Category: Health

Stress and learning

Posted on by Suki

I am sort of a “learning research junkie”—I’ll read pretty much anything about all the new research into how our brains learn—and don’t learn. When I was working on my book, my publisher sent me pretty much any book that they thought might be of interest to my audience. I read all of them. I don’t expect other people to have the time or interest to read them all, but I do think that all parents—especially homeschooling parents—should be aware of some of the most important aspects of how the brain learns. (I’ll suggest some resources at the end of this piece.)

It’s important to understand how brains do learn if you want to recognize a situation in which your child can’t learn. First of all, brains are bundles of connections. When we’re very small, our brains suck in everything we experience and set up a scaffolding that everything they learn later is built on. This is why they say that the first few years are so critical.

Our brains are very badly engineered to learn isolated facts. In fact, most people can only remember a string of random words up to about 7 words long. People who make a hobby out of entering memory competitions learn to memorize unconnected pieces of information by connecting them with things already in their memory (see my recommendation for Moonwalking with Einstein below). The result is that no matter what else is learned about how we learn, the most important aspect of learning is connections.

The second thing to realize is how interconnected the different parts of our brains are. We tend to compartmentalize the brain when we describe it: “this is the part where we feel emotion” and “this is the part where we use logic.” This implies a separation more definitive than is really the case. Researchers have scores of examples of people who have overcome losing an area of their brain due to disease or injury and rewiring other areas of the brain to do what the lost area used to do.

Also, and more importantly, everything you try to do with your brain is affected by the other parts of your brain. So we might try to assert that kids should be able to learn when they are physically or emotionally uncomfortable, because those things “don’t have anything to do with learning.” But in fact, they have everything to do with learning.

I read an excellent article by Judy Willis (author of Inspiring Middle School Minds) on the challenges faced by twice-exceptional learners. But whether or not your child is 2e, Willis offers some important information about stress and its effect on the learning brain. (The full article can be found in this month’s Gifted Education Communicator, which is by subscription only.)

When your child is learning, all input is first filtered through the amygdala, which is in the emotional response center of the brain. Wait: an algebra problem goes through the emotional response center first? Yes: algebra, the color of the water in a pool, the sound of you asking your child to come out of her room, the history of the late Roman Empire, and instructions for when to take out the garbage all get filtered through your child’s emotional center first.

When your child is relaxed and happy, here’s what happens next:

In the absence of high stress, fear, or perceived threat, the amygdala directs incoming information to the prefrontal cortex (PFC). There the information is further evaluated by the brain’s high-order thinking networks as to meaning and relationships to stored memories of previous experiences.

In other words, the information comes into your child’s brain and is connected within existing connections, where it can become part of permanent memory.

But what about when your child is upset and stressed out by what you’re trying to work on? When the amygdala senses stress, it sends all information—no matter what it is—directly into the flight-or-fight center of our brain instead of the areas of the brain that process meaning. According to Willis:

Unfortunately, the human amygdala cannot distinguish between real or imagined threats. Whenever the amygdala is highly activated by negative emotions, it sends incoming information to the lower, involuntary, quick-response brain, where the behavioral reactions are limited to the primitive fight/flight/freeze survival mechanisms. (Gifted Education Communicator, Winter 2012)

I think it’s pretty obvious what this means regarding stress and learning: When you are stressed out, it’s like trying to do a handstand in a straitjacket. You might seem like you’re learning, but the information that’s going in is hitting a wall.

This of course has huge implications for educational policy: no wonder kids in rough neighborhoods aren’t doing well in school. It won’t help to dock the teachers’ pay, fire all the staff, and make stiffer rules. Their friends are getting shot, their parents are AWOL, and their siblings are running with a bad crowd. How do you expect a brain to take in algebra in that situation?

For homeschoolers, the implications are a bit different: We have actual choices each day in what to do. We are not teachers who have to follow a protocol.

I know so many homeschoolers—and I include myself here as well—who forget that we can back off and choose a different way anytime we need to. If math is stressful for your child this week, skip it. If it takes a month before you sense willingness to try again, let that month happen. Watch silly videos about math instead of trying to do problems. Let your child dictate all the math while you write on a whiteboard. Do math while your child is on a swing. Chop your learning times into 15-minute energy windows.

If your child hates to write, don’t force her to write book reports. Dictate silly stories about her darkling beetle. Write limericks. Read, read, read, and read some more. Talk about everything. Ask questions. Answer questions. Take my advice about teaching writing. Take Patricia Zaballos’s advice about teaching writing. But whatever you do, remember that if writing causes your child stress, good writing will not happen.

