Article No. 3
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, ADD, ADHD?
It seems to go with being a boy – being accused of being ADD, or even of being ADHD. Hardly a boy I know has not had this label thrown at him at some point in his life.
Well, maybe that is a bit of an overstatement, but do you get my drift? In terms of style, boys seem to have a need to be overt, noisy, physical and loud – as if hearing the echoes resounding off their environment confirms their very existence. It has even been suggested that this is how males determine and confirm their presence, their identity – the more noisy they are the more real they are. Or is it perhaps the other way around – that the more insecure they are, the more need they have to express their presence through such overt means as noise, or at least loud visual image.
Boys stomp and crash – where girls giggle and talk. Girls preen themselves in the mirror – for hours on end - while boys roar through the town, (peripheral vision glimpsing flashes of reflection in plate glass frontage), on their Harleys. Women ‘multitask’, using their exclusive endowment of eight separate cranial language-sites, like a linguistic octopus, to the confusion and oft-time chagrin of their male counterparts. And our sons get labeled ADD or hyperactive.
“Attention Deficit Disorder” (ADD), is a monica often bandied around with very little close examination or understanding of what is really going on – but that is par for the course in the whole arena of ‘dyslexia’. The words themselves would suggest that the culprit has some lack of ability, or even some lack of willingness, to engage with learning activities at an intellectual level. The label is commonly accompanied by the descriptor ‘highly distractible’, but with a slight tonal hint of accusation, suggesting an element of anger or intolerance by the speaker – invariably the parent or class-teacher of the accused.
ADHD or “Attention Deficit Disorder, with Hyperactivity” becomes a double-barreled tag, additionally endowing the individual with a physical style that might match that of a cornered possum – leaping from door-handle to curtain-rail in perpetuated frenzy, or at least at levels that prevent any associate or family member any predictable peace.
Such labels, it would seem, are invented, and imposed by people who have themselves never participated in or been subject to the particular affliction at a personal level, and therefore label what they see – as opposed to what they know. From the inside the story is different.
How many senses do we have? Our various senses all operate individually and so at any one moment we may be subject to signals through our eyes, our ears, our skin, our nose, and our tongue - all signals being received simulataneously. Our eyes, ears and skin may in actual fact, each be bombarded by literally thousands of signals at any one moment. Could we ever begin to measure how many visual signals our eyes are subject to every instant? And the same goes for the ears and the skin – all this meaning that the human sensory system is receiving saturation input much of the time.
Fortunately, to protect us from burn-out, a compensatory shield is deployed where our major computer scans, sorts and prioritises the items in this sensory flood, ascribing preference and priority to a very small proportion of the available input, allowing us to select and focus, to effectively pay attention to what we regard as most important at that moment. Thank God for such an effective neurological system - what would life be like without that screening ability!
Good question – and if you want a good answer, just ask the ADD kid - because this is what daily life is like for him.
For reasons beyond our current knowledge the children we label as ADD have a significant deficit in terms of this protective screening device, and their ‘attentional energies’ are perpetually hammered by an enormous array of input that they are unable to block, sort or selectively prioritise. Every sound, whether natural or man-made demands identification and attention, whilst at that same moment every movement within their direct or peripheral vision vies for visual contact. Just watch their eyes and get a glimpse of what they are taking in.
But equally every available smell, natural, industrial or human, will be stacking up for olfactory analysis, as will the tactile interference of air movement past the hairs of his leg, the rumble through his seat of the truck beyond the wall, and the elusive itch somewhere on his scalp. Addressing those that he can, trying to ignore those that he can’t, and fighting off the intrusions of the many more becomes a seriously exhausting continuous routine for the ADD child.
ADD? Not at all. There is no attention DEFICIT here. There is rather a very clear, and equally extreme attention OVERLOAD situation that dominates his very existence. In many ways we would be better to label this child AOD, and this different understanding immediately puts question to the real value of the intentionally stimulating environment we often promote and value in our classrooms.
Impact on the Child;
The child with AOD experiences three real sets of difficulty – the first, and most obvious is a consequential difficulty in application, with a down-stream impact on learning being quite predictable. The other two are more insidious, and in themselves are perhaps even more personally crippling.
