Keeping ADD student on task

What other disabilities does this student have? I ask this question because this might effect the strategies suggested. I am a student with ADD myself and also have LD. I find that if a teacher makes the instruction noval then I can pay atention better. If they are just lecturing and not using visual aides or employing other atttention getting activities then I will daydream. If you come up with a signel only you and the student know to get htem back on trakc that works too. this is my thoughts form a tsudents point of view. I am in 8th grade. I just use strategies to hep me along as I did not respond to any o the medacashuns they tried. Most of all be pateient.

MIke

I am the mother of five - three ADD/HD. I am constantly working on trying to solve this problem. My oldest son is 19 and is ADHD. He got through school with very little medication because we didn’t know what the problem was for such a looooong time. Medication did not work all that well either. He has elected to go off of it at this point because he would like to go back into the Army and they won’t let him take medication. I told him we could try it. He isn’t too bad, except when he gets very tired. Last semester he flunked college because he didn’t get his assignments turned in on time. He also found his classes VERY boring. This semester he is reading and happy. Why? He is reading about things that interest him. You may need to brainstorm with the mom and child to see what it is that the student IS interested in. Also, short time frame - can’t attend long to one thing. Do you have a computer in the room? Can he do tutorial stuff on the computer? Use it as a carrot for impulse delay. Then, although I am working on my master’s in SPED, my husband has his PhD in gifted. You said this kid is smart. Has he been checked for giftedness? Often if gifted kids know something, they don’t see any reason to do it again. Also, once they see how to do something, sometimes they don’t see the need to finish. It IS finished in their mind. AND the young man who wrote back is right - just hang in there and be patient. Use mom to help if she can. Probably anything that can use movement may be helpful. If a child has to stand in order to work, let them.some kids have so much energy they just can’t sit. Hope something in this is helpful.

I don’t have a sure fire solution to this but for my inattentive ADD kids, I try to walk by their desk and gently tap the desk while walking by. That gentle tap can help to recall them to their work without embarrassing them. Seat placement can also help as I find mine are more likely to stay on task when sitting front and center than off to the side with the distractions of the bulletin boards close at hand.

Mike, You are right. Having a signal that only the student and the teacher know is a very good idea. I have read about that myself in some books I read. Or the teacher could just walk by and gently touch the student on the shoulder.
This way the student isn’t embarrassed.

When these kids, and you , grow up and are in your 30’s and 40’s who knows who you will be and what you will be doing. Most likely great things. Teachers don’t need to rub kids faces into it when they can’t help the problems they have. Same for parents.
Gerthy

This one was to Mike. I agreed with him.
Gerthy

I have a bright, quiet, socially troubled middle school student, who hates it when the teacher contantly gets her attention. Now it’s possible it helps, but do be careful that other kids don’t notice. My daughter, during the first three weeks of school, said the teacher made her feel dumb the entire breaking- in period. I know she didn’t mean to, but singling ADD kids out can make them less and be very uncomfortable in the spotlight. When she was younger, the teacher would move my daughter’s desk closer to her desk to keep her attention and make her feel uncomfortable. That didn’t help, because my daughter loved the adult interaction and disliked her peers so that was a bonus rather than a punishment!
My daughter can’t finish tests and many assignments, so the teacher is now keeping her after school to finish. This is a blessing and a curse. It does help my daughter get finished sometimes (about 50/50), but it also makes her hate the teacher even more and I think that will be a lasting memory and result and not help retain the work.
My best advice, and what seems to work most often is less repetitions, which you can as a teacher do quietly if the student seems willing to apply some effort. Over and over I have seen my child bring home a test that has 6 perfectly answered questions and 5 unfinished. That means she understands the material, but she still did poorly on the test. Not fair for an ADD kid. Fortunately, until this year, all her other teachers were of that same mindset, so she was thankfully a B+ student. They tell us now, Middle School is different so she is a C student. Makes not one ounce of sense to me. I worry that making her waste her time doing Math she will never use again and giving her a C, as opposed to some graphic art class which will give her an A, or an oral creative storytelling class she would Ace, knocks down her spirit, kills her creativity and gives her a long lasting distaste for learning.

I feel that a lot of patience is the key. He will have good and bad days just the same as your other students. Simple things seem to work the best. Tasks that are short and to the point. For example, don’t give him a whole list of questions that would take him a long time. He will loose interest after a little while. Give him the long assignments in intervals. Also, keep walking by his desk and if he is not on task just tap him on the schoulder to bring him back. Seating arrangements can help, too. Make sure he is away from the “busier” students. They may distract him. And if your desks are not in traditional rows, have him face a wall with the least on it.These are just some tactics that I think will help.

