This year has been an eye-opening experience for me. I have been able to watch kids in classes from a very different lens, that of an administrator. I get to see the impact very different teaching styles have on children. Watching instruction from afar has made me start to question ADD. I am starting to wonder if kids really have ADD or instead the problem is that we are not teaching them in a manner that allows them to focus and succeed.
When I grew up there were limited channels that I had to get up off my couch to change. Because I did not live in a major city, it was not until I got into elementary school that my family got cable. I was not bombarded with simultaneous streams of information. Waiting for MTV to hopefully play my favorite video was how I spent my day…and until I heard those first lines about …My Adidas ..I sat impatiently waiting until Run DMC made their way to my screen.
http://youtu.be/CZ5Vy9BgSeY
In contrast, the students in our classrooms today can watch any video they want at anytime – they don’t need Martha Quinn to deliver it to them. They have over 400 cable channels to impatiently scroll through looking for a better more entertaining show. The chances are they are not even watching TV, but are probably playing video games or group- skyping with their friends or watching something on YouTube. Two years ago a seventh grader said to me in a ‘get with the times’ kind of smirk
“Ms. Clark we don’t watch TV, we watch YouTube.”
Information is coming at them from every direction and they know more by the time they are in fourth grade than I knew in high school.
They come to school and are asked to get information from one source – the teacher – while sitting for hours at a time. Often instruction is delivered with no play, no passion, and no purpose. Even typing this scenario makes me want to scream. The teacher might have an ipad- or a 1:1 classroom -but the information is still coming from teacher directed sources – and learning standards that limit their natural innate wonderful curiosity. Their brains are not able to stay so still and they REQUIRE instruction that looks different.
Maybe in those classrooms where instruction is delivered from in front of the room there is actually less ADD than we thought. More likely ADD means Always Didactically Delivered instruction that is single-handedly robbing students of their curiosity, engagement and FOCUS. As I walk by classrooms, I can see it…to me it is like a smell of bacon at breakfast…something overwhelming that you can’t miss.
Without passing judgment, it might be that some teachers are a bit oblivious to all the ways their students are connected to the outside world. Once they understand the Connectivism that drives learning, issues of focus may no longer be a major problem in the classroom. Maybe one day there will be less ADD diagnoses, and instead there should be a requirement that we teach each student as an individual and let them choose what they want to FOCUS on.