The second is the attitude of the adults in his life. The parents and teachers of this child may not realize that he is subject to an overload of input that he cannot cope with nor control, and of which they have no knowledge. With good intention they cajole him for not paying attention, for not concentrating (his energies) on the task in hand, and for being distractible. So often he is admonished and penalized for something he is completely unable to control.
The third is that he himself has no notion that he is different in this regard, and that the bombardment he experiences is not the norm. He experiences life as he knows it, and like everybody else, assumes that this is normal. It does not appear to him to be an abnormal bombardment – it is just as it has always been – it just is.
The upshot of these is that as well as having a consequential learning difficulty, he is blamed for being uncooperative by the people important to him, and he himself, in his naivety, accepts the label, the blame, and the responsibility. Anxiety, anger, a low self-concept, and eventually depression are the predictable outcomes.
And ADHD?
Hyperactivity means very high levels of activity – as opposed to ‘hypo-activity’ which means just the opposite.
The hyperactive child is more than just an intensively active child. This child moves at an unbelievable rate, is generally erratically spontaneous, and moves constantly and intrusively into and through everything. He recognizes few barriers and no sensitivities – nothing is out-of-bounds as far as his inquisitiveness is concerned. He will commonly have an explosive start to the day – eclipsing the local rooster – and will move like a turbo-charged maniac until dropping in his tracks sometime prior to midnight.
Although many are labeled ‘hyperactive’, few really fit the bill – and for this we should be grateful.
More often we have children who although excessively active, do not warrant the title, ‘hyperactive’ and certainly do not warrant medication. They do however deserve assistance, and investigation of the possible dynamics that may be causing a life-style that is as uncomfortable for them as it is for those sharing their life-space.
Many children who fall under the descriptor ‘dyslexic’ present as having heightened sensitivity to a multitude of environmental factors, which can individually, or as a group create a stressed neuro/muscular system. Identification and monitoring of these environmental factors can bring huge relief to all concerned. Typically chemicals, minerals and electrical current are the main culprits.
The sustained physical function of the human body is a product of an harmonious interaction of two major physiological systems – one being chemical, and the other electrical – together being major factors in our neurological functioning. Each individual person has slightly differing needs in both respects, and any maladjustment has the capacity to impact on the way the individual will operate.
As with motor vehicles, some people are highly tuned, and hence highly vulnerable to variation within their system, and others are so low-tuned that nothing seems to impact on their performance at all. Too much or too little of anything ranging from trace-elements, through vitamins, minerals, proteins, sugars, to foreign chemicals (as in preservatives, flavouring chemicals etc), to foreign electrical impulses, can push a child well beyond their own ability to cope.
Chemicals and Minerals
Foreign chemicals and minerals can enter our diet in a number of ways;
- they can be entirely natural and be present in our natural foods (salicylates in apples, feijoas etc for example).
- they can be natural but be presented in unnatural ways (dried fruits having a changed sugar form, or squeezed juices having sugar concentrates out of balance from that of the raw fruit).
- they can be natural, but not naturally in our food chain (aluminium powder in our town drinking water, or lead in tin packaging).
They can equally be present as part of our food preparation process, (chemicals used to ripen bananas), or be remnant from cleaning processes (chlorine in cleaners), or be present as additives to preserve, colour, flavour and ‘stabilise’ our food. (Your local naturopath or nutritionist could tell you much more than this.)
As part of their heightened sensitivity, many ADHD (perhaps that should now be AOHD) children will present as having food allergies, or at least food intolerances, with dairy and wheat products (gluten) being the two most common.
We frequent our supermarkets and buy our foods in good faith, with a predominating attitude that “they wouldn’t give it to us if it wasn’t good for us”. Few people stop to consider the poisons they regularly put into their own body – or actively provide for their children – under the guise of ‘food’. Few consumers realize that the sulphides and sulphates that are a common ingredient in our canned and bottled fizz, act like a brick on the body’s accelerator, and bolt-cutters through the brake cable – producing what is arguably the first significant, chemically induced, mind-altering experience in the young child’s life.
Electrical.
And then there is the electrical side of our mechanism – the entire nervous system.
That our modern life-style involves a multitude of electrical and electronic gadgetry is readily recognized – but what of the impact of electrical radiation?