I have a High School student undiagnosed, but I feel sure that he is ADHD. We have chairs that can spin, and he does it constantly as I address the class. One day, as I was getting ready to do a demonstration, I realized he was going to spin and interrupt, and squiggle around (not maliciously, he really can’t help it). This knocks me and the other students off track. As it happened, I had the school’s digital camera that day. Inspired, I asked him to take pictures of me and the class and to carefully document each step of the process I was demonstrating. It took 1 minute to show him how. I explained it would be a personal favor, and I could use the pictures later on a website or handout.

It worked out great!! For the first time this semester, I was able to concentrate, and made a better presentation than usual. This boy’s classmates were not exasperated or distracted by his motions and outbursts, because there weren’t any. He paid attention, because he had a productive way to express his physicality and energy and was able to move around while documenting what I was doing. Some of the photographs were excellent, and I will use them- so no white lies on my part.

Of course, this can’t apply to all disciplines or activities, but we don’t always have to force all children to behave in the same way. Looking into a classroom with all the students doing the same thing in the same way at the same time does not necessarily translate into the same learning. We need to orchestrate a situation in which all children are learning, and no children are interfering with the learning of others.

Some other ideas

Instead of taking notes on lined paper, I might pass out a handout (very visual) which provides a loose structure for the presentation or activity.

Have students make a little book instead of a work sheet.

Instead of completing the entire project in their seat, have a series of stations. Students move from station to station as they move through the activity. The ADHD child then has a visual and kinesthetic reinforcement and reference “I still have to go to the last 2 stations!”

Instead of doing special things for one student, run the class as if all the students are ADHD. (yikes!) They willl ALL enjoy it more, and learn as much.

Hmm. I wonder how on earth ADHD kids managed in school during the 1800s? I’ve read the “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and one of the rules in those 1-room schoolhouses was that children were forbidden to whisper or fidget. They had to sit perfectly still and maintain constant focus on their lessons. It seems to me that a child with ADHD would have an impossible time with doing either!

Yours truly,
Kathy G.

bmartin wrote:
>
> I have a High School student undiagnosed, but I feel sure
> that he is ADHD. We have chairs that can spin, and he does
> it constantly as I address the class. One day, as I was
> getting ready to do a demonstration, I realized he was going
> to spin and interrupt, and squiggle around (not maliciously,
> he really can’t help it). This knocks me and the other
> students off track. As it happened, I had the school’s
> digital camera that day. Inspired, I asked him to take
> pictures of me and the class and to carefully document each
> step of the process I was demonstrating. It took 1 minute to
> show him how. I explained it would be a personal favor, and
> I could use the pictures later on a website or handout.
>
> It worked out great!! For the first time this semester, I
> was able to concentrate, and made a better presentation than
> usual. This boy’s classmates were not exasperated or
> distracted by his motions and outbursts, because there
> weren’t any. He paid attention, because he had a productive
> way to express his physicality and energy and was able to
> move around while documenting what I was doing. Some of the
> photographs were excellent, and I will use them- so no white
> lies on my part.
>
> Of course, this can’t apply to all disciplines or activities,
> but we don’t always have to force all children to behave in
> the same way. Looking into a classroom with all the students
> doing the same thing in the same way at the same time does
> not necessarily translate into the same learning. We need to
> orchestrate a situation in which all children are learning,
> and no children are interfering with the learning of others.
>
> Some other ideas
>
> Instead of taking notes on lined paper, I might pass out a
> handout (very visual) which provides a loose structure for
> the presentation or activity.
>
> Have students make a little book instead of a work sheet.
>
> Instead of completing the entire project in their seat, have
> a series of stations. Students move from station to station
> as they move through the activity. The ADHD child then has a
> visual and kinesthetic reinforcement and reference “I still
> have to go to the last 2 stations!”
>
> Instead of doing special things for one student, run the
> class as if all the students are ADHD. (yikes!) They willl
> ALL enjoy it more, and learn as much.

well- they had a lot less school to attend, and perhaps the threat of corporal punishment helped focus…. ;-)

I myself am ADHD.
Although I went to school in the 70’s, I was spanked, publicly chastised, kept in from recess, referred to principal, social worker. But girls weren’t considered ADHD, so the only label most including me came up with was, “not performing up to potential”, or “lazy”. I think in the 1800’s they just said “naughty”.

Kathy,
In”These Happy Golden Years” by Laura Ingalls Wilder she describes her first teaching job. The students she taught remind me of the ADHD students that I teach today.
Chris

Check this article out about how we used to educate kids. I found it on the LD site, and it makes a lot of sense.

