As Liz pointed out in my comments,

One of the difficulties of the Schools Attuned approach is that it does not map directly onto [IDEA] [NCLB] [DSM-IV-TR] (pick your poison). As a parent of a child with a specific learning disability, I think that Levine’s approach is more beneficial for the child — but the flaw is the conflict between the various laws and Levine’s non-labelling, discrete approach.

She probably right. I teach at a private school, which makes things easier for us. We are not beholden to the same entities as public schools are; however, we do still have an obligation to provide the services necessary to students we accept. To that end, I do think we can adopt this approach if we get everyone on board. Asking the faculty to read Levine’s book, All Kinds of Minds, would be a start. I know that I have been guilty of assuming laziness on the part of students whose performance is inconsistent. I doubt I am alone, and education might be key to changing some perceptions.

As I read the chapter on the Attention Controls System, I wondered what Levine’s take on medication was, as he didn’t mention it until the end. He feels that medication may help, but is not the whole solution and that often kids’ attention problems are addressed through medication when they also had other problems that didn’t get properly addressed. I think he’s probably right on both counts, but I was glad to see he was in favor of medication. I think too many people dismiss its effectiveness for kids who do have attention problems. Perhaps it is overprescribed. I don’t know. I have never suggested to a parent that his or her child needed medication. I don’t feel qualified to make that decision, since I’m not a doctor. However, I have encouraged parents who are concerned to have their child evaluated for problems (attention, LD, whatever) with their doctor. I have heard stories of teachers actually recommending medication, and I find that shocking.

I am concerned with one assertion Levine makes in this chapter. He chides secondary schools for their “frenetic” pace — timed tests, deadlines, etc. He explains that at this point in an adolescent’s brain maturation, it is ideal to teach them to “work slowly.” Well, he’s the doctor, and I’m most definitely not. However, I have students who lollygag on purpose, and he doesn’t address that. Students will be given plenty of time to complete a task and procrastinate. He also advocates not timing tests and letting students finish later. What about cheating? What about the fact that whether we like it or not, students will take timed tests in the form of college entrance exams and AP? Are we helping them by reinforcing the idea that they always have as much time as they need to complete tasks? I think teaching deadlines is fairly important, especially with adolescents. Teachers are competing with so many other things that I don’t see how anything would get done if they took Levine’s approach to teaching high school (at least where deadlines and timed assignments are concerned).

• Reading: You should have received a copy of Dr. Mel Levine’s A Mind at a Time in your course Prep-Packet. Please read Chapter 2 “The Ways of Learning”, Chapter 5, “Ways with Words: Our Language System” and Chapter 8, “Some Peeks at a Mind’s Peaks: Our Higher Thinking System.”

Well, that’s one required chapter down. Actually, I finding myself very interested in the things Levine writes in A Mind at a Time so far. My son, Dylan, is three years old and doesn’t talk, excepting mumbling “M” sounds. We have had him evaluated by a speech therapist, who agrees he needs to begin regular speech therapy and have been working with him at home with some simple sign language commands, identifying pictures in books, and making environmental noises (animal sounds). But I look at him and worry about how he will do in school with a teacher who doesn’t understand and writes him off as stupid. I also am angrier and angrier about how my oldest daughter, Sarah, has been treated in school. She has ADD, and her teachers have given her detentions for doing things she has done as a direct result of the fact that she has attention problems. It has never worked. I try to be supportive of teachers since I am one myself, but I have grown increasingly frustrated with how schools handle kids like Sarah. Almost every meeting I’ve had with teachers is “She’s a bright girl,” but… That tells me they feel her problems are a function of her intellect instead of one area of her brain — one learning system, to use Levine’s term. She is gifted artistically and she has highly developed language skills. I think she would make a wonderful children’s book writer and illustrator one day. But school is really hard for kids who have attention difficulties. The second chapter of Levine’s book, which I just finished, gives me a great deal of hope for Sarah. She will make it through school OK, probably with some run-ins because of her attention, but I really worry about how Dylan will be treated.

Now that I know what I am going to be teaching next year, I want to begin lesson planning. I had to turn in the copy of Understanding by Design: Professional Development Workbook to our school library. I simply need to buckle down and purchase some more professional development books for my own library. I spend too long with them to check them out of the library. Meanwhile, I did make some templates for unit planning utilizing the UbD method. If you would like them, I have them available in Word or PDF. If you don’t have a word processor that reads Word documents, download the PDF. Otherwise, I’d recommend downloading the Word document so that you can tweak it and actually use it for planning.

I am going to work on restoring some posts that were on my blog before my old host went down.  If you subscribe via Bloglines or another RSS reader, you might be wondering what’s going on as those old posts appear; those of you who visit directly probably won’t notice anything unusual.

As promised, here is the entry I wrote about a negative school experience:

I am hard pressed to think of one experience that was so profoundly negative that it stands out in my mind, that it still makes me feel hurt or angry. I have many experiences in P.E. that make me feel that way. I never felt coordinated. I was always picked last for teams. I dreaded Field Day, which most of my peers absolutely loved. I never won ribbons—I always had to take home purple participation ribbons, which my mom saved and joked about. I joked, too, but inside, those ribbons were painful reminders of inadequacy. My sister brought home blue 1^st place ribbons, red 2^nd place ribbons, and white 3^rd place ribbons in various events every year. Why couldn’t I hit a ball? Why was I scared the ball was going to hit me? Volleyball was horrible. I remember missing the ball every time it came near me when I was in the front row because I was scared it would hit me. I could serve OK, but that didn’t seem as scary. One time I actually made a basket in basketball, but I had run the wrong way and made it into the other team’s basket. To teach me a lesson, I suppose, my P.E. teacher counted the points for the opposing team. My team hated me. One time, we were playing baseball, and it was well-known and universally accepted that I couldn’t hit the ball. My team advised me to try to let the ball hit me so I could get a walk. I was so upset. It hurt my feelings so much. I remember that I tried to hit the ball anyway. I failed. My teammates were mad and yelled at me for not letting the ball hit me.

I really did try to do what I supposed to do in P.E., but I just couldn’t. I did have a P.E. teacher who I loved in 7^th grade. She tested us objectively on the rules of games, which I always knew. It was putting the procedures into action that I couldn’t do. I remember telling her so proudly that I made a double-bogey on a hole on the golf course—which is a really bad score of five strokes—and she was so pleased that I knew the term and congratulated me. Other teachers might have pointed out that it wasn’t a good score, but she realized that it was good for me. That same year, I caught a pop-fly in baseball. I was on cloud nine all day. I had never managed to do such a thing before (or since). I still try to downplay this by writing it off as a lucky accident. The ball just plopped into the mitt I was holding over my head. I wasn’t even looking. I was scared it would hit me. It landed in the mitt instead. So I caught it and actually made an out! I remember the kid who hit it sought me out after the inning and congratulated me, in his way—he wanted to know who the lucky kid was who caught that excellent hit.

I’m supposed to be recounting negative school experiences, but I can’t help but try to find some positives. I wish there were more, but that one year was the only somewhat positive experience I ever had with P.E.—I subject I came to loathe and dread. I never went so far as to try to fake illness or figure some other way out of it, but I think that was because it never occurred to me I could possibly get away with it if I did. Instead, I just went every day. It never occurred to me until I wrote this that there was a sort of courage in that. I faced it every day and didn’t try to get out of it, even though it was almost always an embarrassing failure.