieving” and “poorly organized” and “wasn’t applying himself.”
Gifted kids don’t fit mainstream assumptions
Andrew Solomon writes in Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identitythat being exceptional is actually the core of the human condition because difference is what unites us. He asks to what extent parents should push children to become what they believe is their best selves.
Dr. Solomon says raising exceptionally gifted children is complicated in an age and ability-segregated educational world. “You can damage prodigies by nurturing their talent at the expense of personal growth,” Solomon writes, “or by cultivating general development at the expense of the special skill that might have given them the deepest fulfillment.” This puts heavy pressure on parents and teachers. The education system is constructed for an average that doesn’t, in any one individual, exist. The farther from that norm, the more a child is a misfit. Dr. Solomon speculates that “being gifted and being disabled are surprisingly similar: isolating, mystifying, petrifying.”
To my lasting regret, we followed the advice of teachers and guidance counselors to take away things our son loved to do until his schoolwork was done. Over the next few years he was too often deprived of his delightfully nerdy interests in things like ham radio, model trains, and small engine repair because he just couldn’t get around to finishing a report. I know now that this was the exact wrong advice, that he was building knowledge and capabilities far more necessary for his whole being and far more relevant to a lasting acquisition of math, science, history, and language skills in the pursuit of his own interests than he ever could in by regurgitating facts on a test.
Giftedness appears to be, in large part, a developmental process
A decade and a half of the Human Genome Project failed to find genes that explain differences in intelligence. Hundreds of studies affirm what a Bowlby Centre report sums up as “virtually no genes explaining significant amounts of variance in traits.” Genetically, genetic variance explains less than five percent of traits such as intelligence or psychological differences. In other words, smarts are not “fixed” in the genes.
Families of gifted children tend to provide an enriching environment, have high expectations, be child-centered, and offer a great deal of independence but these characteristics don’t necessarily “cause” giftedness either.
The 30-plus year Fullerton Longitudinal Study took a different approach to understanding how giftedness evolves. Instead of following kids identified as gifted, it started in 1979 by following healthy one-year-old children, regularly assessing them until the age of 17. One interesting result was identifying a second form of giftedness —motivational. Motivationally gifted kids remain intrinsically drawn to challenging and novel tasks, show persistent curiosity and a drive toward mastery. The more conventional category, intellectually gifted kids, showed advanced capabilities early and performed at a higher level across various subject areas. But their intrinsic motivation didn’t necessarily survive through adolescence. Researchers said there was very little overlap. Intellectually gifted kids may persist in curiosity and achievement, but motivationally gifted kids were distinctly more likely to work harder, learn more, and succeed. Researchers urge educators to nurture motivation in all students. They remind teachers that students do best when given greater autonomy and freedom to question assumptions, when they’re exposed to complex and novel ideas, and when they can work toward mastery rather than be judged by testing.
Scott Barry Kaufman, in an article for The Atlantic titled “Schools Are Missing What Matters About Learning,” sums up this research by writing, “All in all, the Fullerton study is proof that giftedness is not something an individual is either born with or without—giftedness is clearly a developmental process. It’s also proof that giftedness can be caused by various factors. As the Gottfrieds write in their book Gifted IQ: Early Developmental Aspects, “giftedness is not a chance event … giftedness will blossom when children’s cognitive ability, motivation and enriched environments coexist and meld together to foster its growth.”
In fact, children’s belief in their own ability to be successful learners —particularly children who are considered at-risk in the school environment — may be a key factor in expanding intellectual mastery.
One day my 14-year-old son and I had an appointment with the guidance counselor. This man started in on a lecture about how smart kids made a school look good. He told my son most students had little choice, that they were essentially doomed to drive the brain equivalent of a Volkswagen, but my son was born with a Maserati race car brain. That did not have the desired impact on either of us. I sat there thinking this was an offensive analogy, my son later told me he was thinking this guy didn’t know much about race cars.
The appointment got worse.
The counselor, a man with a master’s degree and three decades of experience suddenly stood up, loomed over me, pulled back his fist and started to throw a punch at me. My son leaped out of his chair just as the punch halted a foot from my face. “See,” the counselor said, “you’d do anything to keep your mom from being hurt. But you’re hurting her every day by not doing your best.”