Consider the battery in your wrist watch, and the radiation from your cell-phone, your kitchen micro-wave, TV and computer, or the alarum/radio beside the bed. What of the ever-present current from your electric blanket (even though it is turned off), your home meter-board, and the sub-station or transformer on the street. What about stray radiation from the local cell-phone tower and microwave relay station? All of these may be draining your own energy, and wrecking havoc with the delicate internal balance of your child, making it impossible for him to regulate his activity or his behaviour.
In this case, is it at all appropriate for you to berate your child, or to punish him in an attempt to change his behaviour? – to punish him for something that may be well beyond his control?
And medication? Is it legitimate to add yet another chemical ingredient to the environmental cocktail of poisons your child is experiencing, in the form of a ‘medication’ to calm and regulate him, and do you include these in the ‘must be good for us’ category?
As author, psychologist, ‘hyperactive’ child/become highly energetic adult, this 60 year old psychologist of 30+ years experience in working with such children, urges a responsible examination of the possible dynamics of each individual child by those primarily charged with their safe-keeping – you, the parents.
Take charge of the child’s environment, so he can take charge of his own behaviour.
Laughton King Psychologist www.natalieart.com/ontour.htm July 2008
laughton.king@win.co.nz ph; 0274.171.804
Showing posts with label ADD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ADD. Show all posts
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
DYSLEXIA AS A DAILY LIFE ISSUE
Whilst still struggling with the technology, and all the terms and language associated with Blogging, it is my intention to set up a base of information that will be useful to school teachers, parents social-workers and to 'dyslexic' people themselves - a clarification of the issues of this confusing thing called 'DYLEXSIA'.
I am 'dyslexic'. All my life I have been 'dyslexic', and I realise that I will always be so. We do not grow out of 'dyslexia', it cannot (and does not need to) be fixed. There is nothing wrong with the 'dyslexic' person - they have a perfectly intact manner of thinking, it is just a little different from the thinking style of others.
Being a University trained Psychologist (three psychology degrees), and having spent my entire professional working life (I am now 60) working with 'dyslexic' people, I have written two books around these issues, and am part-way through my third. To be simple and direct, my take on 'dyslexia' is very different from that of most other people - and my mission is to provide useful information to those people struggling with the daily issues of 'dyslexia'.
Progressively, via these pages (and as I manage to get assistance dealing with the technology) I intend to publish sections of the manuscript of my next, as yet unpublished, and untitled book .
All feedback is welcome.
For today, I have interviewed myself, as an overview statement, an outline of what "dyslexia'
really is about.
Article No. 1.
HELP!; OUR BOYS ARE THINKING IN PICTURES!
The headlines are emotional, sensational and repetitive, ‘our boys are failing’. Irrespective of how often we hear it, the message is none-the-less upsetting for anybody with a direct or indirect interest in children, the education system, or our future; our boys are not succeeding satisfactorily in their elemental academic learning.
Acknowledging that issues of academic failure on the part of our younger generation, particularly of our boys, is a journalist’s paradise-playground, the harsh downstream realities, so currently evident in our youth subculture, and so predictable from the evidence to date, raises concerns fueled by emotions ranging from love to fear.
Although recorded history shows clearly that there is nothing new about this situation, our current ‘progress to perfection’ mind-set leaves us little room to sit in complacency while the evidence dances so vividly before us. The education system is failing our little boys, somewhere, somehow. Our little boys stand to become big boys, and at this rate our big boys stand to become big problems – or at least enough of them stand in such a way as we see them as being a problem.
Although the reports persistently tell us there is a problem, they just as persistently fail to indicate where and how the problem lies, and fall glaringly short in terms of any suggestion or indication as to what might be done about it.
As a little boy who experienced such difficulties at school, and who ran perilously close to becoming one of the problematic youth, psychologist Laughton King believes he can shed light on the situation. He claims the explanation is as dynamic, yet as simple as the difference between petrol and diesel.
In his seminars and his books he reminds parents and teachers what happens when we inadvertently put petrol in our diesel car – the engine goes sluggish, overheats, then finally fails to perform. This, he says is what happens when we fail to recognize that many boys under the age of 12 years think in pictures.
