A Mind at a Time

A road map for parents and educators to help recognize how many kinds of young minds there are and to realize that we are in a position to help strengthen their strengths and in doing so, preserve their hopes for the future.

The Mind’s possibilities

Planet earth is inhabited by people who have all kinds of minds. The brain of each human is unique.

Some are wired to create symphonies and sonnets, while others are able to design airplanes and yet others are sport champions.

It is taken for granted in adult society that we cannot all be generalists skilled in every area of learning and mastery.

Nevertheless, we apply tremendous pressure on our children to be good at ‘everything’.

Everyday they are expected to shine in reading, math, writing, speaking, spelling, memorization, comprehension, socialization, athletics…

Few, if any children master all of these ‘trades’. And none of us adults can.

In one way or the other, all minds have their specialties and their frailties.

Each of us is endowed with highly complex, inborn circuitry – creating innumerable branching pathways of options and obstacles.

While some of us have brains that can handle a lot of information at once, others have brains that process little information with more accuracy.

Hopefully, we discover and engage in good matches between our kind of mind and our pursuits in life.

Our abilities and inabilities are tested and challenged throughout our school years.

Some price, modest or substantial, must be paid any time a mind is forced to perform in a manner that it is not wired to understand.

In most schooling, this ends up in instruction that uses the ‘one size fits all’ method.

How Learning Works

The most basic instrument for learning is something called a ‘neurodevelopmental’ function.

Our own minds and those of our children are like tool chests – filled with functions to master subtraction, recitation or riding a cycle.

As you can surmise, the brain’s toolbox is vast – and on top of that, the range of different combinations of functions called upon to accomplish academic tasks is simply mind boggling.

In view of all these functions, it should not surprise us that breakdowns or specific weaknesses are commonplace.

These are known as neurodevelopmental dysfunctions. Often, these do not seriously obstruct roads to success, but sometimes they do !

As adults – parents and educators, being aware and alert to these symptoms can help liberate student distress.

What’s on your ‘Mind’

Some children have difficulty writing, even though they have lots to say. They just can’t seem to form letters quickly enough to keep up with the flow of ideas and words. So, their writing is dramatically inferior to the richness of their thinking and speaking.

When kids write, their brains assign specific muscles to specific aspects of letter formation, certain muscles are supposed to handle vertical movements, others create rotary movements, while others operate to stabilise the pencil so that it will not fall on the floor.

These kids endure agonizing difficulty with such motor implementation – they simply cannot assign the correct muscles consistently !

Therefore, writing looms as a tormenting problem for them. This is a specific neurodevelopmental dysfunction.

All too often, in most schooling systems, such dysfunctions go undetected- and students are branded as ‘ failures’, or ‘not too bright’.

If these children are not provided ‘matches’ for their specific wiring, then the entire schooling years can turn a otherwise ‘bright and creative’ child into a ‘problem’ child.

We need to recognize that not all children have all their wires functioning in correct sync all the time.

Then we need to understand that homes and schools should be the first places where children get as many of their wires in sync so that their minds can celebrate success more times than despair !

The 8 systems It is helpful to think of the well being of the

mind in ‘8 manageable categories’ or neuro-developmental systems.

They have to work together if learning is to occur, just as the cardiovascular system has to team up with the pulmonary system to promote the delivery of oxygen to various parts of our body.

At any point, the strength of functions within each system, directly influences performance in and out of school.

The 8 Systems

The NeurodevelopmentalSystems

Attention ControlSystem

Memory SystemSocial Thinking System

Language SystemHigher Thinking System

Motor System Spatial Ordering

System

Sequential Ordering System

Keeping this in ‘Mind’…

Parents and teachers experience satisfaction watching children’s neurodevelopmental systems expand in their capabilities over days, months and years- specially when the functions are put to good use, exercised like limber muscles.

Caring adults have to realise that a system deteriorates drastically when it is underutilised !

How a Mind’s Profile comes to be…

What shapes a child’s profile?

Can you influence the process?

Multiple forces interact to determine a child’s strengths and shortcomings – and parents ( first ) and educators ( next ) are in a pretty good position to influence most – but not all – of these forces.

Genes

Many strengths and weaknesses appear to be inherited – either completely or in part.

In the best of all the worlds, sharing aspects of your child’s profile can make you a more sympathetic parent.

But with due respect to genes, they maybe powerful but they don’t prevent us from working on our weak spots, especially if we decide they are worth working on.

Family life and Stress level

Clearly when families feel they are buried beneath the stresses and strains of daily existence, it may be hard to foster a stimulating intellectual life through shared experiences and high level discussions at the dinner table regarding current events.