The beauty of homeschooling is flexibility. In times of homeschooling stress, I hope we all remember that there is always another path to get where we are going. Like water going down a hillside, sometimes the easiest path is the best one to take.

Resources:

  • This book is specific to gifted middle schoolers, but I think its message is applicable to all kids in that age range: Inspiring Middle School Minds by Judy Willis. Willis’s website has further articles: http://www.radteach.com/ Check out her Parent Tips.
  • Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer: Foer explores memory, and destroys the illusion that some people are exceptionally “smart” because of their prodigious memories. As you read, you will really come to understand why “linked” memories are so important to your child’s learning.
  • KidLab: I heard Dr. Kalbfleisch speak at NAGC and was impressed with both the depth and breadth of her knowledge and also her ability to talk to an audience of non-scientists. The site has links to articles and interviews.
  • The Eide Neurolearning Blog is full of great ideas about learning.
  • Find more links on my Gifted Links page.

Hear me “on the radio”

Posted on by Suki

My daughter was very impressed to hear that I was going to “be on the radio” today. She asked, “Which station?”

In this modern world, she is straddling two eras of technology, perhaps three. Sometimes we listen to local radio stations over the real radio airwaves. Sometimes we listen to local radio stations which we are far away from, whose signal is transmitted through the Internet to our Rokio box. In the car we sometimes listen to satellite radio, which fizzes out every time we drive under trees. Also in our car we listen to podcasts, sometimes shows that were once on the real radio airwaves, but are now being transmitted by a cellphone tower into my phone and then broadcast through Bluetooth into our car’s stereo system.

Phew. In the past, it was simple. I’m guessing in the future, it will be simple. When my kids tell their kids what it was like to listen to the radio in their day, their kids will shake their heads and say, “Really? You didn’t just turn on the osmophone in your head?”

Or something like that.

So back to the “radio” show that I was on. I was honored to be interviewed tonight on the show Bright, Not Broken, to be found on the Coffee Klatsch, a modern radio station that functions solely online. It was broadcast live and then saved as a podcast, available to listeners around the world. All my sage wisdom, captured in bits.

I love the name of the show: Bright, Not Broken. Sometimes kids are different, and we treat them as if they’re a broken toy needing to be fixed. The great thing about homeschooling is that parents of these kids are finding that they can educate their kids without focusing on their disabilities—they focus on their abilities. In a culture where we have therapies and pills and any number of ways to remediate, some parents and educators are stepping back and saying, “I want to focus on what’s right with this kid.”

Check out my interview. Then listen to Temple Grandin, who said that these days, instead of coming up to her and saying “I like animals, too,” kids come up to her and say “I’m autistic, too.” That’s a tragedy, Grandin says: “We should be talking about what they’re good at.”

It’s so great that our modern “radio” system allows us to find others who share our experiences. Tune in and join the conversation!

Listen to internet radio with The Coffee Klatch on Blog Talk Radio

Favorite boy, favorite girl

Posted on by Suki

My daughter has started to refer to her brother as “Favorite Boy.” You might think that this is not an epithet, but you would be wrong. She is skilled at turning any fine word into an insult, when her brother is the one she’s referring to.

In this particular case, after years of not pulling the “you love him more than me” line on me, suddenly she has started to say that I favor my son over her. She’ll take any excuse: If I ask her to stop hitting her brother, he is “Favorite Boy.” If I tell her to pick up her shoes in the middle of the floor, it’s because he is “Favorite Boy.” Heck, I bet if I asked her to hit her brother, she’d find a way to turn it into favoritism.

En garde!
Watch out for little sister!

I remember feeling this way. I remember telling my friend—perhaps I was the same age she is now—that my father hated me. I remember this as being very matter of fact. He hates me, and I have proof. I remember that we would sit on our beds and discuss these weighty matters: who had a loving parent, which of us had the more evil sibling, what we’d do if we ever found a way to get away from our miserable families.

Of course, the ironic thing is that eventually, pretty much every one of us got away from our families. And did our families say “good riddance” and erase our existence? Hardly. Things went on pretty much as before, except that we weren’t around each other nearly as much and so all the little things that drove us crazy about each other faded into the background.

Though I bet my little brother still hasn’t forgiven me for slamming his finger in the door.

Or did I do that to him? I can’t quite remember.

I’ve been thinking a lot about developmental milestones lately. The early ones are really obvious: When your toddler notices that your body is actually separate from his. When your preschooler finds out that other children have feelings. When your 6-year-old discovers universal laws of morality and applies them to everyone (especially her brother).