He smiles when I look quizzically in response to this statement, as if expecting or indeed predicting my confusion. Thinking just happens – doesn’t it? Few of us probably ever bother to stop and think about thinking, let alone ponder such deep-and-meaningfuls such as how we might think. By way of explanation he gives a thumb-nail description which in essence hi-lights major differences between the way in which most males and females think. He describes girls and women as having a much greater natural skill – and a much greater tendency – to think in words. Boys and men on the other hand, he says have less skill in this arena, but correspondingly more skill in thinking in pictures. This he says explains a lot of the differences in the way men and women operate, and consequently a lot of the difficulties the two experience in communication. This part is familiar ground for most of us.
Despite our gender prejudices, this difference in style of thinking is not just a matter of personal obstinacy, but more a product of the different wiring systems that we have. He talks of ‘masculine’ wiring systems and ‘feminine’ systems, and neurological research that indicates that the feminine system involves up to eight separate centres for language processing (but few for spatial relationships), and that the masculine system has a solitary (and sometimes very lonely) centre for language processing, but has more processing space dedicated to the kinesthetic, tactile and spatial functions.
He points to the obvious – little boys are all touch, crash and go, where little girls are more physically reserved, but talkative in their style. He points to the more obvious – the café where we met for this interview has two or three groups of women talking with varying degrees of animation, and one solitary man hunched over his laptop. Through the window and across the way we see eight large motor-cycles parked outside a café-bar, and their red-and-black leathered owners – the current version of ‘middle-aged-gentlemen’ – sitting quietly with their bikes and their beers in the sun. Their bikes do the talking – or should it be, ‘their bikes make the statement’. Admittedly two women accompany the men, but Laughton draws my attention to their upper-arm tattoos, and with a wordless gesture suggests that I take this into account. What I notice is his distinctly male communication style – gesture, not words.
‘And the relevance to education, and educational success?’ I ask.
“Excuse me for generalizing”, he starts, “but after working with children – mainly boys – with learning difficulties for over thirty years, I feel it is reasonably safe to suggest that up to the age of about 12 years, most boys think predominately in pictures.” “Girls tend to think in words, almost in sentences, creating ‘straight-line’ or a linear thinking style which really suits our schooling system. Our schools are full of words – reading, writing, listening, talking etc – and girls lap this up, with words being a fuel to their thinking. It makes teaching the ‘feminine’ brain a piece of pie.”
He pauses, and a flash of pain passes his eye, “- but for many boys it is different. To varying degrees boys think in pictures. I call them ‘Diesels’. This is a function of their brain wiring. Words are just not a significant part of their system. Their fuel is different, their brain is different, their style is different, and as parents and teachers we need to know this.”
I listen to him speaking, and note the change in his own language, his shorter sentences, as he obviously reflects on personal experiences.
“Consider the teaching staff at your local primary school – primarily female?” Yes, in my case exclusively female, and I pre-empt his next question by acknowledging, ‘All very adept in their language skills.’
“What if they were inadvertently – with the best intention – putting petrol into these little boys’ diesel tanks?” “What I mean is, what if the words they are using were making little sense to the boys – what if their ‘masculine’ wiring system meant that they simply cannot make sense of the words – the language – that their teachers (and parents) are using?”
He invites me to draw a picture, a picture of the instruction “Hurry-up” – one of the most common instructions given to children. “If boys think in pictures, what is the picture that comes up in their head that will tell them what ‘hurry up’ means?”
I’m not much of an artist (more of a word-smith really) and he grins when he sees my rendition of someone running. “Nice picture of ‘run’, but I really wanted a picture of ‘hurry-up’”. Eventually I’m obliged to acknowledge that there is no specific picture of ‘hurry-up’, and he pushes his point by suggesting I draw ‘quickly’, (can’t do), or the instructions ‘tidy up’, (equally can’t do), ‘Put your gear away’ (still can’t do).
‘Enough of this, what should we be saying to boys’, I protest.
On his invitation I find I can draw “Put your bag on the hook behind the door” – it’s a bit like a comic strip, but any pictorial (diesel?) kid could comprehend my efforts there. Similarly the instruction “go brush your teeth – run” fits nicely into picture form, and I am beginning to think of my own family early-morning rush and some changes that might happen very soon.
