NeuroUnique: A Definition

Neurotypical, Neurounique, and Narrative Learning

1. Neurotypical learners: About 60 percent of public school kids graduate high school from a traditional one-size-fits-all education, where typical auditory and rote learning methods are common and based on lectures, taking notes and memorizing facts. But the drop out rate across the country at the time ranged between 40 and 60 percent. I recognized that many of my too-bright students had been in schools not designed for those with a different neural landscape and yet they tried to “fit”  into the way classes were taught.  They weren’t failures, but without choice, school systems were failing so many children.  There was nothing left for them but to drop out of school.

Watching a TED Talk back in 2010 I heard the word “neurotypical” for the first time. Something clicked, I put the talk on pause and took notes feverishly.  I started running word permutations in my head looking for the right term to describe the genius class kids I’d experienced over my 39 years in the classroom who were the opposite of neurotypical.

As I thought about my first students at Foothill High who had been expelled or kicked out of their traditional high schools in Pasadena the word NeuroUnique flashed into my thinking!  That was exactly the word I needed to describe my students, they were Neurounique, the opposite of neurotypical and since schools were not designed for them, they were often found in trouble or worse, they were forced out of school. I found them to be exceptional classroom assets and capable of exciting other students into rousing discussions that lifted the entire class.

Definition:  When I coined the term neurounique, I had in mind students who learned in ways not honored in traditional schooling. They learned “outside the box”, in ways that were beyond neurotypical. Some were kinesthetic learners who learned best when lessons included movement connected to the lesson, some were intuitive, while others were dominated by a “social/emotional” learning style.  I had just learned about integrative learning understood that these kids needed it, and were not getting it.  That explained everything.

They asked insightful, brilliant questions. Such smart kids, why had they been kicked out of school?  When I searched their school records, I found the opposite of what I expected. I had two to three times the number of gifted students populating my classes. So why had they not been getting straight A’s?  Education was a one-size-fits-all operation with the belief that all kids learned the same way. I’d only been teaching a few weeks but I’d already seen that not all kids learned by rote learning. They were not neurotypical.  From class discussions, I saw that these kids were in possession of a highly evolved sense of justice, but why?  Were they were too smart for their own good?  These questions would shape my career as a teacher. So why had they been kicked out of school and how did they come to be in possession of such an advanced sense of justice.  Was I among future Supreme Court judicial minds? With the data in hand (triple the number of gifted students in my classes) these questions launched me on a quest for answers that took me first to the school principal, the district's gifted coordinator and to the superintendent of schools. None knew that so many gifted kids had been expelled from school, none had any answers to my ticklish questions. Then came a epiphany, hadn't I heard there was Masters in Gifted Education at a nearby university? Off I went.

At California State University Los Angeles, I found a graduate program created by Dr. Barbara Clark where I could get a master’s degree in Gifted Education. She was writing her landmark text Growing Up Gifted which she based on actual classroom experiences. As one of her graduate students with students  of our own, she capitalized on our vast collective classroom experience to inform the architecture of her book based on brain research.

2. Neurounique learners on the other hand excel when 4 or more learning modalities are integrated into the architecture of learning. Kinesthetic, emotional, intuitive, and cognitive experiences are at the foundation of learning. 

3. Narrative learners.  The best foundation for long term memory is built on story telling. Around a campfire, Cheyenne grandparents tell the story of Jumping Mouse, a teaching myth, to their grandchildren. The story teaches a sacred value to the next generation about “giving away”, the importance of sharing even when you have little. Jumping Mouse is a chapter in Seven Arrows, a book by Hyemyohsts Storm that was controversial amongst Cheyenne elders because it revealed sacred powers to non-indians.  

A small book mark fell from a book I was reading.  On it was printed a bar code and an unusual reference to size from a clothing package. 

Instead of large, medium, or small, it read:

“SIZE: One size fits all.” 

Sounds alot like the way most classrooms have been historically organized under a belief that: 

“all students learn the same way.”

It’s a flawed basis for education since there is no “one way to teach all children.” Beginning with the industrial age, schools also became assembly lines with kids coming off conveyor belts like cars exiting the end of Ford’s Model A Assembly building.  Like Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, the architecture of learning historically has only worked for about 60% of all the kids in school, which explains why the drop out rate dial swings between 40% and 60%.  What about the kids who have different ways of learning, different neural landscapes? 