Socio economic realities exert powerful influences on a child’s development. Poverty has its risks, as does being over privileged or overindulged.

Cultural factors

A student’s cultural background may help determine which neurodevelopmental strengths get stronger and which ones do not.

In some cultural settings athletic prowess is considered valuable, in others, sports are deemed trivial pastimes.

Whether or not a teenager reads novels, repairs jeeps, attends opera’s or hunts, vividly reflects the culture in which he or she is growing up. These activities profoundly influence a child’s profile.

Friends

Friends play a dominant role in shaping the brains of peers. Children who have no intellectual interests become negative role models for one another.

Learning and succeeding at school may be perceived as some kind of social taboo.

On the other hand, strong influences from peers who are actively involved in some positive outcome can be catalysts for even the most reticent student.

Health / Emotions

Numerous medical factors can foster or impede brain development during the school years.

Nutrition, certain illnesses and physical trauma all may play a role in shaping a profile.

Students with anxiety or depressed feelings often lose all interest and become inhibited about performing in school.

Educational experience

The quality of a child’s teaching most certainly affects his or her mind profile.

In fact, recent studies using sophisticated brain scans have shown vividly that good instruction can actually result in positive changes in brain structure.

It is possible to see increases in brain tissue when parts of the brain get properly stimulated after having been neglected.

How lifestyles may affect learning styles

Increasingly over the years, parents and educators have been trying to wade through the influences of modern living.

Rapidly paced entertainment can make school content seem like a colossal bore !

Aside from the violence that may model impulsive acting out behaviours, there is the passivity involved in watching most TV programmes.

Inactive information uptake while lying on your back and consuming junk food eclipses opportunities for creative thinking, brainstorming, and the development of hobbies.

Take for eg canned laughter during situational comedy – imagine being told when something is funny – the ultimate affront to language processing and higher thinking.

Lifestyle issues also arise when a child becomes overly programmed.

Schools that are highly and tightly structured so that there is little time for original thinking can short circuit brainstorming in students.

This is especially the case when a child is also heavily laden with scheduled activities after school and on weekends.

As parents, we have an obligation to keep things in check – to gauge whether a cultural phenomenon is getting out of hand.

The Intake controls

Much information, both valuable and worthless, orbits around the minds of our kids in school.

What are they supposed to do with it?

How can they manage the daily data deluge?

What needs to occur for a mind to choose the right information to process at the right time and then to extract meaning from it?

Intake is only valuable if it is remembered and retrieved at the right time. This is where our ‘Memory’ kicks in.

A flawed ‘information filing system’ can render even the most intuitive student inept.

Some students have phenomenal musical memory, others are great with faces and names and yet others are trivia masters. But no one – not one at all – has it all.

Learning to ‘Remember’

Our mind’s storage can be divided into ‘short term’ ‘active’ and ‘long term’ memory.

Short term memory allows for the very brief retention ( usually about 2 seconds )of new information.

Active memory is the memory you operate when you temporarily hold in mind all the different components of what you are trying to do right now.

And long term memory is at the other end of the spectrum – the warehouse for more or less permanent knowledge.

Short term memory Short term memory is learning’s front

entrance. As chunks of data enter our minds, we can send them to our long term memory for later use, use them right away or delete them. To extend the life of data in short term memory – you can:

Whisper it under your breadth Form mental pictures of it Put it into words ( recode it ) The space in short term memory is absurdly tight

( most adults can remember only 7 digits if given a series of numbers to repeat immediately - most elementary children can remember only 4 or 5 )

Active working memory Active working memory is the memory you use

when you head for the kitchen to get a plastic bag. But if you arrive there and have no idea what you were doing in the kitchen, you have experienced some humbling limitations of your active working memory.

Active working memory is the place where the multiple intentions or components of any activity are held in place long enough to complete that activity !

As such – it plays an extremely important role in productivity and learning in school.

Active working memory lets a child remember the stuff at the top of the page while reading the last few sentences of that page ( not to be mistaken for comprehension ) A faulty active working memory means that a child may often end up losing her place in the middle of a math problem.

Parents / educators have to encourage such children to write down as much as possible. These are also kids who need to underline important points while reading and then review these at the end of each page – possibly even dictating them into a tape recorder.

Active working memory also gets affected by anxiety. If a child is feeling sad or preoccupied, there may not be room for much else in her mind’s working memory. For eg – if a child’s parent has gone out of town, or if parents are having marital problems, the active working memory can fill up with worries and not leave much room for academic ingredients.

It is also possible to have good active working memory in some subjects and not in others.