William Farish:
THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS LAZY TEACHER
Thom Hartmann’s Complete Guide to ADHD
pp.189-195
Underwood Brooks Grass Valley 2000
Reprinted with permission

Thomas Jefferson was arguably one of the most well-educated Americans of his time. He was well-read, thoughtful, knowledgeable in a wide variety of topics from the arts to the sciences, and the founder of the University of Virginia. The same could probably be said of Ben Franklin, or James and Dolly Madison. On the larger world stage, we could credibly make such claims for René Descartes, William Shakespeare, Galileo, Michelangelo, and Plato.

But there is one thing unique about the education of all these people, which is different from that of you, me, and our children: none ever were given grades. All attended schools or had teachers who worked entirely on a pass/fail system.

The model of education from its earliest times was one of mentorship, starting with hunter-gatherers taking their children out on the hunt 100,000 years ago, all the way up to the teaching methods employed at the university founded by Thomas Jefferson. The teacher and the students got to know one another. They interacted constantly throughout the day. The teacher knew each child, had a clear vision of each child’s understanding of the coursework, and worked with each child (or encouraged them to work with each other) until the teacher was satisfied each child understood the material … or was hopelessly incapable of being educated. Because this latter was virtually an admission of failure on the part of the teacher, it happened rarely.

When a student graduated, the most impressive thing she or he could share with a prospective employer was not a Grade Point Average (GPA) or even the name of the institution attended: it was the name of the teacher. Students of the great teachers of history often became famous themselves because of the thoroughness with which their mentors had inculcated knowledge, understanding, skill, and talent in them.

This is how things went from 98,000 BC to roughly 1800 AD. Then came William Farish.

Around the turn of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was going full-bore. Piece-work payments were becoming increasingly popular, and many schools were beginning to pay teachers based on the number of students they had, as opposed to a flat salary.

William Farish was a tutor at Cambridge University in England in 1792, and, other than his single contribution to the subsequent devastation of generations of schoolchildren, is otherwise undistinguished and unknown by most people.

Getting to know his students, one may suppose, was too much trouble for Farish. It meant work, interacting and participating daily with each child. It meant paying attention to their needs, to their understanding, to their styles of learning. It meant there was a limit on the number of students he could thus get to know, and therefore a limit on how much money he could earn.

So Farish came up with a method of teaching which would allow him to process more students in a shorter period of time. He invented grades. (The grading system had originated earlier in the factories, as a way of determining if the shoes, for example, made on the assembly line were “up to grade.” It was used as a benchmark to determine if the workers should be paid, and if the shoes could be sold.)

Grades did not make students smarter. In fact, they had the opposite effect: they made it harder for those children to succeed whose style of learning didn’t match the didactic, auditory form of lecture-teaching Farish used.
Grades didn’t give students deeper insights into their topics of study. Instead, grades forced children to memorize by rote only those details necessary to pass the tests, without regard to true comprehension of the subject matter.
Grades didn’t encourage critical thinking or insight skills, didn’t promote questioning minds. Such behaviors are useless in the graded classroom, and within a few generations were considered so irrelevant that today they’re no longer listed among the goals of public education.
Grades didn’t stimulate the students, or share with them a contagious love for the subject being studied. The opposite happened, in fact, as the normative effect of grades acted as a muffling blanket to any eruptions of enthusiasm, any attempts to dig deeper into a topic, any discursions into larger significance or practical application of content.
What grades did do, however, was increase the salary of William Farish, while, at the same time, lowering his workload and reducing the hours he needed to spend in the classroom. He no longer needed to burrow into his students’ minds to know if they understood a topic: his grading system would do it for him. And it would do it just as efficiently for twenty children as it would for two hundred.

Farish brought grades to the classroom, and the transformation was both sudden and startling: a revolution as rapid and overwhelming as the Industrial Revolution from which it had sprung. Within a generation, the lecture-hall/classroom shifted from a place where one heard the occasional speech by a famous thinker to the place of ordinary daily instruction.

While grades didn’t help students a bit - and, in fact, had the now well-known effect of “dumbing down” entire nations - they vastly simplified the work of teachers and schools. So they spread across Europe and to America with startling speed, arriving here in the early 1800s.

Without grades, the assembly-line-classroom would not be possible. With grades, whole categories of children were discovered who didn’t fit onto the conveyer belt, providing an entire new realm of employment for’ adults who would diagnose, treat, and remediate these newly-discovered “learning disabled” children.

Responsibility for the success of learning shifted from teachers to students: when kids failed, it was their own fault, because they obviously had a defect or disorder of some sort.

A process of sorting and discarding the misfits began Oust like in the shoe factory) which, to this day, rewards the “standard” and wounds the “different.”