Some of us weren’t cut out for assembly line schooling.  I discovered during my first year of teaching that my classes boasted two to three times the rate of gifted students. Since Foothill High School was a school for drop outs, such a high incidence of bright kids seemed like a contradiction.  They asked such brilliant questions, I was puzzled as to why they hadn’t been successful in school. That’s when I met Chucky Thomas.

“One of the goals of education should be 

to teach that life is precious.” 

Abraham Maslow

Next outing, in sun's setting light, look for people who pause to cast westward their vision. It's not that the sun is setting as much as it is that the horizon is rising.  As long as I can remember when seeing westward gazers at sunset, I habitually turned round to see what it was that they were not seeing.

So too, in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, published the same year I stepped into the classroom, did Abraham Maslow.  In 1968, he wrote: "It is as if Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half." Maslow turned round to see what all other psychologists did not see. He shown floodlights on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to examining their deficits. He studied the farther reaches of our nature.

From this genesis did I carry forward a new vision into the classroom. Across the arc of my teaching career it became my mission to find in each child what others did not see.


Maslow died two years later, but the torch of his far reaching human nature continues to carry on through my colleagues, students and their students. In my dreamscape I wish that you too seek the best in those whom you encounter, that which others cannot see.
 ttps://teachersamurai.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2020-04-29T10:06:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=21&by-date=false

The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

To our readers:

 

The first week of school is pivotal in sharing with students the explicit architecture of their new learning environment. So I begin each semester with a philosophical orientation founded on this quote: 

"All life is education and everybody is a teacher 

and everybody is forever a pupil." 

--Abraham Maslow

Here is the landscape: I dream that each of you will teach me something this year, something profound or a thought as simple as a quotation.

One of the reasons I've gotten smarter over the years is that I have 200 students teaching me so many important things.  While you have six teachers this semester, I have 200 of you each teaching me some thing I never knew.  Let's make the most of it!  You now know that I will become wiser because of you.

Important to me was setting into motion a properly planted seed, a thought that might grow into a theme to frame for students the passing of our time together.  

So now, I hope to continue  that tradition with you.  Though you are reading this little book, learning some of what I have learned, I too hope to learn from you.   Keep in touch.
          --Toby Manzanares

To overcome our fear of greatness, we must learn to move boldly towards our goals, while simultaneously maintaining humility in the awareness that we are all after all “human, all too human”. Or as Maslow explained:

“For some people this evasion of one’s own growth, setting low levels of aspiration, the fear of doing what one is capable of doing, voluntary self-crippling…are in fact defenses against grandiosity, arrogance, sinful pride, hubris. There are people who cannot manage that graceful integration between the humility and the pride which is absolutely necessary for creative work. To invent or create you must have the “arrogance of creativeness” which so many investigators have noticed. But, of course, if you have only the arrogance without the humility, then you are in fact [delusional]. You must be aware not only of the godlike possibilities within, but also of the existential human limitations….If you can be amused by the worm trying to be god, then in fact you may be able to go on trying and being arrogant without fearing [delusions of grandeur]…This is a good technique.”   -Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

Abraham Maslow was a leading-edge teacher who frequently asked his students: 

“Who among you will write a great novel, or become a great leader or composer?  Generally everybody starts giggling, blushing, and squirming until I ask:  'If not you, then who else?' If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life.  You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.”                               --From his book: The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

 

While Maslow's iconic actualization hierarchy is widely known, I just learned that Maslow never himself depicted his Hierarchy of Needs as a pyramid. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/who-created-maslows-iconic-pyramid/#:~:text=We%20traced%20the%20pyramid%20that,motivation%20at%20the%20lowest%20cost”.

And while this revelation is surprising, what is most interesting to me is that in 1938 Maslow spent 6 weeks living in Siksika learning the Blackfoot way of life. In this context, Maslow's work on self actualization can be reinvigorated with the Blackfoot Community Actualization as a way of life. It's time for a new biography of Abraham Maslow. It's time for Community Actualization to become the new icon for the Farther Reaches of Human Nature.

