Mikecanhelp

Planners! ADHD! Like peanut butter and chocolate... No, not really...
A parent asked me this morning, can I recommend a planner that is good for people with ADHD?
I cannot. But I have (helpful) thoughts...

ADHD and Planners Here is an email I just wrote to a parent who asked me about their child’s need to use a planner. Have I ever seen one that was particularly...

The most important thing. Seriously.

Truly Fundamental: Executive Functions This is the single most important understanding I need as an educator. Everything I do right for students & every helpful consultation I offer parents or col...

Here is a pep talk I made for Middle Schoolers in 2023.
The theses:
1. Anyone in middle school right now was deprived of key scholarly-community-building "soft-learning" because of lockdown during 3rd/4th/5th grades, but rather than creating a chronic deficit, by forcing this generation to intentionally learn those skills now, the pandemic has given this generation unprecedented potential to make great change in the world, carrying those intentional-community-building skills forward.

2. Western academic tradition alienates many of us from our learning by reifying categories of knowledge; the need for connection of every kind post-pandemic is particularly acute; thus, everything we learn and do should be embedded in a deep, genuine, and ever-present sense of connectedness.

Message To Middle Schoolers in 2023

Are you a parent attending conferences for your kid? A teacher doing conferences with parents? I have a suggestion (below)
Basically, I was in a parent-teacher conference today, and was surprised how salient my blog post about teacher meetings still seems to be. Originally about Student Support Team meetings in particular, I think it definitely applies to basic conferences and key questions that teachers should try to answer for parents, and parents should gently ask for if they aren't offered.
Here's the snippet (the whole blog is at https://andoccasionallyjoy.blogspot.com/2018/01/things-helpers-need-to-know-big-people.html ) :
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Talking about progress shouldn’t be confusing, but it is. We can remedy this a great deal if we talk about two kinds of progress, separately: progress relative to self, and progress relative to peers. As teachers and helpers we should offer this; as parents we should ask for it.
..
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..“how do you think it went? Seems like things are pretty good!” I think a skewed-positive impression is a pretty common parent experience of such meetings, relatively independent of how positively the school team *intended* to convey things. Why this disconnect?
Perhaps because teachers are with the child every day, and they don’t always realize how much the school-child may differ from the home-child; perhaps because teachers assume parents must have a baseline clarity about their child’s academic strengths and challenges (especially teachers who are not parents); or perhaps because of misplaced privacy notions regarding discussing “other children” with a family: teachers often leave out the "progress-relative-to-peers" piece entirely. But this kind of progress is often the crux of the problem--is a skills gap closing or widening between my child and their classmates? Yet the combination of the above assumptions and the further disinclination to be frank because it is simply a more difficult conversation to have, leads many educators to dwell mostly or entirely upon improvements relative to self, simply labeling them as progress in general.
So maybe Morgan is talking out of turn much less, or getting much more of their homework in. But if their peers are turning all of their homework in, and talking out of turn never, that is key information! Furthermore, if Morgan happens to feel no agency in these behaviors, if they are beyond their control in some way, they are likely suffering in spite of their improvement, and if parents go home feeling like Morgan's doing great because they are improving--after all, that’s all anyone can do!--Morgan suffers alone. They still feel different from their peers (and are) and they are now less likely to continue to improve, because it’s much harder alone. What a relief to have parents come from a teacher meeting happily saying how proud teachers are of your progress! How difficult would it be for the kid to then say, “Actually, dad, I don’t feel like it’s going so well...”
What parents often get in meetings, even with talented veteran educators, is a confusing mishmash of positives and negatives, and we naturally average these out to see which side wins. And because of the process I just described, positive often wins, and parents leave feeling uneasily swayed toward an outcome that “things are good. Morgan just needs to work a little more on A, B and C.” This process of averaging needs to be made unnecessary through more clarity. Helpers need to help parents hold the strengths and challenges side by side, celebrating the strengths and continuing to scaffold their child’s joy in those strengths, which are a major source of comfort and satisfaction in school, while also clearly delineating the impact of the child’s challenges on their quality of school life, and providing concrete ways for the entire home-school team to support efficient progress addressing those challenges.
So, we must always be clear about which kind of progress we are describing, and we have to describe both. We have to address *progress relative to self* because it is the most fundamental kind of progress, and the child--who may be entirely focused on comparing themself to peers and be missing their own progress completely--needs to see and feel the achievement of such progress. Yet, we must also consider the child’s *progress relative to their peers*, or to grade-level expectations, or whatever normative measure the school is comfortable addressing with parents, because if that gap is widening, we are setting the child up for more frustration, more missed learning, more feeling inadequate, and probably the inevitable cessation of that progress, because what’s the use? If that gap *is* closing, is it closing quickly enough? Do we need to add further measures to increase the rate of that progress and can we do that without exhausting the child?
The self/peers info binary is sort of the school version of a key belief I have about tutoring. There’s another pair of musts here. It is vital that good tutoring provide long-term remediation *and* short term help. Not either/or, but both/and. That is, a child may have core skills missing, and need many hours of help to build them up, yet if I focus entirely on that long-term project and neglect the fact that the child is walking into class, experiencing their own challenges as immutable and innate each day, then I’m basically risking their engagement in everything we do by acting like it is OK for them to be hemorrhaging self-esteem all day. They also get no reason to believe school can be better than this for them. These implicit messages are unacceptable to me. They are fine as they are--we are not working to “make them OK someday.” They do not deserve to suffer. So it is imperative that I help them first to understand themself as a learner with their current skill set--always in the context of a growth mindset, but not implying that they will grow into something “better,” just someone for whom some tasks are easier--and help them figure out how to navigate school as they are, with self-esteem intact. But it is precisely just as vital that they be getting the long-term remediation as well, because with only the short-term coping strategies, I may actually be systematically teaching them to stifle their own potential by avoiding or working around challenging areas rather than strengthening them. This, they also do not deserve. They and every student deserve both immediate and long-term help, and to feel reasonably good about themselves the entire time.

