A Mind at a Time

Mel Levine

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780743217682
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

"Different minds learn differently, " writes Dr. Mel Levine, one of the best-known education experts and pediatricians in America today. And that's a problem for many children, because most schools still cling to a one-size-fits-all education philosophy. As a result, these children struggle because their learning patterns don't fit the schools they are in.
In A Mind at a Time, Dr. Levine shows parents and others who care for children how to identify these individual learning patterns. He explains how parents and teachers can encourage a child's strengths and bypass the child's weaknesses. This type of teaching produces satisfaction and achievement instead of frustration and failure.
Different brains are differently wired, Dr. Levine explains. There are eight fundamental systems, or components, of learning that draw on a variety of neurodevelopmental capacities. Some students are strong in certain areas and some are strong in others, but no one is equally capable in all eight. Using examples drawn from his own extensive experience, Dr. Levine shows how parents and children can identify their strengths and weaknesses to determine their individual learning styles.
For example, some students are creative and write imaginatively but do poorly in history because weak memory skills prevent them from retaining facts. Some students are weak in sequential ordering and can't follow directions. They may test poorly and often don't do well in mathematics. In these cases, Dr. Levine observes, the problem is not a lack of intelligence but a learning style that doesn't fit the assignment. Drawing on his pioneering research and his work with thousands of students, Dr. Levine shows how parents and teachers can develop effective strategies to work through or around these weaknesses.
"It's 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 to our children to be good at everything. They are expected to shine in math, reading, writing, speaking, spelling, memorization, comprehension, problem solving...and none of us adults can" do all this, observes Dr. Levine. Learning begins in school but it doesn't end there. Frustrating a child's desire to learn will have lifelong repercussions. This frustration can be avoided if we understand that not every child can do equally well in every type of learning. We must begin to pay more attention to individual learning styles, to individual minds, urges Dr. Levine, so that we can maximize children's learning potential. In A Mind at a Time he shows us how.

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A Mind at a Time

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Introduction

Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

AMBROSE BIERCE, The Devil’s Dictionary

Time is that wherein there is opportunity, and opportunity is that wherein there is no great time. . . . Healing is a matter of time, but it is also a matter of opportunity.

HIPPOCRATES, Epidemics

PLANET earth is inhabited by all kinds of people who have all kinds of minds. The brain of each human is unique. Some minds are wired to create symphonies and sonnets, while others are fitted out to build bridges, highways, and computers; design airplanes and road systems; drive trucks and taxicabs; or seek cures for breast cancer and hypertension. The growth of our society and the progress of the world are dependent on our commitment to fostering in our children, and among ourselves, the coexistence and mutual respect of these many different kinds of minds. Parents have a special responsibility and joy as they get to know well and to cultivate their children’s individual minds. Tragic results are seen when we misconstrue and possibly even misuse a child’s kind of mind! And that happens all the time.

I’m a pediatrician with a mission. I’m obsessed with helping children find success. Over the years, working in all sorts of settings, I have been struck by the despairing flocks of boys and girls out there trying to make a go of it but faltering badly and disappointing their teachers, their families, and, worst of all, themselves. It has to be hard, very hard, to be a disappointment. I have come to the conclusion that helping such children find their way is as much a part of pediatric care as curing asthma attacks and ear infections.

Kids who can’t seem to operate their minds to meet expectations feel terrible about themselves, while their perplexed parents understandably lose sleep over their child who reads with little understanding or has trouble making friends or is out of focus in school. Teachers may feel exasperated and sometimes incompetent as they witness a student’s inexplicable downward spiral.

Some children end up paying an exorbitant price for having the kind of mind they were born with. Through no fault of their own, they are the owners of brains that somehow don’t quite mesh with the demands they come up against, requirements like the need to spell accurately, write legibly, read quickly, work efficiently, or recall multiplication facts automatically. When they grow up, they will be able to practice their brain’s specialties; in childhood they will be evaluated ruthlessly on how well they do everything. Having seen so often the agony of those who taste failure at an early age, I have developed a fervent commitment to such kids and to their parents and teachers. All are well-meaning, innocent victims of a child’s particular neurological circuitry.