Preface

“When the student is ready the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready… The teacher will Disappear.” ― Tao Te Ching

Teaching has been an inspiration, which is one of the reasons I'm writing* this book. That inspiration, now motivation, came from my students and colleagues. And so I wanted to tell you their stories and how their influence awakened a renewing and animating spirit that for 39 years moved me to continue teaching. But just like I told my students. "Don't believe me. Don't believe me because I'm your teacher. I could be misinformed or mistaken. You have my invitation to be skeptical of everything I say, everything you hear and see and read.* 

Ask yourself, "Who said that? (based on what expertise) Who wrote this? Who paid for the making of this such and such media content or that video? What's the motivation behind this editorial or that brochure? Find other sources to prove or disprove what you learn from me or what you hear from anyone else.

*(Written in present tense, that sentence reveals that the writing of this book continues on NeuroUnique, one of my websites.)

Try these questions on this next sentence.

Teachers make a remarkable and unimaginable difference in the lives of their students.

Don't believe me, but take a look at this. Click HERE for example number one.

My thesis: teachers make little known but unimaginable differences in the lives of their students. But don't believe me... here's more.

Before we end, here is a list of “Must Sees” and “Must Reads”. 

Film: 1. Dead Poets Society. When watching, take notes about what Keating does that are characteristic of a great teacher.  We’ll compare notes when you’ve seen the film and read “Oh Captain, My Captain”. 

Books: 1. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature by Abraham Maslow

ON CHILDREN by Kahil Gibran

"Your children are not your children
They are the sons and daughters of life's longing ...
They come through you but not from you
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you
You may give them your love but not your thoughts
For they have their own thoughts
You may house their bodies but not their souls
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow
Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams
You may strive to be like them
But seek not to make them like you
For life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday
You are the bows from which your children
As living arrows are sent forth
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite
And he bends you with his might
That his arrows may go swift and far
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness
For even as he loves the arrow that flies

So he loves also the bow that is stable." --Kahil Gibran

 

It occurs to me that teachers are, at the same moment, both the archer and the bow: we imagine our student's mark upon the path of the infinite.

And we bend so that our students may go swift and far from bows which are stable.  We do this in gladness for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow and we might strive to be like them.  Teaching is not for the faint of heart but for those with strong open hearts capable of bending when students need us to go beyond the curriculum of academics and reach for what our students need most.

So what is it they most need?

Let's make a list.

“Those that can ... teach.”

“The more you fail...

the more you learn.”

“The faster you fail 

the faster you succeed.”

“Not failing = not learning”

Dedication

Dedication

I dedicate this little book to all the bridge builders I've known.

The Bridge Builder

by: Will Allen Dromgoole

An old man going a lone highway
Came at the evening, cold and gray,
To a chasm, vast, and deep and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.

The old man crossed in the twilight dim;
The sullen stream had no fear for him;
But he turned, when safe on the other side,
And built a bridge to span the tide.

"Old man," said a fellow pilgrim, near,
"You are wasting strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day;
You never again will pass this way;
You've crossed the chasm, deep and wide-
Why build you this bridge at the evening tide?"

The builder lifted his old gray head:
"Good friend, in the path I have come," he said,
"There followeth after me today,
A youth, whose feet must pass this way.

This chasm, that has been naught to me,
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building this bridge for him."

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Unconventional Genius.
Chapter Two: 

To continue to Chapter 1 click below right on Older Posts. 

CHAPTER 1 Unconventional Genius: NeuroUnique (in progress)

 

Case Study #1, Circa 1464:  Rejected Carrera Marble

 

In the early 1400’s, in the Apuan Alps near Florence, a large slab of mediocre marble was extracted  from the Carrera quarries of Tuscany. It was later delivered to the workshop yard of the Duomo Cathedral in Florence.

 

Click HERE: go to Carrera Quarries

In 1464, the statue of David was commissioned.  The artist Agostino began work on the large slab leftover from an earlier cathedral initiative. The slab lay on its back in the courtyard, "the stone," he said was “badly blocked out. ” Abandoned by Agostino, Antonio Rossellino came to the slab next but soon backed out citing its poor quality. A third sculptor, Michaelangelo, would come to stand before this rejected mediocre marble and see ‘David' restless for release.

  

The Outcast Slab of Mediocre Marble 

Becomes the World’s Most Famous Statue, 1464

I've met many students who like David were waiting quietly (sometimes not) for someone like Michaelangelo to release the genius within.