Long term memory

Long term memory is a seemingly limitless repository for preserving knowledge, skills, and life experiences.

Its massive storage vaults can be drawn upon throughout life. It may be that we don’t forget things, but we forget where we put them !! ( tip of the tongue phenomenon )

For that reason, long term memory consists of two stages – filing and access !!

Filing information

When a student fails a quiz because she has trouble remembering the parts and names of the digestive system, there is a strong likelihood she wasn’t very systematic when she first stored it into her long term memory. ( match of language of learning to wiring of profile of child ! )

The act of filing information for later use is called consolidation and it is with the ‘Language’ system that we do this best.

The language ingredients of learning include, among other things –

The ease with which a brain detects differences between the forty four or so different language sounds

The ability to understand, remember vocabulary The capacity to express thought while speaking and on

paper And the speed of comprehension in daily use.

It is not surprising then, that children who have even the mildest language inefficiencies are at a disadvantage throughout their schools years.

Robert Frost, in commenting on his trade , once wrote,

“A poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness…It finds the thought,

and the thought finds the words”

Frost was describing a miraculous and mysterious process, namely the constant back and forth exchange between words and thoughts.

The establishing of this flow is one of school’s most daunting demands.

Language even helps provide some internal control over a child’s behaviour, it is known that talking through conflicts or temptations, using inner voices, often prevents a child from being rash or lashing out.

Verbal demands intrude on less obvious academic territories as well. For eg, using words bolsters mathematical understanding, especially when combined with visualisation.

Language even gets into the game when it comes to sports – understanding a coach’s rapid fire commands makes demands

on our language systems.

Automatic versus Literate Language

Automatic English is the English spoken at the bus stop, in the staff room, and at the mall. “Hey, like, I’m gonna chill out instead of goin’ to the party, like, whatever yaar”. It is the English of everyday banter and interpersonal dealings.

Literate language, on the other hand, includes sophisticated classroom talk as well as academic reading and writing; it’s the verbal ‘craftsmanship’ and ‘showmanship’ that is exhibited when one is studying or expounding upon concepts like “due process” or ‘energy resources”.

Often, then, children with language problems start tuning out of the academic program and look as if they have attention deficits.

Attention needs to be nurtured and such children’s attention controls are tuned off by language.

Children with literate language dysfunction may initially go undetected but the discrepancies become increasingly conspicuous in middle and secondary school.

Concrete versus Abstract Language

Concrete language has meaning that comes directly from our senses. It portrays things we can picture, feel, smell or hear. The words “cat”, “perfume”, “spiciness” and “noisy” are all concrete words.

Abstract language, on the other hand, is language that can’t be deciphered directly through a sensory pathway. It includes words like “elite”,”irony”, “symbolism” and “sportsmanship” – terms resistant to instant visualization.

As children advance through school, an increasing share of the language inflow is abstract, disconnected from immediate sensory transmission. Thus, students experience severe academic stress as words and sentences become less concrete.

Mounting levels of abstract terminology pervade the sciences, literature, and mathematics. That commonly leads to a decline in the grades of many students with language dysfunctions.

Students can be encouraged to keep a personal dictionary of the tough abstract terms

and review them periodically.

Effective oral language serves an abundance of purposes. For one thing, it correlates highly with writing skill.

Quite understandably, “If you don’t talk so good, it might be you’d not write too good neither.”

Children with expressive language problems come up with communication barriers at home and at school. They need plenty of practice. They need to build up their language ‘muscles’.

Keeping a watchful eye…

Oral language needs to blossom progressively in all children – and we can help it along through rich verbal interactions.

Children should be encouraged to elaborate, speak in full sentences, avoiding conversational deterrents like,”stuff’,”thing” and “whatever”.

Parents should be mindful to what extent a child’s entertainment and recreational life is monopolized by non verbal activities.

Children need to see their parents reading, and they need to be read to as early as possible.

Children can benefit from language oriented out-of-school entertainment such as scrabble, crossword puzzles and word building games.

Keeping a diary is another good way to promote language skills.

All students need to work on their summarization skills - since this works as a perfect bridge between memory and language.

Overwhelming data now suggests that language and attention are intrinsically linked.

And a lack of attention control may masquerade as laziness or attitude.

Once we are able to overcome our language dysfunction, we automatically see our success in other areas.

As concerned adults, parents or educators, we need to realise that our focus should remain on locating the right match for the mind.

This will ensure more occasions for success – and providing tools and techniques for overcoming dysfunctions will mean that more students will be able to feel good about themselves.

Finally…..Mind it !!