“That’s ice-berg number one – and there are lots more like it that sink many of our little boys, and severely deflate the self-concept of many others. We tend to call these children ‘dyslexic’ because we see that they are having trouble with language – reading, writing etc – and we tend to think that there is something wrong with them. There is nothing wrong with them, they are perfectly well formed diesels (picture thinkers), and they don’t need fixing. They also don’t need more petrol squirted into their engines – and unfortunately most of our remedial assistance approaches involve just that – more petrol.”
“What they do need is a basic understanding of their natural style, acceptance of their pictorial processes, and for teachers and parents to take this into account. Let’s stop blaming the victim. We need to change us, and what we do, rather than trying to fix the children”.
This is his mission as he moves around the country with Natalie, his portrait-artist wife, in their five ton mobile home. Currently in the South Island, they have dedicated several years to personally visiting most towns in New Zealand, visiting schools, running seminars, and introducing parents and teachers, social workers and policy-makers to what he considers to be one of the most commonly misunderstood social dynamics of our time.
The implications are horrendous, he says. Firstly it cuts so many of us out of successful education. This has a huge impact on the self-concept of a large proportion of our male population. This in turn is reflected in our use of drugs and alcohol, our physical and mental health, our employment dynamics, our incidence of domestic violence, our incidence of split families, our attitude to authority and the law, and directly to our prison population. His passion is obvious.
Our discussion goes on and on, and I learn the impact of negative language (Ice-berg No. 2) and can now clearly see the hypnotic effect when I tell my four-year-old son ‘Don’t use the front door’. My blaming the child now seems so unfair, and I begin to wonder about the label ‘Oppositional Defiance Disorder’.
Ice-berg No. 3 emerges as a series of school rules (e.g. ‘Respect other people’s rights’) which simply cannot be transcribed in pictorial form, and which therefore completely elude the pictorial child’s understanding. A sense of sadness floods me as I suddenly realize who it is who repetitively stands in front of the Principal for breaking the school rules – yet again – and I see a completely new causal connection between learning difficulties and behaviour problems.
Ice-berg No. 4 appears as a complete difficulty when it comes to ‘creative-writing’ in the classroom. So many of these children have a wonderful creative fantasy - which presents itself in pictorial form. They have a head full of pictures, but no words – there is nothing for them to write, because you can’t write pictures. For the person who thinks in words this is so hard to comprehend, and they just see the child as lazy, or unmotivated.
And here comes Ice-berg No. 5. The parent or teacher really wants this child to succeed, and so ‘remedial help’ is arranged. Done with the very best intention, so often this is more petrol for the poor little diesel, and he struggles to comply but ends up failing yet again. Whereas in the past he has been motivated to achieve, now his repetitive failure takes its toll and he becomes motivated to self-preserve – so he withdraws his co-operation and his effort. ‘If I don’t try, I can’t fail’. For his efforts he is tagged as ‘unmotivated’, and with ‘an attitude problem’.
Ice-berg No. 6 is apparently more like an ice sheet, and consists of a whole raft of further dynamics that predictably accompany the ‘dyslexic’ condition. These include a tendency to food intolerances, or even food allergies, a social lonliness born of other children’s intolerance and teasing, an inability to filter-out distracting stimuli (often called ADD – Attention Deficit Disorder, but really an Attention Overdose Disorder), a tendency to reverse direction in both reading and writing, speech and language difficulties (the butt of further teasing), and an inability to think before he speaks.
No. 7, predictably like the polar ice-cap, covers all and takes the form of a major lack of self-confidence and anger that often pervades the rest of his being. This then can either preclude any subsequent personal success, or in some instances creates such a powerful sense of purpose and determination that nothing is ever allowed to get in the way of achievement and success – what ever that means.
‘Is it all bad?’ I ask, recalling some reference to dyslexia as a ‘gift’. The look he returns is tolerant, but barely so. “No, it’s not all bad, but it can seem that way. At 58 years I still regularly have nightmares about my primary schooling. Before we start singing the benefits of being a diesel motor let’s start by getting clear about what a diesel motor is, how it works, and getting really clear about the fuel we put in it.” He pauses, breathes out then adds, “I guess that’s my job”.