In sculptor’s hands from the time of Leonardo DaVinci and Michaelangelo, it is now in teacher’s eyes to see in their students the nascent forms and features hidden within, and, in the teacher's hands, to chisel away at the outer stone to reveal the genius within.  -Toby Manzanares

Case Study #2, Circa 1891

With his family in economic crisis and school an increasingly dreadful, seemingly endless labor, he searched for a way out.  Sitting far back in his classroom, bored, lonely, uneasy, Albert smiled curiously, painfully aware of his teacher's animosity. In frustration, and seeing Albert's smile yet again his teacher erupted, heatedly directing at him a final and devastating humiliation: Albert! You will never amount to anything.  You are wasting everyone's time here. You should leave this school immediately! Another insult heaped upon this neuro unique child. 

In elementary school, unable to learn by rote, his teachers thought him dull witted.  When called upon in class Albert was not able to give a immediate answers like other children, instead he hesitated, stumbled, and after, he'd silently move his lips, repeating the words, his way of coping with on-demand learning.  He was an outlander in a system that expected, forced conformity and compliance.

I would come across many an unconventional genius like Albert Einstein over the arc of my 39 year teaching career advocating for kids lacking the tools to fit into the landscape of traditional educational institutions. 

CREATING  AN ARCHITECTURE FOR INCLUSIVE LEARNING 

“Focus both on students and the content for there
will be little learning without a map of every child's neural landscape.”

--Toby Manzanares

Albert Einstein felt, like many of today's bright students, that he'd done nothing wrong, but his teacher continued: "You sit there in the back row, smiling and that undermines the respect a teacher needs for his class." I can only imagine that this teacher interpreted Albert’s smile as defiance, rebellion, or at the very least, smugness. In reality, that self conscious smile was Albert’s reaction to stress.

That they had a genius in their midst was not clear to his parents or teachers, nor did they have the insight to understand what they thought as "odd" behavior, or to value his divergent nature. Not unlike many kids in classrooms today, the young Albert Einstein carried a neural landscape that was remarkably different from the other children in his school classrooms, he was neurologically unique in a very neurotypical world!  Resentful of school regimen by 15 he wrote: "the spirit of learning and creative thought was crushed by rote learning."  Remember this quote for Chapter  

Similar chronicles have been written by modern day gifted At-Risk students who have found themselves bottled up in institutions and circumstances lacking a compass to navigate their prickly landscapes

Einstein's school experience echoes a long history of children finding themselves in distressing and often convoluted circumstances. His experience from 1890's, shines a shimmering light into the lives of many children worldwide.  This light illluminates extremely bright children who are misunderstood, squeezed out of classrooms and ultimately for too many, driven out of school. It's not just extremely bright children that find themselves in ill fitted educational environments. Many students find themselves in this predicament as evidenced by high drop out rates in the United States. Based on my 39 years in public education, schools adequately service about 40% of their students, those who are neurotypical.  The rest, I catagorize as neuro-unique, those do not find comfort in a one-size-fits-all institutionalized educational system.  Drop outs?  No, too many of these kids are not dropping out as much as they are being squeezed or pushed out of schools.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln:

"We must work earnestly in the best light they give us."

It's all too common for economic situations to turn ordinary families upside down. Like families today, the Einstein family faced an economic struggle that forced Albert’s father Hermann to move the family from Munich to Northern Italy for better business opportunities. But Albert was left behind at a boarding school where he must have felt orphaned, like the 400,000 kids finding themselves in foster care in the United States today. 

http://www.npr.org/2013/09/22/225148325/foster-care-in-america-too-many-kids-not-enough-home

   

 

Photo source: ResearchGate 

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-playful-Einstein-amidst-a-pile-of-fellow-Swiss-Federal-Institute-of-Technology-students_fig4_246356771

 

 Einstein 1,000 Fireflies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Case Study #3:  circa 1920