My son’s education wasn’t about me, or that school’s test scores, or what anyone wanted my him to prove. Although we’d been told from the time he was a toddler that we needed experts to deal with such a gifted child, the counselor’s heavy-handed manipulation helped me see, imperfectly, that experts had been getting it wrong. He’d been showing us all along how he learned best and the adults in his life did their very best to ignore that.
Full use of their gifts may be squelched
Even the most promising child prodigies rarely grow up to use their genius in profoundly creative ways. They excel early on at music, math, or science, but when that excellence is aimed at gaining approval of adults through extraordinary performances or test scores it may not nurture more creative, unconventional approaches. Original compositions don’t necessarily arise from Rachmaninoff played to perfection and new innovations don’t necessarily arise from impressive grasp of facts. Interestingly, when 500 top scientists were asked to identify the core traits of exemplary scientists, they put curiosity at the top. And we’ve known for a long time that high test scores don’t necessarily correlate with adult happiness, career success, good relationships, or mental and physical health.
My son is doing well as a young adult, which is all any mother can ask. But I would like to apologize to him for believing experts when all along he was right there showing us that he needed to learn in his own way.
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark. – Victor Hugo
Reading readiness and reading advancement has little or nothing to do with educational toys, apps, or enrichment programs. It has much more to do with what kids naturally like to do: move their bodies, enjoy stories, take part in conversation, and play freely.
Why?
Movement helps children develop sufficient brain-body maturation so they can successful decode abstract symbols into meaning. This includes complex neurological pathways as well as sufficient kinesthetic awareness and proprioceptive sense. (Find out what movements are essential in “Reading Readiness Has To Do With the Body.”)
Reading aloud every day, starting in babyhood, helps children associate reading with closeness and pleasure. Even a board book builds vocabulary, demonstrates left to right sequencing, and promotes comprehension. We can fold reading time into daily rituals like story time before naps and again after dinner. We can also show how much we value reading by letting kids see us reading our own books and magazines.
As kids get older it’s important to avoid offering rewards for reading or make reading a precondition for privileges. That’s because rewards, even for something kids already enjoy, significantly diminishes their own intrinsic motivation. Telling kids “20 minutes of reading before you can play games on the tablet”casts reading as an obligation, leading kids to devalue reading while enhancing the appeal of digital entertainment. (No wonder “eat your broccoli before you can have ice cream” makes broccoli the enemy and ice cream even more tempting.)
Stories stretch the mind and imagination. They help us, at any age, develop empathy and give us a larger context for our own lives. That’s not limited to the page. There’s extraordinary power in telling family stories. When we share tales of our doubts, misdeeds, and triumphs we’re not only building family cohesiveness, we’re also (according to science) helping kids grow up with greater confidence and self-control.
Daily conversations, including all those questions kids ask, helps them advance in reasoning and social skills while bringing us closer to each other. Let’s admit, a great deal of parent and child interaction isn’t true conversation so much as directives, complaints, and reminders (because, well, life) so it helps to create openings for conversation. Hold a space for kids to talk about what’s on their minds —- this often seems to happen on a walk, a drive, or at bedtime —- good times to avoid earbuds and screens. Make a practice of showing you’re listening by using eye contact and avoiding interruption. Talk about big issues and dilemmas in your lives, in your community, and in the news. Big topics have a way of stretching young minds.
Free play is an essential part of childhood. It also helps kids develop the skills necessary for reading well. It may look like fun, but in ways deeper and more vital than we can imagine play is a process of learning. We don’t have to engineer their play. Play is, and always has been, a universal language. Give kids as much time for free play as possible. But when you want to play along, here are a few ideas.
Play Cherries & Pits to get conversations started. Very simply, each person takes turns telling the best things (Cherries) about their day and the worst things (Pits) about their day.
Tell round robin stories. One person starts a story with a character and setting (“The elf woke up to find a large bird staring at him.”). The next person adds a few sentences before passing it along to the next person. This works well with as little as two people and nearly always becomes amusingly improbable.
Turn socks into puppets for impromptu plays. Puppeteers can hide behind a couch or sheet-covered table to perform, although socks in my house tend to talk on their way to the laundry.
