Teach42

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Well, I’m here at the workshop. We haven’t started yet, but it looks really exciting. They’ve given us a massive amount of material including a curriculum guide and a notebook of articles, powerpoint presentations, and reference material the likes of which I haven’t seen since my undergrad years!

Well, I just found out that my school has moved! Perhaps moved is the wrong term, but it isn’t going to be in the location that I thought it was. It won’t be too far away, just a few blocks, but that’s still quite a surprise.

Onwards, introductions are over and it’s time to get started. The program is called S.M.A.R.T., Stimulating Maturity through Accelerated Readiness Training. Children aren’t coming to schools ready for education. The program is not a curriculum per se, it is embedded in the regular curriculum and should enhance it.

Right now he’s listing all the different things that will be enhanced by this program. Zooming in on just classroom desk activities, they’re saying it will improve hand-eye coordination, letter sound stimulation, vocab stimulation, pre-math skills and so on. I know it’s just the overview, but it sounds almost like a sales pitch. A bottle of snake oil that will help your migraines, arthritis, and cure that nasty cold. I don’t mean to sound critical, it just has the flavor of a sales pitch. I’m sold, I’m here. I don’t need to be convinced that this program is incredible, I want to see it in action and get into the details.

He’s relating a story about a boy named Alex who was struggling in Kindergarten, horribly cross-eyed and stuck in right field when he played little league. After 240 hours of this program, his eye was straightened out (“Daddy, I only see one of you now!), he was doing much better in school and playing first base. While the story may be true and this may be a fantastic program, the story just has the feeling of a Sunday morning religious program. “The doctors told him that he would never walk again, but the power of faith has healed him!” Like I said, the story may be true, but you aren’t going to get me to buy in to something by describing a success story or two. I want to get to the meat of the program. It’s easy to describe a ‘miracle’, it’s much more of a challenge to teach somebody to produce miracles.

Just got the presenters name. Bob DeBoer, former high school counselor, co-founder of New Visions school and member of the executive committee of the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools. He’s describing how his organizations were formed and some background. Looks like the program has actually been going on for quite a while, since 1987.

Readiness Skill Deficits: Here we go, the program is designed to address visual efficiency & perceptual problems, auditory processing problems and biochemical imbalances. These issues will be addressed through SMART, Auditory Stimulation and NeuroTechnology. Heh, I don’t know what NeuroTechnology is yet, but the term definitely appeals to the geek in me. If I had WiFi here, I’d be skipping ahead right now and looking the term up in the Wikipedia.

Random thought, I think I learn better with Wifi. I’m very impulsive and get frustrated when there’s something I want to learn a bit more about, but am forced to wait for when the presenter decides to inform me about it. Will it be this morning, afternoon, tomorrow? Who knows? Instead, here I am trying to figure out what that could possibly be about instead of just finding it out and moving forward.

This is interesting. Bob is talking about how most people are “right eared”, meaning they primarily take auditory stimulus in through the right ear which then goes straight to the left hemisphere where language is processed. Many children with issues are found to be “left eared” meaning that language comes in through the left ear, goes to the right hemisphere, and then has to cross over to the left hemisphere. To address this, they have them listening to music that basically stimulates them into becoming ‘right eared’. I’m oversimplifying, but it sounded worth doing more research.

I just had to be a little patient; he’s talking about NeuroTechnology right now. It’s a bit complicated and I’m not quite sure how to put it into words. One thing I found interesting was that he was basically saying that they can ‘cure’ ADD by having the kids play games that are based are controlled by a person exerting control over their brainwaves in specific waves. Ok, that completely fails to describe it, but we’ll be getting into more detail later. To say I’m skeptical is an understatement, but I’m really looking forward to learning more. It sounds sort of like physical therapy for the brain.

Random thought, there have been several studies showing that the content from most workshops tends to have little impact on the classroom. I wonder how our school’s directors are planning to address this and ensure that this content really gets embedded into the school’s culture.

The program started off in Minnesota, and is now being used in 90 schools outside of Minnesota. It’s being used in Delaware, Kentucky, Florida, Massachusetts, Iowa, and so on. It is fairly impressive that so many schools are adopting the program. What I’d love to hear is how many schools started the program vs. how many are still using it.

We finally saw a video of what this program looks like. Wow. It looks nothing like what I expected. I don’t know how to describe it short of a psychedelic sobriety test of sorts. A lot of kinesthetics combined with forced visual stimulation. Just based on what I’ve heard and now seen, it definitely sounds promising. I wish they’d shown the video from the very beginning though. Would have done a lot to frame the introduction.