Friends Called Him Ritty

Ritty spent his early childhood largely between the covers of Encyclopaedia Britannica's 32 volumes (14th edition) where among other interesting titles he poured over its science content but his early academic record was mediocre.*  In his homemade lab he experimented with electricity, where he used light bulbs, resistors, a storage battery and swithes to invent  a burglar alarm to alerting him the millisecond his parents entered in his room.  On an IQ test he scored an above average 125. In high school he grew preoccupied with science and math, but his approach to mathematics was highly unconventional which brought him immesurable  pleasure to the extent that by his senior year he won the New York state-wide math competition. Though he excelled in math and science, when he applied to Columbia University, he was rejected due to his unremarkable grades in the other subject areas.  This is a teachable moment for high schoolers today, because Ritty was subsequently accepted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He did not allow rejection to crash the arc of his trajectory. And there he found freedom to chose a very  personal course of study that landed him untimately at the California Institute of Technology in 1950. That is where I came to know him.  A gathering  of parents at Cal Tech and Jet Propulsion Lab met to demand a visionary school for their children who at the time were attending  public school in Pasadena. One parent reported:  "my daughter came home to tell me she no longer interested in school because she  wasn't allowed to choose  what she wanted to learn. This group of parents, many of the finest minds on the planet, wanted a school of choice for their children. They met with the school superintendent who called upon the finest teachers in Pasadena starting with Greta Pruitt who put  together the first school of choice in California, The Pasadena Alternative School where I found a nobel laureate's son in my science classes. 

 

My hypothesis about the development of genius is well framed in the life cycle of a monarch butterly:  looking like ordinary caterpillars, there comes the moment of metamorphosis when the breath-taking beauty of the adult butterfly emerges from  quiescent chysalids. That's what we aspire to as teachers, to engineer for all  children  an architecture where choice, the freedom to learn, releases their germinal genius.  Geniuses are not born, they are made, as in Ritty's case.

 

As adolescence passed, the rest of Ritty's story became history, finally maturing into his grown up title: not Ritty but Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics.   

Though his IQ test did not detect his genius, the  world renowned scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory  knew him as the boy genius amongst the greatest scientific minds of the time and the only one able to crack top-security safes when scientists were out of state but their lab data was needed immediately. Call Feynman!. Richard was the product of "Choice in Education**. He chose the MIT classes he wanted to take. And that opportunity is what he wanted for his own children.  When his son Carl was in my science class, Richard already knew his son wound end up at MIT. What Dr. Feynman needed from me is to make a space where his son would love learning about the world of science. 

*There's More To Being Smart than IQ.      **Richard Phillips Feynamn: A Biography

Case Study #4, Circa 1970

 

Fast forward 100 years beyond Albert’s classroom. He wasn’t a CEO forty-nine years ago when I knew him as Chucky, but at that time, he was “too smart for his own good”, he'd already been kicked out of high school and unlike the young Albert Einstein, Chucky was not passive in his noncompliance and for his tender years, did not suffer injustice kindly.  Chuck had lost count of the number of times he wasent to the principal’s office.  But by the time he walked into my classroom, his character reminded me of what Abraham Lincoln once wrote:

As teachers "We must work earnestly in the best light they give us.” 

Asking questions that revealed deep insight he was a model student in my class. 

But some of Chucky's teachers were not able to see his light. I was surprised therefore one afternoon when he told of his history of problems in school.  He taught me that student behaviors give us clues about how to fire their learning. It was natural for me to look beyond his history, and look to his future by gathering data about the workings of his mind like in this story that Chucky told again at my retirement celebration a few years ago.

 

“Passing the teacher's lounge en route to the Principlal's office, I overheard two teachers making a bet."

First voice: “I bet he's in jail before the end of the semester.”

Second voice: "I bet Chucky doesn't make it to the end of the month."  

Out in the hall he must have bristled.  

He told us at my retirement dinner that the distance between being a citizen or a criminal is a very thin line. Pointing at me Chuck said: "If it wasn't for Toby, I'd be in jail now."  Now, he's the CEO of the  non-profit OBA.  Click HERE to go to it's web site..

But to me as a first year teacher, Chucky was a young Einstein, showing signs of genius in a school system not yet able to recognize unconventional genius.

Chucky was bright eyed, playful, brilliant with a wonderful sense of humor, personable and eager to participate: the ideal student.  Why he had been expelled from high school was baffling. Staying after class one afternoon, I asked: "You're such a top tier student. How is it you were expelled?"

“I had this teacher who was always kicking kids out of class, sending them to the principal’s office.”  He went on to say that most of the time this teacher mistakenly  kicked innocent kids out of class. One afternoon, this teacher was writing on the chalkboard back to the class, never a good idea, when a paper plane hit the blackboard. Turning to trace back its point of origin, he spotted three laughing kids on that side of the room: 'You! Out! To the principal’s office!'  But the actual paper plane pilot was busy taking notes in the front row.h e actual paper plane pilot was busy taking notes in the first row.  

