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If I were someone considering a career teaching "special needs kids", then I might ask an experienced special needs teacher about the work and my suitability. But since none of these parameters exist, the advice is simply odd.

Well, at the risk of getting off topic, the issue of special-ed kids mainstreamed into classrooms is an ongoing one. Every district I've worked for has some way of dealing with this issue, to different degrees of success. So much depends on the strength of the special-ed department of the school. I've worked with some serious experts, and some people who are just looking to get paid extra $$$ while working with much fewer kids than the rest of us teachers.

In an ideal world, every classroom teacher should be well trained to deal with every possible situation involving "special needs kids," but the reality is so far removed from the textbook, it almost renders my credentialing program's mainstreaming course useless.

Spoken like a robot, or Mr. Spock.

Give the rest of us a little room to be human.

You didn't say that. Tim likes to create strawmen, and he did it again.

A feeling is whatever it is, you can just feel it; no one else has to even know.

Whatever you did is behavior, which is your responsibility and your choice.

I tend to thing that sure, there is instinct, we can sense feelings, but at the same time, at work a lot of us learn to leave certain feelings behind, to be neutral and do our work. To act and cover things up... part of teaching is acting. Acting in a way that we can cover things up. We learn to hide things. In hospitality, if a customer is being difficult, you smile and be polite and you don't get stirred by their anger. I never find it difficult to work with special needs kids, I've dealt with tantrums and books thrown around but I stay calm and neutral and I never lose my patience...

Nice statement to derive the reminder that the student with ADHD is NOT ABLE to chose, and this is why ADHD is a desease and not just a consequence of a bad habbit of too much briskness or a bad education or a bad allimentation.

The problem of course is that there is perhaps 1 real ADHD case for every 20 kids with the fashionable label alone swallowing high grade amphetamines prescribed by their doctor in many Western markets.

Even someone with real ADHD is not completely unable to manage any kind of emotional regulation whatsoever nor make any kind of conscious choices. That kind of excuse making creates pathologies rather than addressing them.

I love the way Dr Christopher Green puts it in his book "Understanding ADHD" - "ADHD is an explanation, not an excuse"

My nephew has ADHD and his behavior is stellar. His parents taught him manners and respect. He cannot choose how his brain processes, but he can certainly choose how what he says and how he responds.

Mary, Michael, Mortimer, and Marinda sneeze. Mary sneezes because she is allergic to dust. Michael sneezes because he fell on his nose when he was a baby and it didn't heal properly. Mortimer has a bad cold. Marinda sneezes because of some kind of condition in her nervous system.

Our four M's are labeled with "sneezitis". So they are all put into the same room and given the same program for sneezers. Or maybe they're put into the same room, and a hapless teacher has to figure out what to do with sneezers. Does this make sense?

I would accept that your nephew has behaviour that is being labeled as ADHD, i.e. symptoms. If he can choose his actions, then he is unlike the boy that I had in my class. This boy was extremely polite, and had careful, involved, caring, mature, sane parents. He wanted desperately to do well in school, and fought to be able to settle down in his work. He knew that he had the intelligence, and the only reason things didn't filter in is because he could not pay attention long enough. There were consultations between him, the school psychologist, his family doctor, himself, and his parents. He was put on Ritalin, and for this boy, it was a relief. There was no question of him not being brought up properly, and not knowing how to behave. He was fighting a losing battle.

Another student could have been helped, had I known more. I took the course after teaching him. In this case the problem involves tracking and distractions. You wipe a chalkboard, and it leaves streaks. This student gets distracted with the lines from the streaks, which merge with the lines of letters and numbers, causing a struggle. It is an exhausting struggle, resulting in loss of concentration from exhaustion. Yet we have these idiot children books that have "watermark" pictures under the print, making reading difficult. Or they have bright "exciting" pictures in the books, which are also distracting.

In fact, we were taught to make things exciting, brief, fast, varied, bright, active. Guess what that does to calmness?

And how about if the material is meaningless and boring?

Distractability is a symptom of something. The child born to a drug addict may have damage to his nervous system. Etc.

My nephew was placed on several different medications before they found one that helped him function well. He was given accommodations for exams and had other services as well. He is now a nurse, having written the top research paper in his graduating class.

ADHD can present itself differently, I realize.

Yes. It is a symptom. Like the sneezes. The student I wrote about was also placed in medication. I was the teacher who identified the problem in its raw form, and then it became a collaboration between various experts, myself, and the parents. The student who was distracted by background things such as smears, this student needed a different solution because his distractability was due to a different cause. It's this overall labeling which is the problem.

With dismay, I realize you may have thought my comment was addressed to you personally.

That was not my intent. I intended only the generic "you plural," a piece of grammar unfortunately missing from English. Any person who has difficulty controlling their reactions to difficult people should reconsider working with difficult people.

I've been here since 2004, and while I will argue an idea forcefully, sometimes vehemently, it should be obvious I do not do personal attacks.

That's a really good point. It's a rather curious contradiction.

There are plenty of people quick to discard my position that most of us can control our reactions to a great extent, if we choose to, work at it, and maybe are taught a few techniques. (This is a position that many people DO find enormously helpful in dealing with situations and people they can't control.)

And then, some of those same people are quick to discard the notions that ADHD kids can't control their behavior, at least to the extent that is possible for most of us. They would prefer to simply blame the kids for being naughty or poorly raised. The kids that I've observed are not enjoying being naughty or getting away with something. They are intensely uncomfortable, would do anything to be better, and carry significant guilt over not behaving and not concentrating.

TimR, the whole thing went belly up a while back. I liked your original idea that soothing music may be non-soothing for some, and since you came up with it, I surmised you had actually worked with people in some capacity as opposed to just reading about it or speculating. Your background told me that, which is why I thanked you for it. And then it went belly up again at the mention of "emotion" which you seem to perceive as an action, while many of us perceive it as a feeling that we can decide to act upon, or not. So again it got weird. I assume that in your studies, they defined emotion in the "acting" way? Conversations so often go awry at the level of terminology.

We had an interesting exercise in a learning disability workshop. You hold a piece of writing - or maybe a drawing - to a mirror, and your partner has to copy the mirror image. It is very difficult. You want to go right, and you go left. You want to go up, and you go down. Your circles get all scribbly and the whole thing looks messy and horrid, like an attempt by a 3 year old. Very soon you have a knot in your stomach, and you want to flee or have a temper tantrum. Our instructor then upped the ante. The person holding the mirror said encouraging things like, "You know you can do better." "It's really easy if you put your mind to it." (sweet smile, condescending encouraging voice, as you patter on). While we professional teachers exercised self control, we were ready to do bodily harm on our "helper". This, too, can manifest as ADHD.

There are more of these kids than you think, many of them undiagnosed, unmedicated, and falling far behind.



I did poorly my first time (of three degrees) in college in many classes. I could absorb information faster than most of my peers, understand it more deeply, and treat an exam like an athletic contest. I could not focus long enough to write a decent paper to save my life. What kind of excuse created that pathology? I never blamed anybody but myself, never tried anything but harder..........but nothing worked. In a science class I'd be a standard deviation above anybody else, but add a research paper and I might as well take the F before starting.

This did improve with age, but it is still almost impossible for me to sustain effort. I work in spurts.

The first poster I saw when I entered university years ago on someone's wall said "Don't adjust your set. The world is out of whack." The pathology may not be with you.