I leave the café and our interview with a mixed sense of despondency and guilt, gratitude that I was never one of these, and a determination to join up and present as clear a picture as I can through the words of my profession. Yes, I have a lad of my own, fortunately not dyslexic, but certainly one who leans toward the pictorial.
Laughton’s books contain insights for teachers and parents. He is adamant that they do not contain programmes for the ‘dyslexic’ child. He avoids this approach on the basis that each child has a different presentation – and different needs, and that the teachers already know how to teach. He is convinced that the parents and teachers are already concerned and motivated. They just need insights as to how these children think, how they feel, how they react, so that we can reach them and then teach them. Then we may better work with them – not against them. Hence the titles of his two books; REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER, and WITH, NOT AGAINST.
Laughton is pleased to be available for contact via his email; laughton.king@win.co.nz
Web; www.natalieart.com/ontour.htm Ph; 0274.171.804
Laughton King July 2008
I am 'dyslexic'. All my life I have been 'dyslexic', and I realise that I will always be so. We do not grow out of 'dyslexia', it cannot (and does not need to) be fixed. There is nothing wrong with the 'dyslexic' person - they have a perfectly intact manner of thinking, it is just a little different from the thinking style of others.
Being a University trained Psychologist (three psychology degrees), and having spent my entire professional working life (I am now 60) working with 'dyslexic' people, I have written two books around these issues, and am part-way through my third. To be simple and direct, my take on 'dyslexia' is very different from that of most other people - and my mission is to provide useful information to those people struggling with the daily issues of 'dyslexia'.
Progressively, via these pages (and as I manage to get assistance dealing with the technology) I intend to publish sections of the manuscript of my next, as yet unpublished, and untitled book .
All feedback is welcome.
For today, I have interviewed myself, as an overview statement, an outline of what "dyslexia'
really is about.
Article No. 1.
HELP!; OUR BOYS ARE THINKING IN PICTURES!
The headlines are emotional, sensational and repetitive, ‘our boys are failing’. Irrespective of how often we hear it, the message is none-the-less upsetting for anybody with a direct or indirect interest in children, the education system, or our future; our boys are not succeeding satisfactorily in their elemental academic learning.
Acknowledging that issues of academic failure on the part of our younger generation, particularly of our boys, is a journalist’s paradise-playground, the harsh downstream realities, so currently evident in our youth subculture, and so predictable from the evidence to date, raises concerns fueled by emotions ranging from love to fear.
Although recorded history shows clearly that there is nothing new about this situation, our current ‘progress to perfection’ mind-set leaves us little room to sit in complacency while the evidence dances so vividly before us. The education system is failing our little boys, somewhere, somehow. Our little boys stand to become big boys, and at this rate our big boys stand to become big problems – or at least enough of them stand in such a way as we see them as being a problem.
Although the reports persistently tell us there is a problem, they just as persistently fail to indicate where and how the problem lies, and fall glaringly short in terms of any suggestion or indication as to what might be done about it.
As a little boy who experienced such difficulties at school, and who ran perilously close to becoming one of the problematic youth, psychologist Laughton King believes he can shed light on the situation. He claims the explanation is as dynamic, yet as simple as the difference between petrol and diesel.
In his seminars and his books he reminds parents and teachers what happens when we inadvertently put petrol in our diesel car – the engine goes sluggish, overheats, then finally fails to perform. This, he says is what happens when we fail to recognize that many boys under the age of 12 years think in pictures.
He smiles when I look quizzically in response to this statement, as if expecting or indeed predicting my confusion. Thinking just happens – doesn’t it? Few of us probably ever bother to stop and think about thinking, let alone ponder such deep-and-meaningfuls such as how we might think. By way of explanation he gives a thumb-nail description which in essence hi-lights major differences between the way in which most males and females think. He describes girls and women as having a much greater natural skill – and a much greater tendency – to think in words. Boys and men on the other hand, he says have less skill in this arena, but correspondingly more skill in thinking in pictures. This he says explains a lot of the differences in the way men and women operate, and consequently a lot of the difficulties the two experience in communication. This part is familiar ground for most of us.
Despite our gender prejudices, this difference in style of thinking is not just a matter of personal obstinacy, but more a product of the different wiring systems that we have. He talks of ‘masculine’ wiring systems and ‘feminine’ systems, and neurological research that indicates that the feminine system involves up to eight separate centres for language processing (but few for spatial relationships), and that the masculine system has a solitary (and sometimes very lonely) centre for language processing, but has more processing space dedicated to the kinesthetic, tactile and spatial functions.