Charles went on that this miscarriage of justice was common. But this instance was a bridge too far. Chucky had come to class after lunch, an apple in hand, and imagined it splattering on the chalk board between the teacher’s head and the chalk in his right hand, sending apple sauce all over his face. He stood, wound up like a picture on the varsity baseball team and threw fast that apple at the chalk board with enough speed to splatter.  Spinning in a rage, he saw 5 kids laughing in the back of the room and kicked them all out of class, suspending them until their parents could come for a conference, again, the wrong kids.  

Chucky now must weigh the call of his conscience above the plight of his punishment, so he leaves for the principal’s office to take responsibility for his actions and prevent a miscarriage of justice for the three wrongly accused.

 

One characteristic common among kids “too smart” for their own good, is that they carry a highly sensitive moral compass in the presence of injustice.  And many, like Chucky would find themselves in trouble because of it. It was then that I realized that while their sense of justice was to be respected, they lacked the knowledge, the tools to respond in an effective and constructive manner. Now I understood, that when students exhibit poor judgement in the classroom, these could be “teachable” moments.  I launched a career-long journey to help students learn how to respond constructively rather than react to the injustices of our time. Instead of seeing them as misfits or failures, I was to become their advocate. They needed a mentor, a champion in the system.  Now when they felt their new voice, and understood their new tools, they rose to my highest expectations.

Breathtaking, actually, the extent of the effect of self fulfilling prophesy from my positive expectations on students over the arc of my career (see Pygmalion below).  It seemed like they’d longed for someone who believed in them, and now they flourished in this wholesome environment.  They quickly responded to this belief and worked diligently as if to fulfill a divine decree. Furthermore, their progress was unmistakable prompting reinforcement of the notion they’d finally found their calling.  They were no longer misfits or dropouts, they’d become rare avis, an uncommon, exceptional people.

The Pygmalion Effect

http://www.users.miamioh.edu/shermalw/edp603_group2-f00.html

TRUST

What so many of my students held in common:

• a highly evolved passion for social justice, or

• life altering traumas or series of childhood traumatic stress events.  (Traumatic Stress: Effects on the Brain)   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181836/

Take Cindy for example.

Weeping, she entered my classroom an hour before first period as I prepared for the day’s lab activity. Dad had just dropped her off on his way to work and he wasn’t happy that Cindy wanted to be early to study for her biology exam.  I gave her time to collect her thoughts then asked if she needed someone to talk to. She explained her family was about to be evicted from their apartment.  Both her parents were working, mom had two jobs yet they were unable to make ends meet.  Under a great deal frustration, he lost his balance and spewed:

“You spent the whole night studying, for what?”

You’ll never get into college, you're so f…..g stupid.

Why don’t you drop out of school, get a job, do something useful.

You're too f…..g stupid for anything else.”

Tears fell again as she repeated his castigating words.  

“Looks like he shot you full of poisoned arrows and you’re terribly hurt.”

She nodded, shamed. “He’s said it before.  It’ll come again.”

“I have an experiment for you to try that might stop his arrows from sticking next time. Give it some thought, and if you want, I’ll come back in a few minutes.”

Going back to preparing for the day’s lab, I heard her voice softly:  “I’d like to try it.”

“Ok, stand up tall. Did you see that scene in Titanic where Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are on the bow? Wind blowing back their hair?”

Cindy nods.

“Close your eyes and image with me. (This imaging technique works for about 70% of those who try it.) Keep your eyes closed. Imagine you’re on the bow of a great cruise ship, sun on your face, wind in your hair . . .  Let me know when you’re there.”

With a faint smile, she nods.

“Feel the cool ocean breeze on your skin, and when you're ready, raise your arms out like … wings. Feel the wind lifting you to the tips of your toes . . .”

She smiles.

Looking down you see the bow, resolute, cleaving the water into a giant sparkling wave.

Can you feel the waves’ mist on your face?

Again she nods.

Up ahead you see your dad on the stern of an old rusty barge. He’s shouting but you cannot hear his words. Instead they erupt from his mouth on a roll of toilet paper.

Do you mind if I use his words?

No. she nods.

His words, on paper roll from his mouth and land upon the water. . .

“You’re  . . .     so . . .     f…..g     stupid.”

Can you see the words, the paper floating in the water?

They're not about you, they spew from his unbearable frustration.

