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Talking about Learning Diabilities

Learning disabilities have been somewhat of a taboo topic in society and in education. In society, it is becoming less so but that change is not being reflected in our education system. This lack of education about situations of the people around us leads us all to ignorance towards them.

My friend’s family’s (true, not theoretical) story demonstrates exactly why this education is needed. My friend’s brother was diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago, but recently found out he is on the autism spectrum. She says that the lack of knowledge around ASD has contributed to a very difficult life for her brother and her family. Her brother faces bullying at school from kids who have no compassion to those different than them. People make fun of his stutter, his different emotions, and his family. Had these kinds of things been talked about in schools, these very kids would likely grow up to be more compassionate.

I just moved to Tennessee, and I hear all kinds of insensitive atrocities said about disabled and neuroatypical people by kids at this school. Ableist slurs are part of the vernacular here. Part of that is cultural and has to do with upbringing, but the other part is schools. Nobody ever talked about ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Dyslexia, etc. in schools. Even growing up for most of my school on the west coast, the most I learned about learning disabilities was from Rick Riordan’s books where most major characters had ADHD and Dyslexia. (Side note: the representation in these books in unprecedented compared to many other popular things, and representation for disabled people is very important). It’s just not part of anything that’s talked about in schools.

So what exactly would talking about learning disabilities in schools fix? There are two things: ignorance and lack of compassion, and teaching kids about themselves.

Ignorance leads to bigotry and hate. Humans have a natural aversion to those different than ourselves. This can easily be overcome with education and compassion, which should be introduced at a very early age. Knowing about these disabilities, how they manifest, what challenges they bring for people, and how they can be supportive towards people with disabilities would create a major shift in the general attitude towards learning disabilities.

Imagine someone going through their whole life not knowing why they have trouble reading. Imagine being too scared to raise the issue for fear of bullying. Imagine hearing someone say “dyslexia” at 17 years old, asking what that is, and having the problems of the last 17 years click into place. That is the reality for many people with learning disabilities. I knew I had ADHD since fourth grade and keeping that in mind helped me modify my study and organization habits to work with some of my difficulties. What if I hadn’t known until much later? People are told how to study and practice and learn under the assumption that they are an average neurotypical person. These methods don’t work for everyone, especially people with learning disabilities. These people are always given instructions for the majority and don’t understand why things aren’t working for them. If these disabilities were talked about in schools in a non-stigmatizing way, people would be more comfortable talking about their difficulties and find clarity earlier in their lives.

I can’t begin to think of a reason as to why this important and relevant topic isn’t discussed in schools, but it’s causing problems with lots of people growing up facing harassment for being different while simultaneously not knowing why they’re different.

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This is really important. We've known for a long time that grades don't really measure progress, but we haven't been doing anything about it. We've been raising standards and trying to improve on our unfixable school structure. What we need is a revolutionary change in our approach to teaching, and this is definitely the right way to go.

In my second post I talked about how in math, low level concepts are spread out and repeated over and over again in elementary and middle school, which leads students to be bored, unengaged, and unmotivated. This personalized approach allows students to move on once and for all from topics they learned in elementary school, and most importantly, it lets them set their own pace from the class. This is a much better approach to learning and really addresses all the problems that we've seen lately in education.

One small school district in New Hampshire was performing at the bottom of the state when it came to standardized tests and graduation rates. Then, leaders totally changed the way teachers taught.

(Image credit: Richie Pope for NPR)

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Amount vs Complexity

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a tool in educational psychology to classify levels of thinking and learning. The six categories are Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating. Knowing about the kind of work they’re doing and the types of thinking they’re doing can be beneficial to students looking to know more about how they learn. With that knowledge comes developing strategies for how to maximize learning potential. Knowing about Bloom’s Taxonomy can profoundly help with that.

A lot of work in schools is busywork. It’s unfortunate, but true. The debate over whether homework should be part of school at all is a conversation for another day (though I will say that I believe that giving no assigned homework and letting students choose what to work on would be a wake up call to the unmotivated students who would get no practice and fail the class, an exercise in judgement and self-guided learning for motivated students to know their strengths and weaknesses and practice them, and an overall foresight into the structure of college and adulthood) but the reality we have to deal with is that homework is a part of school. The ball is in our court to figure out what to do with it. I believe that educators will see the most positive results if they would assign low amounts of complex work instead of high amounts of simple work.