Make story stones (pictures on stones or tiles) and grab a few to prompt a story idea. Other stones can be added as the story goes on.
Ask off-the-wall questions. “Would you rather be a monkey or a lion?” “What would it be like if people had wings?” “If we could go on an adventure together what would we do?”
Write messages to each other. Scratch a few words in the sand, leave a message in magnetic letters, designate a place (under each other’s bed pillows, perhaps) where secret notes can be left, share a question and answer journal (taking turns asking and answering any and all questions), and leave little love letters for kids to find.
Sing songs with familiar tunes and invented lyrics. Those tend to be somewhat scatological in my family, a favorite faux opera here has to do with encouraging dogs to go out and get their elimination duties over with….
Games
Play impromptu memory games. For example, take turns tapping out a beat, seeing if the next person can repeat it. Or try imitating movements in sequence (first person jumps, the other person jumps and adds clapping, first person jumps and claps and adds a turkey gobble, and so on). Or take turns memorizing a sequence of unrelated words to repeat back in two minutes or ten minutes or the next day. Be prepared to lose to your kids!
Encourage classic games like checkers, mancala, and chess. Games of all kinds typically help kids understand sequencing, grouping, and memory. No need to choose specifically educational games.
Set aside one evening a week as a family board game night or set up a kids’ game club with friends. (There are even great games for kids three and under like Roll & Play, First Orchard, and Feed the Woozle.)
Waiting in line with kids? Find objects that begin with each letter of the alphabet together, from avocados to zeros. Or play the classic Going on a Picnic game. Start by saying, “I’m going on a picnic and I’m bringing an aardvark (or any “A” word). The next person continues with “I’m going on a picnic and I’m bringing an aardvark and a basketball (or any word starting with a B) and so on. The last person to remember and repeat the list is the winner.
Encourage kids to draw maps of places they know well (your kitchen, your house, your street) and maps of imaginary places (alien planets, mythic kingdoms, ninja training camps). Draw a map of where you’ve hidden packed lunches for them to discover or the bedtime chapter book you’ll read.
Encourage children to set up obstacle courses. Indoors this may include three somersaults through the hall, chairs to wriggle under, a rope to hop over, and a bunk bed ladder to climb. Outdoors the course can be more ambitious.
Enjoy regular treasure hunts. First hide a prize or two. Then place clues through the house or yard. These can be simple words or sentences, symbols, or pictures. Each clue leads to the next. The prize doesn’t have to be a toy or candy (it could be a note saying “we’re going to the park!”) the fun is in the hunting. Encourage children to set up their up treasure hunts too.
Letterboxing combines walking, navigation, and solving riddles. Clues help seekers find “letterboxes” hidden outdoors. Seekers mark their logbooks with a rubber stamp found in this box, mark a logbook in the box with their own personal stamp, then leave the box for the next seeker. For more information and links to regional clues, check with organizations such as Letterboxing North America or Atlas Quest. Or use the guidebook, It’s a Treasure Hunt! Geocaching & Letterboxing.
Try orienteering. This sport combines navigation, map reading, and decision-making. Participants walk, run, bike, or ski using a map and compass to choose the best route on or off the trail. Consult Orienteering Made Simple And Gps Technology: An Instructional Handbookby Nancy Kelly.
Take turns playing Line Zombie. Draw a line on paper with a pencil or on the ground with chalk, using arrows to indicate direction. The other person must follow the line either by tracing on the paper with marker or walking on the chalk line. Zombie noises optional.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” ~John Muir
Ten-year-old Matias is enthusiastic about all things automotive. He calls out model and year of cars passing the street in front of his apartment in an impressive display of mental acuity. He learned every detail of how engines work by quizzing everyone he could who knew anything about cars, then turned to YouTube for more in-depth information. That led to inquiries about types of fuels and manufacturing processes, which led to questions about the history of the assembly line and the formation of unions. Books and documentaries have made him familiar with figures such as Nikolaus Otto and Karl Benz as well as Elon Musk. Matias loves going to auto museums, car shows, and races. Although he says a visit to a demolition derby didn’t upset him, he’s been talking ever since about ways to save cars from junkyards. He’s excited about the potential for energy-efficient vehicles and he really hopes self-driving cars don’t become a thing before he gets to drive.