Now watch closely the floating paper . . .  “You’re  . . .     so . . .     f…..g  . . . 

Watch as the paper is cleaved by the bow, some going left, some to the right.

Can you see it?

The words don’t stick, they are just cast aside, flotsam on the surface of a vast ocean.

If they don’t stick, they can not hurt you.

Now just enjoy the ocean breeze, the mist, the warmth of the sun.”

Her face relaxes slightly. I know she understands.

Cindy in her excitement, bursts into my classroom the very next day.

“It worked, it worked!”

Sad that it was necessary to deploy her newly learned skill so soon, but judging by her happy face, she was now able to

CHAPTER 1

Drawn on parchment circa 1450 is a beautiful map of the known world, a “mappae mundi” commissioned by King Afonso V of Portugal.  Upon closer examination you will find it is upside down compared to the way we see maps today and it reminds me of an important understanding brought to light by my students. Each human being, every student, came to me with their mappae mundi, on their own parchment life history, made from the archive of their collected moments allowing me to navigate through their unimaginably complex neural landscape. Since schools are not yet able to "succeed" with all students, I had a great opportunity to examine the mapper mundi of students who had been forced out of traditional schools.  I was searching for ways that schools could succeed with students that were ... neurounique.  

If we are charged with the education of our youth, then we must first chart their terra incognita, their unknown land, for they are not taught to draw one for us. Then we must learn to sail their mare incognitum (unknown seas), so they may arrive at journey’s end with their magnificent fleet in tact.

Behind eyes just now reading these words, is a world largely uncharted, your brain, and we must pull out a large sheet of parchment and map it for ourselves, and so better understand our own landscape, our unknown seas. This will be our NeuroYouNique journey, to paint the portrait of our neural landscape. 

  

Like the Fra Mauro mappae mundi, our understanding of education is upside down, with subject content at the top and the ways students learn at the bottom. We need to look at learning from both sides.  Nowhere on his circa 1450 map is the New World, knowledge of which was about to emerge. Similarly, there is now a great deal emerging about mapping the human brain, a veritable new world understanding that has and will have an enormous impact on education. 

The Mappae Mundi di Fra Mauro with its thousands of inscriptions was a transitional map marking the end of the medieval period and the beginning of the Renaissance.  In a way, this book can too be a transitional map marking the beginning of a Renaissance in education, one where learners are valued for their thousands of “inscriptions” telling us how to best help them learn. Coming to us with a teeming storehouse of data, we must see them as unimaginable sources who will guide us toward lighting in them a life long passion for learning.

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BRAIN FACT:  “The process of combining more primitive pieces of information to create something more meaningful is a crucial aspect both of learning and of consciousness and is one of the defining features of human experience. Once we have reached adulthood, we have decades of intensive learning behind us, where the discovery of thousands of useful combinations of features, as well as combinations of combinations and so on, has collectively generated an amazingly rich, hierarchical model of the world. Inside us is also written a multitude of mini strategies about how to direct our attention in order to maximize further learning. We can allow our attention to roam anywhere around us and glean interesting new clues about any facet of our local environment, to compare and potentially add to our extensive internal model.”

The human brain is a pattern engine designed to identify patterns in our environment.  When things really are connected, we learn something new and can make predictions.  Sometimes we believe things are real when they are not, (false positives). Imagine 10,000 years ago, hours after sunset, a hunter is returning home when she hears a sound from a rocky outcropping. She sprints, then dives into a rock crevasse too narrow for a saber-tooth to reach her. She’d heard that sound as a young girl, barely surviving an attack. This day it was a false alarm (a false positive) but thats better than not believing something is real when it is not.

This is important for parents (and teacher’s more specifically) because when children enter a new class, teachers will see behaviors that connect with previous experiences: The kid that sits front row center vs. the kid that sits way in the back, furthest from the teacher’s desk. Even where they sit and how they sit gives us useful information about them. Do they like photography, pop music, animae, dogs, fashion,  insects, skateboarding,  movie making,  or street art? Knowing this, a teacher can nudge a borderline student in the direction of a more challenging term project. They’ll carry a challenge farther if they already have an avenue of interest that can be employed. 

Full stop 

CHOICES elaborate on these topics.

Unimaginable, overstating the importance of providing choices in the learning environment

The Narrative Mind, The Narrative Learner

Protecting kids whose behavior seems out of right field.