William Farish gained, but something precious was lost to generations of students thereafter: the mentored learning experience.

SELF-ESTEEM AS A PREDICTOR OF FUTURE SUCCESS

In hi s best-selling book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman lays out in great detail how the factors that contribute to a happy, well-adjusted adulthood are not necessarily good grades or even high IQ. In fact, study after study has shown that there’s virtually no correlation between grades in school and success in adult life.

Unfortunately for Farish, his students, and generations of students since his 1792 invention, grades do not predict success and, in fact, are not even a particularly good measurement of true learning or understanding of a topic. Studies of valedictorians have found that they’re about as likely as anybody else to succeed or fail in life. Oddly enough, it’s the “average students” who seem the most well-adjusted to life as adults - assuming, of course, that they were not constantly harassed, humiliated, or prodded by their parents or teachers to improve their grade point averages (GPA). Those adults who lived under the most pressure as students - and often who got the best grades - are also often the ones who crumble under the pressures of life as adults. Along with grades came another horror for students, although it’s only been in the past few decades that it’s become an obsession in the public schools: standardized curriculum. If grading students frees teachers from having to get to know them, having to work one-on-one with them, and having to develop any deep sense of their skill levels, then standardized curriculum causes them to not even have to think about what level of development or knowledge a student may be at. All students must be the same! It’s ordained by the all-knowing bureaucrats in their offices downtown, in the state capitol, or in Washington D.C. And, since the standardized curriculum has implicit in it a concept of normalcy, if students are not performing well it’s obviously because they - not their teachers or their schools, but they - are not normal.Unfortunately for our children, standardized curriculum has proven to be as much of a failure as have grades in helping kids learn. The ability to perform to some mythical norm is irrelevant as a measurement of a child’s abilities, just as grades are only marginally relevant as a measurement of anything other than a person’s ability to take a test and to memorize. (Neither of those skills have much application to the real world, and yet they comprise the vast majority of what students are called upon to do throughout their school careers.

There is, however, one measurable index which does do a pretty good job of predicting a child’s probability of leading a happy and successful life as an adult: his or her selfesteem.

Self-esteem, however, is not generally measured in schools. Indeed, at times it seems as if modern schools were set up specifically to minimize self-esteem, producing instead compliant, unthinking little robots for Parents and teachers the machine of industrial society.

Much teaching behavior, in the holy can work together to name of Good Grades, could have change this situation been designed in a psych laboratory and modify our to disorient and shatter the self learning environments. confidence of young people, particularly those with ADD.

Parents and teachers can work together to change this situation and modify our learning environments so emphasis is put on building an enthusiasm for learning, rather than the ability to do short-term rote memory to pass a test. Grades based on the ability to memorize and recite minutiae should be replaced by a simple pass/fail system in which the teacher determines if the student has mastered the topic, understands the material, and can carry that understanding forward into other areas of study and life. In other words, we need to go back to the system that worked so well for thousands of years before Farish decided to become history’s most famous lazy teacher.

First Person - Carl is a high school student in Atlanta:

I discovered something about the way that I pay attention in school when I had this really cool teacher, Gary, who taught me civics. Gary really cared about us kids, and he even liked to stay after class and talk with us about politics and things; he liked us and he loved the subject he was teaching. He also coached the drama club.

And I noticed that in Gary’s classes, even when the material was boring, I worked harder to pay attention because I cared about what Gary thought of me. I wanted to make him happy and proud of me, because’ I liked and respected him.

This made me think about my other teachers. Most of them I didn’t know at all. The kids would tell jokes about them, and we’d just try to get through the class, you know; they really didn’t seem like people. They were just teachers.

So I thought, I wonder what would happen if I got to know some of my other teachers?

I started out with Mrs. Billingham, who teaches math, which is a subject I don’t much like, and I never really liked her that much, either. But, of course, I never got to know her, and she looks sort of like a tank, if you know what I mean. Her giving me a D on my last semester didn’t help, either.

But I tried to get to know her. I went up after class, asked for her help with some things, and asked about her life. I learned that she spent part of her childhood in China and that her parents were missionaries. She decided she wanted to become a teacher because they were. I was blown away. I asked her if I could come in early for a few weeks, maybe a half-hour before school started, so she could help me catch up. She got really enthusiastic about it, and we did it for two weeks.

Now I have a solid B in math, and it’s not because I’ve become the teacher’s pet or anything stupid like that, but it’s because I’ve gotten to know her, and so now I care about her and what she thinks of me. So now when I drift off in her class, I catch myself and bring myself back.

It’s amazing, you know, what you can do if you want to. And how hard it is to do things, like paying attention in class, when you don’t give a damn.

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