Light the Tunnel HI there! This is the book I'm writing--and you can get it for free! I like to think I know some useful stuff, but while expressing it I'll probably make some gross generalizations, be culturally insensitive, mansplain a time or two... but then if YOU are kind enough to call me out on that, the end....

Making Math Less Repellant A lot of students experience math as something teachers say is process-oriented, but the students' actual experience is that it is product o...

http://andoccasionallyjoy.blogspot.com/2021/08/math-journals-for-students-who-cant.html

Math Journals for Students Who Can't Remember Math There are a lot of students who seem to be unable to retain math procedures in spite of herculean efforts to do so. In particular, some peop...

"It is important for parents to understand that it is a developmentally inappropriate expectation for almost ANY teenager to be motivated to change a behavior based upon a future possible NEGATIVE outcome. They are wired for immediate positive reinforcement, and future positive reinforcement only when it is very compelling. Dire warnings based upon the experience of others do not feel salient, and this is quadruply so in teens with ADHD.
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Our teens are hard-wired for a particularly severe case of something akin to what psychologists call "optimism bias." Simply put, positive reinforcement is MUCH more effective than negative reinforcement. An expected reward seems to remain present in the mind much more effectively during the day, when choices count, than a dreaded punishment, which may only actually come to mind when they are actually suffering it, and, worse, the thoughts may be more resentment than reflection... and this resentment often inspires more rebellious instincts than any desire to do what one is told! The desire to change behavior might actually be inhibited, because that means admitting defeat and giving the oppressor what they want."

UPDATED:

ADHD and Procrastination in Middle School — Broken Promises to Self and Others So, there's this rut we ADHD kids get into, that parents and teachers don't seem to be able to see. Term after term: assignments get misse...

ADHD and Procrastination in Middle School—Broken Promises to Self and Others So, there's a this rut we ADHD kids get into, that parents and teachers don't seem to be able to see. Term after term: assignments get mis...

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Effective Team Meetings for Students with LD (Things Helpers Need to Know) Big People in Little Chairs I recently had the joy of attending two teacher-parent-admin meetings in rapid succession, once on each side...