Notice how this fascination leads him eagerly through all sorts of fields?
Natural learning takes place across a spectrum. History, math, music, science, art, literature, business, philosophy, and athletics don’t neatly divide into “subjects.” They’re interrelated. A child notices one bare sliver of a topic, and intrigued, follows it. That pursuit lights up a totally new subject until a dazzling array of possibilities opens, each refracting new angles. The thrill of exploring is inseparable from a love of learning.
Some children, like Matias, become so absorbed in a single subject that it seems their personalities are inseparable from that passion. Their bemused families can’t help but stoke the fire of that interest. Activities and discussions with the child take on a distinct tone. Indeed, family members are changed by close association with someone who loves the world in such a focused manner.
Most of the time children learn in far more unobtrusive manner. It may seem they go through their days unaffected by the influences that pour in all around them. Yet gradually their comprehension deepens. This is a mysterious process, an ongoing improvisation that weaves together previous experiences with new comprehension and insight. But then, our children are changed by what they’ve come to understand in ways none of us can measure or assess.
Few of us are absorbed by the sort of overwhelming fascination Matias shows for all things automotive. Instead we’re open to many directions, staying with our interests as long as inspiration calls us before moving on. We have what polymath Emilie Wapnick calls “multipotentiality.” As she writes,
The only constant in my life is shape-shifting, exploration and evolution… There’s something that draws me to each of my interests and it’s not “excellence.” I have no interest in committing to one thing forever. Once I no longer feel inspired in a field, I simply move on. Some people call this “quitting,” I call it growth.
You’ll notice, however, that “find your passion” is the recommended approach. The pressure starts in childhood, with well-meaning people doing their very best to get kids on a fast track to success in sports or music or STEM. The push to find, pursue, and excel in a particular field doesn’t stop after graduation. Throughout adulthood we’re told “find your passion” in our careers, our creative lives, even our spiritual development.
I think writer Elizabeth Gilbert shares an apt metaphor in her recent talk. She says some people are like her, driven to focus on one pursuit. She calls such people jackhammers. Other people flit from curiosity to curiosity. This, she says, is the “flight of the natural born hummingbird.” She admits that for years she exhorted people to act like jackhammers in order to reach their goals. Then she had an epiphany — the world needs more than jackhammers. When people allow themselves the freedom to be hummingbirds, she says,
Two things happen. One, they create incredibly rich complex lives for themselves. and they also end up cross-pollinating the world. That’s the service you do. You bring an idea from here and you weave in and take up the next thing, because your entire being brings a different perspective. It ends up aerating the culture.
Chances are, most of us can’t be fully described by terms like jackhammer or a hummingbird. The larger lesson here is the wisdom of freeing ourselves (and our children) to explore what intrigues us. Then we understand on our own terms that full spectrum learning is inseparable from life.
David McCullough’s book The Wright Brothersis a captivating look at Orville and Wilbur Wright. The brothers were considered peculiar, aloof, single-minded, solemn, and obsessively drawn to their own pursuits. Neither of these self-taught engineers possessed a high school diploma. In pursuit of their ambitions, the Dayton, Ohio men spent weeks at a time camping on the sand of steamy, mosquito-infested Kitty Hawk, N.C. in order to study flight as directly as possible. There they watched seabirds for hours, sometimes flapping their wrists and elbows to better understand the motion of bird wings. Local residents assumed these two awkward, unsociable men were “nuts.”
As I read this book I’m reminded of kids I know. Kids lit from within by their own enthusiasms. Kids with labels and kids without. Kids like mine, kids like yours.
One of those kids is named Aiden. He attends a regular third grade classroom and, because he’s been diagnosed with Asperger’s, he also has an aide for part of the day. Her job is to reinforce, over and over, the exacting demands of his assignments along with other classroom requirements. (We now know too much help can be counterproductive.) His aide says Aiden quickly comprehends the material but sees little purpose in doing assignments to prove it. His resistance is growing. He reminds me a little of another boy labeled “underachiever.”
Aiden spends hours each week with various therapists working on his speech and coordination. His progress is tracked in excruciating detail and he’s made aware, sometimes minute to minute, where his deficits lie. It’s exhausting for him. He’s bored. He’s frustrated. He wants to do what he’s interested in and that means anything that has to do with bicycles.