He points to the obvious – little boys are all touch, crash and go, where little girls are more physically reserved, but talkative in their style. He points to the more obvious – the café where we met for this interview has two or three groups of women talking with varying degrees of animation, and one solitary man hunched over his laptop. Through the window and across the way we see eight large motor-cycles parked outside a café-bar, and their red-and-black leathered owners – the current version of ‘middle-aged-gentlemen’ – sitting quietly with their bikes and their beers in the sun. Their bikes do the talking – or should it be, ‘their bikes make the statement’. Admittedly two women accompany the men, but Laughton draws my attention to their upper-arm tattoos, and with a wordless gesture suggests that I take this into account. What I notice is his distinctly male communication style – gesture, not words.
‘And the relevance to education, and educational success?’ I ask.
“Excuse me for generalizing”, he starts, “but after working with children – mainly boys – with learning difficulties for over thirty years, I feel it is reasonably safe to suggest that up to the age of about 12 years, most boys think predominately in pictures.” “Girls tend to think in words, almost in sentences, creating ‘straight-line’ or a linear thinking style which really suits our schooling system. Our schools are full of words – reading, writing, listening, talking etc – and girls lap this up, with words being a fuel to their thinking. It makes teaching the ‘feminine’ brain a piece of pie.”
He pauses, and a flash of pain passes his eye, “- but for many boys it is different. To varying degrees boys think in pictures. I call them ‘Diesels’. This is a function of their brain wiring. Words are just not a significant part of their system. Their fuel is different, their brain is different, their style is different, and as parents and teachers we need to know this.”
I listen to him speaking, and note the change in his own language, his shorter sentences, as he obviously reflects on personal experiences.
“Consider the teaching staff at your local primary school – primarily female?” Yes, in my case exclusively female, and I pre-empt his next question by acknowledging, ‘All very adept in their language skills.’
“What if they were inadvertently – with the best intention – putting petrol into these little boys’ diesel tanks?” “What I mean is, what if the words they are using were making little sense to the boys – what if their ‘masculine’ wiring system meant that they simply cannot make sense of the words – the language – that their teachers (and parents) are using?”
He invites me to draw a picture, a picture of the instruction “Hurry-up” – one of the most common instructions given to children. “If boys think in pictures, what is the picture that comes up in their head that will tell them what ‘hurry up’ means?”
I’m not much of an artist (more of a word-smith really) and he grins when he sees my rendition of someone running. “Nice picture of ‘run’, but I really wanted a picture of ‘hurry-up’”. Eventually I’m obliged to acknowledge that there is no specific picture of ‘hurry-up’, and he pushes his point by suggesting I draw ‘quickly’, (can’t do), or the instructions ‘tidy up’, (equally can’t do), ‘Put your gear away’ (still can’t do).
‘Enough of this, what should we be saying to boys’, I protest.
On his invitation I find I can draw “Put your bag on the hook behind the door” – it’s a bit like a comic strip, but any pictorial (diesel?) kid could comprehend my efforts there. Similarly the instruction “go brush your teeth – run” fits nicely into picture form, and I am beginning to think of my own family early-morning rush and some changes that might happen very soon.
“That’s ice-berg number one – and there are lots more like it that sink many of our little boys, and severely deflate the self-concept of many others. We tend to call these children ‘dyslexic’ because we see that they are having trouble with language – reading, writing etc – and we tend to think that there is something wrong with them. There is nothing wrong with them, they are perfectly well formed diesels (picture thinkers), and they don’t need fixing. They also don’t need more petrol squirted into their engines – and unfortunately most of our remedial assistance approaches involve just that – more petrol.”
“What they do need is a basic understanding of their natural style, acceptance of their pictorial processes, and for teachers and parents to take this into account. Let’s stop blaming the victim. We need to change us, and what we do, rather than trying to fix the children”.
This is his mission as he moves around the country with Natalie, his portrait-artist wife, in their five ton mobile home. Currently in the South Island, they have dedicated several years to personally visiting most towns in New Zealand, visiting schools, running seminars, and introducing parents and teachers, social workers and policy-makers to what he considers to be one of the most commonly misunderstood social dynamics of our time.