Perhaps this “who is Mommy’s favorite” thing is developmental. Perhaps she has some biological need—now that she’s figured out that she’s not a part of me, that her brother has feelings, and that everyone in the Whole World has wronged her—to find the pecking order in our family. Perhaps it’s because her brother is a teen and she is just entering adolescence. Were they princes, she would just now be realizing that her brother is destined to be king while she will probably end up a jester.

If they had other siblings, these ordinal musings would come and go. Today she might see her older brother as the favorite; another day it might be her younger sister.

But our family—like more and more modern families—is organized as sets of two. One father, one mother. One brother, one sister. Daily their genes battle to find dominance, and only find one other person to exert dominance over. The cave-person instinct to suspect the older brother is never put aside to thwart the ambitions of a younger sibling. At our house, there is apparently one throne, and two possible occupants.

Her brother the teen, of course, shrugs this off. His genes have him going off in another direction, thinking that instead of taking the throne, perhaps he’ll travel to uncharted lands.

We recently purchased a bunch of foam swords, and they have been getting lots of healthy use. I’m sure that someday the kids will return to the nest for a Thanksgiving dinner or perhaps to drag one of their parents off to an old folks home, and they’ll laugh about this.

“Do you remember how jealous of you I was?”

“You? Jealous of me? No way: Mom loved you more.”

“No, way, Favorite Boy! You were always her favorite.”

First born!

Perpetual baby!

Inheritor of the throne!

The one who got to have all the fun.

OK, maybe they won’t laugh, but I will. Wheel me out, kids. I’m off to play some gin rummy and seduce those nurses into thinking I’m the best. The chosen one. The one who inherited my parents’ love and admiration.

Birthing a book

Posted on by Suki

People compare writing a book to having a baby, and in many ways its the same. You pour a huge amount of yourself into a book, whether it’s an autobiography or an academic treatise on a rare insect from Guatemala.

But for me, the process of publishing my book, From School to Homeschool, has been in some ways uncomfortably unlike birth.

Suki and book
Me with my little newborn baby!

When you have a baby – those of you who are parents will remember – your body is flooded with happy hormones and despite the fact that your body may hurt and you’re getting very little sleep, you feel elated. You know that your baby is the most beautiful, wonderful baby ever birthed. And people stop you on the street to tell  you how beautiful and wonderful your baby is.

Between the heady days of writing a book and sending it out into the world, however, you lose any hormonal help you may have gotten. The editing process drags on and then you have to start marketing something you can’t even hold in your hands yet. You start to think:

“Is my baby really that beautiful, or did I somehow mislead my publisher?”

“Oh, I really should have given my baby brown eyes instead of blue!”

“Did I forget to give my baby a pleasant smile?”

“Why would anybody like a baby of mine, anyway?”

“How could I have thought that I’d be a good mommy to this baby?” (OK, I think I did think that one once or twice over the last 13 years of parenting, as well!)

The first thing that happened as the paper copies rolled off the press was contacting reviewers. My publisher’s publicity person rightly pointed out to me that they get a better response rate when the writer approaches reviewers she knows or has some sort of relationship with, so I started sending out e-mails. I suspect they were more professionally worded than this, but I remember these e-mails going something like this, “Please like my baby, please don’t treat her badly, please notice her friendly smile and not the big wart on her nose!”

Last week, I awoke with a start in the middle of the night. I realized with great certainty that I had forgotten to mention the website of one of the wonderful movers and shakers of the homeschooling world who agreed to review my book!

What is going to happen when she reads the book and sees that her wonderful website and her wonderful books aren’t mentioned? I thought, my heart pounding. I mentally composed an apologetic e-mail — “I can’t believe we got through the entire editing process without my realizing that I’d forgotten your website!” — and somehow got myself back to sleep.

Days later I remembered that midnight terror, and went to check my electronic copy of the book. There the website was, with appropriately encouraging words about the author’s contributions to the craft of homeschooling.

OK, so my baby is slightly less imperfect than I thought.

Of course, there will be people who don’t like my book, and I’m prepared for that. And there are people who for whatever reason don’t like me, and thus won’t like my book. I suppose I’m a little less prepared for that because I know that I’m way too concerned with whether people like me than I should be. And of course I’m completely prepared for the fact that my book isn’t for everyone: When people whose children are grown or gone, or people who never had any in the first place and are not into gifted education, say that they’re going to buy my book, I’m happy to say, “Only if you want to.” (I personally have a “thing” for owning books by people I know, but what started as one shelf of people that I know has overflown to books stashed all over the house, so perhaps that’s a “thing” I need to give up!)

So yes, publishing a book is like birthing a baby. I am terribly fond of my little orange-and-blue progeny and it was such a thrill to see her (why is she a she? I can’t answer that) after all those months of imagining what she’d look like.