The first time I asked myself this question was when my geometry teacher assigned 50 or so problems from the book as homework. All of them were just formulas and recall. Remembering is the lowest level of learning and thinking on Bloom’s Taxonomy scale.  A similar night had a lot of problems which were split fairly evenly between “remember”-level complexity and “understand”-level complexity. Most of the problems we did in class were around “apply”-level and “analyze”-level. She was a fantastic teacher to me but the homework took up so much of my time, even as a math person! I couldn’t imagine how long it took for people who struggled in math. The real disappointment was seeing so many “evaluate” and “create” problems in the book that were skipped over! I saw one that asked to approximate the area under a curve using trapezoids and triangles (which foreshadows calculus), another that asked to derive a formula using information given, and there were just so many interesting problems that got skipped over in favor of lower level problems. With geometry it’s understandable that remembering formulas would be important, but I’ve seen this with other areas and subject matters; the practice work assigned is just low level thinking.

I think it’s important to have variety in levels of thinking, but when homework is just recall work, it gets boring and then we’re left with an unmotivated student. New and challenging work can be given to kids after mastery has been shown in the bottom two levels of the period, and there’s then an opportunity for more growth. Even if a student were to work on the more interesting problems in the book, it would take more time because they still have to do the low level work. (With no set assigned homework kids would be free to choose which problems to practice). Repetitive busywork turns kids into virtual zombies, just cranking through one problem at a time without much thought to the task at hand. With complex and challenging work it breaks through and allows kids to think deeper about what they’re learning.

The best part about this is that with very high level thinking, only a few problems are really needed to demonstrate mastery in a subject. They may take more time per problem because of the complex thinking, but students will be more stimulated doing it which will make time go by faster. They would also stop dreading homework so much; seeing three problems assigned versus twenty makes a big difference.

Schools have plenty of resources for the motivated teacher and the motivated student to engage in complex work and have a more stimulating and interesting experience at school, they just have to use them. It would benefit every type of student, the teacher, and practically everyone involved would get more out of it, perhaps even leading to students discovering a passion for something once they were exposed to more complex thinking in the area. There’s only good that can come from it. Rising standards want a more rigorous learning but standards don’t quite target this specific area. It begins with the teacher and the student, and starting there will lead to improvement in every area.

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Our generation would be a lot different if we publicized, televised, and red- carpeted the Nobel awards for peace, chemistry, and medicine the way we do for the Grammys/ Oscars/ etc…

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A solution to unmotivated students

School has been becoming increasingly restrictive and standardized over the years. As brilliantly articulated in this TED Talk by Ken Robinson, school has been killing creativity. Academic subjects are prioritized and valued more than non-academic subjects, and excelling in non-academic subjects is discouraged on the basis that students won't make careers out of non-academic subjects. At the same time this has been happening, standards are only becoming stricter and more rigorous in the hope that it will bring kids to submit to academic subjects. While standards are being raised and expectations are being heightened, with some positive result (1) (2), stress and apathy levels are also rising. Because of this, my opinion is that the stricter standards are generally unsuccessful.

What is the reason that kids are unmotivated? Taking a quick look at Common Core Math Standards (courtesy of IXL Learning) for 4th and 7th grades, I can already see similarities. 4th grade “Number and Operations in Base Ten” and “Number and Operations—Fractions” have many similarities to 7th grade “The Number System.” Word problems, adding and subtracting integers, operations with fractions, they’re doing a lot of the same stuff. This happens in other grades and math areas too. It’s no wonder that students are unmotivated in 7th grade to complete the same work that they completed in 4th grade. The problems may be slightly more complex, but they still draw on the same skills and concepts. Learning (specifically the “a-ha” moment and formation of memory) happens when a synapse, or a new brain connection, is formed. If seventh graders are using three-year old brain connections, they aren’t learning anything new. Under-stimulated kids lose interest. 

My own personal growth stagnation was from the 3rd to 7th grade, and I only really discovered my love for math when I took Algebra 1 in 8th grade. Because I was so unmotivated, I didn’t have a quality work output in math and wasn’t selected to be in the “smart group” that got to take Algebra 1 in the 7th grade, even though by now I’ve met or surpassed their math interest. Specialized interest in a person’s subject area may not show up until they’re introduced to higher level concepts, and by that time valuable time that they could have used for developing their interests has been lost.

The same things happen in other academic areas. I did a plant cell model and learned about organelles in 5th and 7th grades. I learned about American colonization in 5th and 8th grades. It was really only in the eighth grade when the pace of learning started to pick up and I became a motivated learner again. For my peers, that interest stayed dead. It had somewhat of a revival once they started high school, but years of real learning was missed out on. I believe that if concepts in core areas had not been repeated so often and spread out so much, interest and aptitude could have continuously developed and cultivated throughout all of primary education, instead of stagnating in middle school. If higher level concepts had been introduced earlier, stagnation would not have happened. 

