Reframed by Stuart Shanker

Author:Stuart Shanker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Why are we pushing so many young children to override their limbic brakes – without realizing that we are doing so?

How can we avoid or turn off a “kindled maths alarm”?

The answer to the first question lies in the effect of HMA societal on our attitudes towards cases of output failure. Empathy turns off; old biases kick in. The answer to the second question starts by exposing and overcoming that bias.

Bridging the “Unbridgeable”

Output failure, like paradigm revolutions, does not happen out of the blue. The child tells us in all sorts of ways that a meltdown is looming: for example, in pupil dilation, changes in prosody, facial complexion, restlessness, heightened “distractibility,” avoidance. We misread resistance as lack of effort, see anxiety as non-compliance. We persist in pushing or punishing when we should be pausing and probing: Why is this child, who is so active and interested in other school subjects, having so much trouble with maths?

The first step in helping such a student is to reframe: in place of misbehaviour, Self-Reg sees stress-behaviour, in all its subtle forms. The hard part is the second step: identifying the reasons maths is such an overpowering cognitive stress for that child. This is where we need to be constantly asking why and reflecting on what we are learning about the student’s processing challenges.

Instituting such measures as a classroom makeover, mindfulness, and exercise breaks or providing stress-relieving manipulatives may help as a third step.44 But in the case of HMA, this will likely not be enough. It is essential to reduce the cognitive stress, not just by working on problems in numerical processing or spatial sense, but in many cases, with exercises that address underlying sensorimotor deficits.

It is essential that the student himself become aware that and why he finds maths so stressful (the fourth step of Self-Reg). He needs to internalize that this is not a reflection of inadequacy but an example of the different kinds of processing deficits that modern science is learning how to address. Bear in mind that there was a time, not so long ago, when myopia was seen as a weakness and wearing glasses a form of indulgence.

Finally, students need to develop pre/post strategies to maintain or restore Blue Brain/Red Brain balance (the fifth step of Self-Reg). They need to learn more adaptive modes of self-regulation, not just in maths class, but in all aspect of their lives. The student with HMA who doesn’t know what calm feels like will find it impossible to remain calm when faced with a sharp stress, such as she finds with maths.

The better we can understand cognitive stress and how it interacts with other stresses, the better we can alleviate how hard a student must work. Highly instructive in this regard is the work of Christine Roman-Lantzy (director of the Vision Information and Evaluation Clinic at West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh). She has developed a number of techniques to help students with cortical visual impairment begin to read.

These are cases where the

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