Grasshopper New Media Presents...

I got to talk to Jonathan Mooney for the LD Podcast recently. Jon’s new book, The Short Bus, is about a trip he took around the Country in a refurbished Short Yellow School Bus, meeting people and exploring what it means to be ‘normal’.

Jon is severely dyslexic and didn’t read until he was 12, yet he ended up at Brown University, has written two books, and has started his own non-profit to help mentor kids who struggle in school through Project Eye to Eye.

One of the things we spoke about is the concept of “chasing normal”- how whenever a kid doesn’t “fit in”, it’s assumed that the problem is somehow a fault or deficit that must be fixed. That somehow, the child is defective, and if we use the right tools, we can “fix” him and make him fit in. A cure, the perfect program, a remedy- whatever it takes to make them “normal.” However, for most kids and parents, the fix is an elusive myth. We have to learn to accept limitations, but more importantly, learn to emphasize all that is good and possible.

We all have limitations, regardless of how smart we are. I am a woman, 5′3″ and in my early 40’s. The chance of my having a professional sports career is unlikely. However, rather than mourning about my under-appreciated hook shot, I accept basketball will never be my best sport, and I’ve moved on to things that are within my skill set. Likewise, as parents, we need to come to honest terms with our child’s wonderful gifts, as well as their deficits. The point is not to concentrate and mourn what is not, but to concentrate on all that is possible and available to our kids.

Many parents worry when their child is constantly getting in trouble in school. They have tried everything they can think of to help their children succeed in school, but the child and the environment are simply not a good fit. The child may chafe at the constraints placed on him in a classroom, and the instructor may find that the more they try to enforce control and rules on the child, the harder it is for the child to comply. And guess what? Stricter discipline is not always the answer. Trying to understand and then solve the problem works 100% better than trying to solve a problem just by imposing more and more rules.

We all assume that “freedom” can lead to trouble and the answer to kids breaking rules is to give them more and more of them. This is like gradually reducing the fence size around an animal that keeps trying to escape-giving them less freedom doesn’t solve the problem; figuring out why they want to escape and what’s so attractive on the other side of the fence gives you insight on how to solve the problem at hand.

My first impulse as a parent is often to restrict the playstation or game boy when we have an issue, but that only makes sense if the gameboy or playstation is the cause of the problem. Most of the time, those punishments don’t fit the crime, and the cause of the problem isn’t addressed, just leading to the problem re-occurring. For example, the parental chestnut of the status of a child’s room improved when we helped our sons find an easier way to stay organized. No amount of taking electronics away, fining them for stuff left on the floor, confiscating forgotten items and making them re-earn them by doing chores solved the problem of neatness. Organization did. It’s not perfect, but it’s better.

Likewise, when a kid is having problems in school, no amount of punishment alone will solve the problem. In fact, it tends to cause more. Rather than trying to solve the environmental issues, we start to place blame on the child and parents for being poorly disciplined, a trouble maker, careless, or other moral failings that have nothing to do with the situation at hand.

This causes a crisis for many folks, especially when public school is the only reasonable alternative, and private schools that might better fit for a child with learning issues, for example, can cost as much as college.

How many kids could we save if we stopped chasing normal and embraced differences? How many kids would respond if we tried to listen and understand the problem from their point of view instead of only approaching it from that of the teacher? How many kids would respond better if they thought their teachers really cared for them, instead of seeing them as another widget on the education assembly line?

The answer to our problems in education are not getting rid of the kids outside the center of the bell-shaped curve, but rather constructing a culture in schools that truly embraced kid’s diversity and used problem solving rather than discipline as their mission.

by Whitney Hoffman

[tags]Jonathan Mooney, The Short Bus, book, differences, learning disabilities, dyslexia, normal, research, kids, children, parents, parenting[/tags]
Photo ungraciously stolen from Jonathan Mooney, whom we hope won’t sue us.