Aiden reads adult-level books about bike repair, bike trips, and bike history. He’s memorized the offerings in bike catalogs from different manufacturers down to individual parts. He draws plans of bikes and will talk at length about them. His dream is to build a self-designed bicycle. Experts assure Aiden’s parents that their son must not be allowed to indulge in his love of bike-related learning except as a reward for meeting incremental goals in school and therapy. Aiden’s mother says when she follows their advice Aiden becomes withdrawn, often barely speaking at all. “He’s himself when it has anything to do with bikes,” she says. “He just comes alive.”
His mother never expected Aiden to have problems in school since he’s so obviously intelligent. She saw signs of this early on. As a toddler Aiden was skilled at putting together increasingly difficult puzzles. He was mesmerized by anything with wheels, especially his toy cars but also the wheels on bikes and strollers. He’d lie with his head on the ground slowly moving any object with wheels back and forth to observe the movement. He was also able to draw perfect circles, interlocking them in complicated patterns. When he was about 18 months old his eager engagement with people had noticeably declined. So had his early verbal skills. He became a quiet little boy wrapped in his own fascinations.
When I ask her to talk about Aiden’s best times she describes what many of us consider our own best times —-when we’re deeply absorbed in a state of flow or struck by awe at the world around us. One of those times was when Aiden was four years old. His grandfather, who has since passed away, came for a visit with three bicycles he’d picked up on trash collection day. He and Aiden spent an entire day fixing those bikes together. His mother said he still talks about that day. Another time his family drove to Ohio to visit the Bicycle Museum of America. Aiden was wonder struck, spending hours looking carefully at each display. This is a memory he cherishes. (Each to his own, his sister describes that place as the most boring ever).
Many children develop unevenly. Asynchronous development is particularly common in gifted children. A child may show artistic promise and read as well as students many years older, yet be well below grade level in math. All sorts of attention is focused on getting that math score up rather than letting the child’s best abilities afford her a strong sense of self, a sense that she’s capable of learning whatever she’s ready to learn, to let her discover all sorts of ways to love math as it reinforces her artistic and literary inclinations. Our strengths have a way of helping us learn more while pulling our abilities up in all areas, a concept often called by snappy terms like customized education and personalized learning. (A concept homeschoolers already know inside and out.)
Aiden’s fascination with bicycles is teaching him history, geometry, physics, technical drawing, and much more —- a self-education far more in-depth than the curriculum he’s expected to follow. Yet the very thing he loves is taken away until he meets the next demand, and the next, and the next.
We work hard to fit young people into the world of today, forgetting they are here to create the future through ideas, innovations, and solutions. A future that relies more on eccentricity than conformity. A future where the most gifted rarely fit the norm. That doesn’t mean we must push our children toward what society considers greatness, but to recognize that living with meaning, joy, and purpose is also a form of greatness. Perhaps a far more necessary greatness.
We need to nurture our children in ways that brings forth who they are, what James Hillman calls the “acorn” that’s exhibited in a child’s particular fascinations. Let’s not blunt the (sometimes exasperating, often inexplicable) uniqueness every child brings to life by tossing a blanket over light that doesn’t shine as we expect it to. Let’s remember history is full of “peculiar” people whose unconventional ideas still send us aloft.
What society seems to favor in young people — obedience, popularity, good school behavior, robust mental health, plus good grades and test scores — doesn’t necessarily build on their inborn strengths. In fact the very things we define as problems are vital aspects of human diversity. Suppressing them hinders a young person’s full development into who they are.
The natural world is full of playthings. Sand, sticks, dirt, water, pinecones, leaves, logs, flowers, and rocks have inspired children’s imaginations for ages.
Neither of these self-taught engineers possessed a high school diploma. In pursuit of their ambitions, the Dayton, Ohio men spent weeks at a time camping on the sand of steamy, mosquito-infested Kitty Hawk, N.C. in order to study flight as directly as possible. There they watched seabirds for hours, sometimes flapping their wrists and elbows to better understand the motion of bird wings. Local residents assumed these two awkward, unsociable men were “nuts.”
Laura Grace Weldon 