On countless evenings I have driven home from work feeling emotionally depleted, dejected after listening to the sad tales of children who have come to equate education with humiliation. Many of them have been forced to accept labels for themselves, labels that mark them as somehow permanently deviant or dysfunctional, labels like ADD (attention deficit disorder) or LD (learning disability). Others have been placed willy-nilly on several drugs to somehow settle or sedate or soothe their kinds of minds. Adding to the torturous trails they navigate, many struggling students have been seriously wounded by the current testing mania in our society. Their intellectual identity has been shrunken down to a list of examination scores that will determine their destinies while shedding little light on their true strengths, weaknesses, and educational needs.

I have not been willing to stand by while these children suffer a battering of their self-esteem. Too many of them are misread, oversimplified, maltreated, or else falsely accused by the adult world. And you have to worry about what these innocent victims of their own wiring think of themselves. As one child lamented in a letter to me, “I can’t do nothing rite. My mom and my teachers keep hollerin at me all the time. I feel like I’m the dumbest kid in my class. I guess I was boren to loose.” No one should have to grow up feeling that way. And given all that recent research has revealed about differences in learning, no one needs to anymore.

The scenario is universal. Not every child is severely traumatized by a mismatching of his brain’s wiring to current demands, but all of us sooner or later come up against expectations that cause us frustration and lead to some panicky feelings of inadequacy. No one is exempt. We can all recall times in our lives when we felt close to worthless compared to others. Luckily, most of us are reasonably resilient and so can bounce back from such feelings of inferiority. Some people, however, never recover from their failures.

Just think of the tragedy in the making when a child goes through life listening to such caustic refrains as “We know you can do better” or “He’ll start succeeding when he makes up his mind to do so” or “She’s got an attitude problem” when such statements are just plain untrue. They suggest that a child is somehow academically immoral, guilty in the first degree of his or her own undoing! Yes, they all can do better, but if and only if they are better understood by adults and then helped to succeed. There is much that parents and teachers can do to redeem such kids, all of whom possess remarkable strengths waiting to be tapped. That is what energizes me the most as I participate in their evolving biographies. They all can be helped once we identify the strengths of their minds as well as the potholes that get in the way of their success or mastery. We can cultivate their minds by addressing the weaknesses and strengthening the strengths.

A Mind at a Time sets out to accomplish multiple goals. In the course of describing the struggles of unsuccessful children, I will shed light on the brain’s challenges that we all endure and see in our children over the years. Additionally, this book is intended to provide a road map for parents and teachers, enabling them to observe as children develop and mature through their school years the unfolding of important mind functions that play a leading role in school performance (and in career success). As such, this book might well be read by all parents and educators committed to the earliest possible detection of breakdowns in learning as well as the prompt identification of a child’s assets. This is a book that could not have been written decades ago. It is only in recent years that, fortified with a wealth of research into learning, brain function, and school failure, we have been able to develop approaches to the understanding of children’s minds.

A Mind at a Time is also a call to arms. I am beckoning parents, teachers, and policy makers to recognize how many kinds of young minds there are and to realize we need to meet their learning needs and strengthen their strengths and in so doing preserve their hopes for the future.

In writing this book, I decided to rely heavily on my own thirty years of experience as a pediatrician working in clinical programs and in schools of all types, from kindergarten through twelfth grade (with occasional forays into the early post–high school years). Over the course of these three decades I have been a collector and chronicler of case vignettes as well as direct quotations, the actual stories and words of real children’s struggles. For me these kids have been like textbooks on learning and mind development. I can learn more about a child by getting to know her well than by reading a list of computer-generated test scores. In fact, whenever I participate in the clinical evaluation of a child, I see some facets of brain function that I have never before seen. In this book I want to share what I have learned from the students, their parents, and their teachers. Although I follow the research in the field very closely, I think it appropriate to write this book based purely on objective clinical observation, a volume in which children and their families and teachers tell most of the story (the names and identifying details all changed, of course).

To set the tone, before venturing any further, I would like to offer several illustrative examples of some of these clinical encounters. All were the children of good parents who were feeling desperate and seeking help from my colleagues and me. I start with Caleb.