The implications are horrendous, he says. Firstly it cuts so many of us out of successful education. This has a huge impact on the self-concept of a large proportion of our male population. This in turn is reflected in our use of drugs and alcohol, our physical and mental health, our employment dynamics, our incidence of domestic violence, our incidence of split families, our attitude to authority and the law, and directly to our prison population. His passion is obvious.
Our discussion goes on and on, and I learn the impact of negative language (Ice-berg No. 2) and can now clearly see the hypnotic effect when I tell my four-year-old son ‘Don’t use the front door’. My blaming the child now seems so unfair, and I begin to wonder about the label ‘Oppositional Defiance Disorder’.
Ice-berg No. 3 emerges as a series of school rules (e.g. ‘Respect other people’s rights’) which simply cannot be transcribed in pictorial form, and which therefore completely elude the pictorial child’s understanding. A sense of sadness floods me as I suddenly realize who it is who repetitively stands in front of the Principal for breaking the school rules – yet again – and I see a completely new causal connection between learning difficulties and behaviour problems.
Ice-berg No. 4 appears as a complete difficulty when it comes to ‘creative-writing’ in the classroom. So many of these children have a wonderful creative fantasy - which presents itself in pictorial form. They have a head full of pictures, but no words – there is nothing for them to write, because you can’t write pictures. For the person who thinks in words this is so hard to comprehend, and they just see the child as lazy, or unmotivated.
And here comes Ice-berg No. 5. The parent or teacher really wants this child to succeed, and so ‘remedial help’ is arranged. Done with the very best intention, so often this is more petrol for the poor little diesel, and he struggles to comply but ends up failing yet again. Whereas in the past he has been motivated to achieve, now his repetitive failure takes its toll and he becomes motivated to self-preserve – so he withdraws his co-operation and his effort. ‘If I don’t try, I can’t fail’. For his efforts he is tagged as ‘unmotivated’, and with ‘an attitude problem’.
Ice-berg No. 6 is apparently more like an ice sheet, and consists of a whole raft of further dynamics that predictably accompany the ‘dyslexic’ condition. These include a tendency to food intolerances, or even food allergies, a social lonliness born of other children’s intolerance and teasing, an inability to filter-out distracting stimuli (often called ADD – Attention Deficit Disorder, but really an Attention Overdose Disorder), a tendency to reverse direction in both reading and writing, speech and language difficulties (the butt of further teasing), and an inability to think before he speaks.
No. 7, predictably like the polar ice-cap, covers all and takes the form of a major lack of self-confidence and anger that often pervades the rest of his being. This then can either preclude any subsequent personal success, or in some instances creates such a powerful sense of purpose and determination that nothing is ever allowed to get in the way of achievement and success – what ever that means.
‘Is it all bad?’ I ask, recalling some reference to dyslexia as a ‘gift’. The look he returns is tolerant, but barely so. “No, it’s not all bad, but it can seem that way. At 58 years I still regularly have nightmares about my primary schooling. Before we start singing the benefits of being a diesel motor let’s start by getting clear about what a diesel motor is, how it works, and getting really clear about the fuel we put in it.” He pauses, breathes out then adds, “I guess that’s my job”.
I leave the café and our interview with a mixed sense of despondency and guilt, gratitude that I was never one of these, and a determination to join up and present as clear a picture as I can through the words of my profession. Yes, I have a lad of my own, fortunately not dyslexic, but certainly one who leans toward the pictorial.
Laughton’s books contain insights for teachers and parents. He is adamant that they do not contain programmes for the ‘dyslexic’ child. He avoids this approach on the basis that each child has a different presentation – and different needs, and that the teachers already know how to teach. He is convinced that the parents and teachers are already concerned and motivated. They just need insights as to how these children think, how they feel, how they react, so that we can reach them and then teach them. Then we may better work with them – not against them. Hence the titles of his two books; REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER, and WITH, NOT AGAINST.
Laughton is pleased to be available for contact via his email; laughton.king@win.co.nz
Web; www.natalieart.com/ontour.htm Ph; 0274.171.804
Laughton King July 2008
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