Mindy and Max's True Life Blog

Mary Poole- Teacher & Mother January 14, 2010

You asked for teachers’ experiences of working with kids with ADHD. In my experience I’ve found that when I started teaching (before you met me), I wanted all of my students to fit into a mold and do what they were told. It was hard to be patient with kids who constantly disrupted the class. But then I realized that when I was alone with those “disrupting” kids, I had no problem dealing with them at all. They were bright, fun, energetic… what more can you ask for in your students? So the problem wasn’t THEM, the problem was that their behavior didn’t match the same behavior as everybody ELSE. That’s not their fault. If anything, it only made them a minority, but we can’t discriminate against minorities.

So I learned that I had to just figure out a way to adjust my teaching techniques and assignments so that active kids could always be somewhat active and lower-energy kids could do the bulk of the sitting still. Is it really going to harm anybody if an energetic kid wants to memorize his lines while pacing back and forth in the back of the theatre? Would it really hurt me to mix up my group activities with my personal, sitting activities so that there’s always something new happening, and not sitting the first half of class and moving around the 2nd half? What’s wrong with mixing it up?

Last semester I observed many different teachers in 6 different schools (I’m working on my master’s degree in elementary education) and I found that the most successful teachers always had a million different activities going on at the same time, or at least options for them, so that you didn’t have to sit at one thing for extended periods of time. So long as by the end of the day, you’ve accomplished everything, who cares if you did… english math english math… rather than eeeeeennnggglishhh maaaaattthh in long, boring chunks? I know from theatre that mixing things up helps one to remember the material better, anyway. It uses some short-term, and some long-term memory.

So now when I teach I use something called “universal design” which means that I make educational tools and “toys” available to my entire classroom. If there’s a rocking chair, or (my favorite– how clever is this?) a regular chair with a bungee cord attached to the front legs so the child can kick and bounce his feet off of it, then everyone has access to these things all the time, nobody is “pegged” and stigmatized, and what the heck– most of the stuff that’s good for kids with adhd is good for everybody anyway. If a kid wants to doodle while I teach, fine. I don’t care. So long as he’s not poking the kid next to him with the pencil or banging it loudly against the desk, he’s not bothering anybody and doodling and listening are NOT mutually exclusive (contrary to the opinion of some teachers who demand complete attention… and are generally not very successful).

I have learned so much about teaching students with ADHD since entering grad school, it’s amazing. I didn’t know there are actually recipes– diets these children can go on which can help them! Did you know that? Way cool! (same with sensory disorders by the way) I didn’t know that there are all sorts of therapy tools that can help, and I didn’t know all the clever ways I know now to adjust my lesson plans to fit everybody. National-Louis rocks!

Now I enjoy teaching all of my students, particularly the ones with ADHD, because they present just enough of a challenge to me to peek my interest, but I don’t feel so helpless anymore that I can’t help them to succeed. Now, they succeed, and so do I!

Julie Caccamo Meierdirks January 14 at 10:34pm