PROBLEM STUDENT – NO SUCH THING!

by Christina Frank

Spend time in any elementary-school classroom and you're likely to spot at least one of the following: a kid who can't sit still, a kid who practicaly crawls under her desk to avoid being called on, and a kid who never remem­bers to do his homework—along with a motley as­sortment of other types who stray from the model of the ideal student. In the past, such children might have been punished, been sent for extensive tutor­ing, or been written off as hopeless; these days, they'd probably be labeled with one of the ubiqui­tous "D's"— like ADD (attention deficit disorder), ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), LD (learning disorder), or BD (behavioral disorder).

But pediatrician Mel Levine would just call these kids nor­mal. Sure, they may not respond well to a standard, one-size-fits-all teaching approach, but in his mind it's the teachers who need to change, not the students. Embracing the notion that all children are wired to learn in subtly dif­ferent ways, Levine has created a program called Schools Attuned, which trains teach­ers how to tailor their methods to each stu­dent's specific strengths and weaknesses.

Levine, 60, has synthesized years of brain research and come up with eight types of brain function (such as attention, memory, and language), which are then broken down into a number of subcategories.

Each subcategory can be translated into a specif­ic, comprehensible learning issue. "Saliency determination," for example, which falls under memory, refers to a child's ability to extract what is most meaningful in a passage of text. "Sequential output" is the ability to follow steps in a specific order. A child may be perfectly intelligent, but fail to do well in school because his brain shortchanges him in one of these small, but significant areas.

By targeting a child's weakness so specifi­cally, Levine's assessment avoids broadly la­beling children with assorted "disorder" ini­tials. Though he acknowledges that the la­bels served a purpose for a while, he feels it's time to move forward. "The labels are too global, too inaccurate, too vague, and too pessimistic," he says. "We can help these kids so much more effectively if we label the phenomena and not the child."

He'd also like to replace the word disorder with dysfunction. "Dysfunction is where something's adjusted in a way that doesn't quite work," he explains. "If your TV set wasn't working and all you had to do was turn the right knob, it doesn't mean the whole TV is broken."

So instead of diagnosing a child with LD (learning disorder), for example, you might say she struggles with her active work­ing memory, which means she has a hard time holding several things in her mind at once. This may make it hard for her to ab­sorb reading material or to write papers.

"By specifically identifying a child's problem like this, you can begin to help her," says Levine. "Then she doesn't feel retarded and teachers can come up with a whole bunch of strategies to help deal with it."

Plus, warns Levine, one of the major haz­ards of reducing children to learning-dis­abled status is low self-esteem, which in turn correlates with drug use and delinquency.

Some of Levine's solutions are so simple, it's amazing no one ever thought of them be­fore. For fidgety students, he recommends that teachers keep a bowl of spongy balls on their desks, so that instead of noisily tapping a pencil, a kid can go up and get a ball to squeeze quietly. Stopping a student from fid­geting altogether is not necessary because fidgeting may actually serve a purpose for a child by keeping him alert and focused. He just needs a nondisruptive way of doing it. For a child who dreads being called on, the fear usually has to do with having to re­spond immediately.

"Some children's mem­ories don't work that fast," explains Levine. "A teacher can give that child a warning that she'll be called on tomorrow, say, about the causes of the War of 1812. This way she has 23 hours to get ready instead of 3 seconds."

Some argue that this amounts to fa­voritism. Levine disagrees. "We don't treat any two kids the same because some children need flexibility in one area, some in other areas," he points out. And in fact, "to treat everybody the same is not to treat them equally, because it will favor certain kids."

Many teachers who use the program say Levine's approach saves time in the class­room because it cuts down on time spent disciplining. And often the interventions designed for one child become something that's useful for the entire class.

Danette Lipten, who teaches 6- and 7-year-olds at the Bank Street School for Chil­dren in New York City, took the week-long Schools Attuned workshop four years ago. "I am so much more thorough in my under­standing of kids and of how they learn," she says. "And I am able to communicate so much better with parents. The value of the program is immeasurable."

Schools Attuned is meant to be a collabo­ration between teachers, parents, and the children themselves. Parents are given tech­niques for helping their children at home and the kids themselves are "demystified," as Levine calls it.

"As soon as we figure out what the issue is, we explain it to the child and give him the words for the things he needs to work on."

He also promotes the idea that it's as important to develop stu­dents' particular strengths as it is to help them remedy their weaknesses.

Levine has a soft spot for offbeat kids be­cause he himself fit into that category. He describes himself as "a kid who ran around with his nose running, his fly open, and most of the time carrying a snake or a tur­tle."

He was a good student, but lousy at sports. "Kids would fight to not have me on their team," he recalls.

Raised on Long Island by parents who worked in the garment in­dustry, Levine decided at a young age that he wanted to be a doctor. After graduating from Brown University in 1961, he won a Rhodes Scholarship which took him to Oxford; he then enrolled at Harvard Medical School. But it was his service during the Vietnam War that had a major impact on his think­ing. As the school doctor at an Air Force base in the Philippines, he became fascinat­ed with the potential relationship between pediatrics and education. "It just seemed we had so much to teach each other and that by combining perspectives we could get an in-depth sense of how a kid was wired."

Schools Attuned was born in 1987. It has flourished especially in recent years, thanks to generous financial backing from such high-profile investors as Charles Schwab (who himself was dyslexic) and the Geral­dine R. Dodge Foundation. Levine and his colleagues have established 10 Schools At­tuned regional training centers, as well as a broader, nonprofit institute called All Kinds of Minds. In the works is a PBS series along with a video library that he hopes to make available to every school in the country. At the moment, over 5,000 education professionals have gone through the program. He dreams of creating actual Schools Attuned schools.

But reforming American education is just one of Levine's passions. He is a fanatic animal lover who, with his wife Bambi (to whom he has been married for more than 30 years), lives on a farm in rural Rougemont, North Carolina. They have no chil­dren, but are surrogate parents to 240 geese, along with numerous peacocks, swans, pheasants, cats, dogs, and donkeys. When he's not fulfilling his role as Professor of Pediatrics at the University of North Car­olina at Chapel Hill or on the road promot­ing Schools Attuned, he is likely to be hold­ing a meeting of The Carolina-Virginia Pheasant and Waterfowl Society, which he founded. "I've never done anything with­out overdoing it," says Levine. "I try to do ab­solutely everything in excess."

Perhaps because of his own eccentricities (his other interests include Oriental porce­lain, metal sculpture, Robert Frost poetry, and gourmet food), Levine appreciates that which makes people unique—and believes it is highly valuable. "Our society desperately needs all kinds of minds," he says. "So let's make sure that every child is getting his or her strengths strengthened. Let's not punish kids for the way they're wired, but let's celebrate and encourage that diversity. I'm trying to prop­agate a generation of optimistic kids, who will feel that they've made a contribution, that they are successful in their own ways. If you can show people how to believe in themselves when they're young, then it be­comes a lifelong process."

2. Prepare a summary evaluation of Mel Levine’s accomplishments.