But it’s also a period of growth for me, and growth, as any rapidly stretching teen can tell you, is not always comfortable.

Here’s to books, babies, and personal growth. None of the three is always a welcome force at any given time of a given day, but all are necessary for the continuation of intelligent life in our little corner of the universe.

News from the convention, Day 3

Posted on by Suki

Following are my notes on the National Association for the Gifted Convention, day 3. Click here to read day 1 and day 2.

I can’t believe it! I’m typing this on the airplane home and I may in fact be caught up when we touch down. Now, whether I have time to put any links into this text this evening is still unanswered. But you know how to use Google as well as I do.

This morning, I got right on it by turning up with a crowd of other people at 8 a.m. to hear Jim Delisle speak about teaching writing to middle schoolers. It was a very school-focused talk, and I am sure that if I were to do any of these exercises with homeschoolers I’d change them considerably, but his ideas are great and it’s clear why he is considered at the top of his field. I don’t have the title of his book handy at the moment, but I would highly recommend it to teachers – in fact, I did recommend it by e-mail to one of my son’s teachers. He used a variety of methods to get kids to get in touch with what they really care about, and he is able to help them do the seeingly impossible, such as a beautiful essay by a girl who had been failing English. For once, she was not required to write in full sentences, and her little bits of thought held together beautifully.

I hardly took notes during the panel discussion of gifted kids and sensitivity (again, I didn’t write down the panelists’ names, so I only know that Linda Silverman was one of them). The first question that came up is do we know for sure that gifted kids are in fact more sensitive than other kids? Silverman joked that perhaps her 35 years in the field should be dismissed because she hadn’t submitted peer-reviewed papers to the journals, so we could just consider what she said a 35 year long anecdote. Then she went on to detail the huge amount of data amassed by her Gifted Development Center in Colorado and others and said that from what she’s seen, sensitivity appears to be a prerequisite for gifted learners. Those kids who can’t stand the hum of fluorescent lights aren’t just coincidentally the fastest learners in the classroom. She and the others on the panel all had different ways of coming at the problem, but they all agreed that a hyper-aware brain is part of what makes a brain the sort that excels on IQ tests. Two of the panelists spoke movingly of their experiences as therapists working with families. One spoke bravely of his own struggles with being a highly sensitive person and how it has informed his opinion on how such children should be dealt with in schools.

The final keynote was by Jonathan Mooney, who is apparently well-known though he was new to me. He spoke of neurodiversity, which is a relatively new argument that we should think of the diversity of human minds like we think of plant and animal diversity: something to be nurtured and treasured. For a man who has never lived in the South, the woman next to me said, he sure does sound like a black preacher. In fact, we noticed that the cadences of his sentences were exactly like President Obama’s, which were explicitly modeled on black preachers’ speech. But he was a very engaging speaker, and his message was both in lockstep with what many at the conference were saying – gifted kids are different and need to be accepted and nurture – and also critical on the focus on traditional “academic” learning as what makes an educated person. Like Temple Grandin, he admitted that he is never going to be the well-rounded generalist that our schools attempt to produce. But in his case, there was no diagnosis to go on (though clearly these days he’d be diagnosed ADHD if he were in school). He was made to feel stupid and lazy throughout his school years, and the only thing that saved him, he said, was the unwavering faith that his mother had in him. When he was failing in school, she’d tell him that he was worthwhile and smart. Finally, after failing his way into high school, he somehow turned everything around and got into Brown University (not sure how that happened except that Brown is notoriously creative about taking unusual students such as the earliest gifted homeschoolers when no one else in the Ivies would).

All in all, this conference was a fabulous place to learn and connect with others if you are in education and care about your sensitive, asynchronous, neuro-nontypical, “gifted” learners. Nowhere at this conference did I hear dismissive statements about other kids, just a concern that while advocating for any other group of children is seen as noble and fair, advocating for gifted children, in all their rainbow of flavors, is seen as elitist and unnecessary. It is such a relief to everyone there not to have to apologize for their passion for reaching the thinkers in our society, trying to find the ones who are hiding, trying to heal the ones who have been broken, trying to inspire the ones who have been bored into compliance. The message of the conference was not “these kids are more important,” but rather, “all kids are important, so why are we trying either to make these kids into something they’re not or forcing them always to be on the outside in education?”

Thanks to everyone who gave their time to present at the conference and were willing to talk to someone who nodded vigorously when one presenter spoke of “imposter syndrome.” If you spend too much time feeling like you don’t belong, you can end up believing that you will never find a place in this world.

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