The question now is how do we solve the problem of unmotivated students after stagnation in interest has already happened. I believe that given the stricter standards and new credit requirements and everything mentioned in the first paragraph, we can deem them overall unsuccessful. I have a new approach, one that begins with adjustment of credit requirements. My solution is as follows:

Science: 2 credits required

Biology and Physical Science, unless Physical Science is covered in 8th grade, in which case the second credit is another science class chosen by the student

Math: 3 credits required

Algebra 1, Geometry, Practical Math

Social Studies: 4 credits required

0.5 credit Economics, 0.5 credit US Government and Civics, 1 credit Global Issues, 1 credit US History, 1 credit World History

English: 2 credits required

English 9, English 10, and a satisfactory reading/writing proficiency score at the end of the two classes. If a satisfactory score isn’t met, one or more flexible core credits becomes a remedial English credit.

Arts: 2 credits required

Foreign Language: 2 credits required (same language, consecutive)

Can be completed in middle school to free up 2 credits for electives

Physical Education: 2 credits required (1 Health and 1 more PE)

Elective Focus: 3 credits required

Flexible core credits: 6 required

The Elective Focus is something we have in Tennessee that I’ve come to really like. It consists of three credits in a particular area of postsecondary study. Various elective focuses can be Advanced Placement (pass 3 AP exams), ROTC (4 credits of ROTC), or a number of CTE programs like Health and Human Services, Business and Management, Agriscience, Cosmetology, or Fundamentals of Education. I like it because it engages students in career possibilities and lets them explore their future, and it also creates jobs for specialized teachers who teach nontraditional classroom subjects.

A note about Practical Math and Social Studies: many students complain something along the lines of “I can’t do taxes but I know the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.” I don’t believe that Personal Finance curricula go far enough in educating students about the financial decisions they will be making and the math that they should know how to do. Practical Math would be a curriculum that includes all of Personal Finance like loans, interest, and credit cards, but would also include taxes and a review of pre-algebra and algebra with an emphasis on everyday life calculations. It would also include a review of the concepts in geometry that are applicable to the lives of the average person such as area, perimeter, volume, unit conversion, proportions and similar figures, etc. The reason Social Studies has 4 credits is because it’s a broad spectrum of studies. Closer look shows that all core subjects (except for math) are on equal standing: 2 credits. History, Science, Arts, English, etc. The other two Social Studies credits are for Global Issues, Economics, and US Government and Civics. Economics and US Government and Civics are important topics to know to be an informed participant in democracy. Global Issues is important for people to know for the same reason but also to educate about the causes and effects of the contemporary world in order to have a better background for future analysis of events.

Flexible core credits are the key point of my solution. Currently we have arts oriented people struggling in sciences and science oriented people struggling in arts. Some argue that it makes for a well rounded individual, but I think it makes for a waste of time. My personal philosophy is that everyone should continuously strive to better themselves at every moment possible. I don’t believe that people are able to do that stuck in a class that they know they will never have an interest in. That’s why I would require 6-8 more core credits (core including arts) that the student gets to take, but they can choose which core area(s) those credits are in. After taking the introductory courses in these areas, they will hopefully have an idea of what their strengths are and they can spend time developing those strengths. I don’t believe that continuing to force students through classes they’re weak in is productive, and it can damage their GPA and transcript which can affect getting into college. It can make a student appear unprepared and unmotivated for college even though they’re very prepared and motivated to study their interest in college and become a specialist. By allowing students to have more control over the classes they take, they will be more engaged in what they learn because it will be closer to what they plan for the future. Being able to devote more time to what they like will alleviate stress and get students excited about learning again.

Student motivation is an epidemic that requires re-examination of education standards, the pace at which successive concepts are introduced, and what high school students are expected to complete. A lot of intricacies are involved and many complex cause and effect systems are at work here but I believe fixing student motivation will begin the process of improving the quality of education they receive.

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Here we go

Hi!

My name is Kyle and I want to be a math teacher. Eventually, however, I want to become US Secretary of Education. My passion has been education for a while now (specifically math education) but I have a vision for the future of education in the United States. There are a lot of problems, and I really believe that our system was never sustainable and that it’s culminating in a breakdown with our changing society. We’ve been doing the same thing for a few hundred years and the rest of society has moved on without us. People used to use horses to get around, and at that same time kids learned in classrooms. Now we have state of the art cars with power that those horse-drawn carriage makers could never have dreamed of, but we’re still in classrooms.

This blog is going to be me detailing the problems in our education, and illustrating my ideas in solutions. Part of it will be reflecting on lessons and materials from Leaders Of Learning, a course taught by Harvard Graduate School of Education through edX, an online platform founded by Harvard and MIT whose goal was to provide equal and equitable access to higher level education for all. My professor is Richard Elmore, one of the leading speakers on education and education reform in the US.

Oh, and I’m 15. So I have a few years before I can make my dreams a reality. But, it’s never too early to start.