Caleb, a boy living just outside of Boston, enters preschool at the age of nearly four. Over the next two years of his education, he is expected to relate amiably and cooperatively with his little classmates and accept the routines, rules, and other requirements of daily life at Happy Mountain Preschool and Kindergarten. His parents feel justifiably pleased and proud. At this age Caleb must show that he is acquiring a set of much needed early academic pre-skills, as they are often called. That means he is using a scissors with good results, forming letters legibly, counting beads, understanding adventure stories, and acting upon verbal directions. Caleb keeps up with the motor demands, but he is slow to follow directions and uninterested during storytelling. His parents become concerned because Caleb is starting to say that he hates school. He makes believe his belly is aching on many a school day. They worry about him but can’t really pinpoint any kind of learning problem.

In first and second grades, Caleb is supposed to pick up some very basic math skills, which seem to come easily to him. He also must get his mind fully attuned to the sounds of the English language, so that he can tell them apart (like the difference between “bowl” and “ball”) readily, and start matching sounds with symbols. The latter is the basis for reading. Out of the blue, Caleb announces one night at supper, “School stinks, and I hate it. I can’t stand school. It’s dumb and I’m the stupidest kid in my room.” He flees to his bed in tears. Caleb is stumbling and beginning to fail academically because of his mind’s language weaknesses, which include trouble appreciating distinctly the sounds that make up words. He looks around and sees his classmates cracking the language code for reading, and he feels terrible and panic-stricken. His mother and father wonder if he needs tutoring or testing but are told by their pediatrician that Caleb is bright and no doubt will outgrow his problem. In third and fourth grades the language requirements intensify with the call for rapid growth of vocabulary and the understanding and use of challenging grammar. Caleb falls further behind.

Now he plunges into an academic nosedive. He is virtually blocked when it comes to putting his thoughts into language and then down on paper, even though he can form letters neatly. His parents, now very worried about him, have me evaluate him in North Carolina, find out that he is struggling with some critical language weaknesses, and arrange for Caleb to get intensive help. Meanwhile, Caleb’s math abilities are getting stronger, and he is discovered to be a terrific artist. He also has started trumpet lessons and is doing very well musically. Caleb competes well with his peers in sports, but does not seem to be a budding athletic talent. His parents come back to see me once a year and keep in touch by fax and e-mail.

As he makes his way through the notorious obstacle course we call middle school, Caleb’s reading starts to catch up to expectations. With continuing help, by the middle of eighth grade he is at grade level in reading and is beginning to write a lot more. He is getting straight As in math and keeping pace in science too. However, a lot of the abstract terminology in social studies and science confuses him due to his lingering language weaknesses. Caleb is coping effectively with the relentless peer pressure that is the guiding force of middle school life. He is also contending successfully with the heavy surge of memory demand that takes place in middle school—all those scientific facts, historical dates, math processes, and geographic places you have to file away. He also satisfies the need to be organized with homework, with deadlines, with meeting other responsibilities. His parents are pleased and relieved. They believe he is out of the woods.

Alas, during ninth grade, his first year of high school, Caleb’s grades take a terrible tumble. He has lost all interest in school, feels hopelessly overwhelmed, as if he could never succeed. He is lost amid 2,800 students and the overworked, underpaid, well-intentioned teachers, all of whom seem to have all they can do to learn the names of their students, much less understand their individual learning needs. Caleb has never read for pleasure and now he finds the reading load unbearable. Even his math work, Caleb’s dependably strong suit, declines.

Ninth grade amounts to an academic famine; Caleb is starved for success, but he manages to get by. His parents are in a panic. They call me for advice, and I discuss his situation with Caleb on the phone several times. I also arrange for him to see a psychologist at the Children’s Hospital in Boston. Caleb is denying he’s having problems and refuses all help. “If you guys would just bug off and quit hassling me I’d do okay. Besides, I don’t like any of my teachers, and none of my friends like their teachers either.” His mother and father feel as if they have been on a roller-coaster ride for the last decade. His mother described Caleb as follows: “He’s a doll. He’s so good. He means well. He craves our respect, but he believes he doesn’t deserve us. Now he feels so low, so blue all the time. And we know he’s discouraged, very discourage...