CHILDREN NEED TO KNOW HOW THEY WILL BE TREATED BY THEIR VARIOUS TEACHERS YEAR AFTER YEAR

Annie’s morning starts out quite pleasantly. She gets dressed, eats her favorite cereal, plays a video game with her dad, walks her dog, and finally runs up the street to her bus. The morning takes a turn after she takes her seat in Room 1 at Northside Elementary.

“Annie, please take the attendance-sheet to the office,” says Ms. Star. Annie freezes in a state of panic, mouth open, eyes wide. She is momentarily at a loss for what to do next. Annie cannot call up in her brain what an attendance-sheet is. She thinks to herself furiously, “Attendance-sheet, attendance-sheet, what is an attendance sheet? Dang, I know I know what it is. I just can’t remember right now. Ms. Star is going to yell at me so bad. What am I going to do? I can’t tell her I don’t know what it is. She won’t believe me and all the kids will think I am dumber than Luke and will hate me too”

Annie is a child who simply cannot remember the meanings of words very well due to to her poor short term memory. Ms. Star cannot ascertain this deficit as of yet because Ms. Star, like many teachers and psychologists, believes almost all educational problems, regardless of a child’s I.Q., can be solved with basic behavior management theories and practices. When Annie turns in sub-par work, Ms. Star ramps up her comments towards Annie about how Annie needs to pay better attention in class and work harder on her assignments.

All Annie knows right now is Ms. Star is going to yell at her big time if she does not stand up right away to get the attendance-sheet in order to take it to the office. Annie has previously been yelled at many times for drawing a blank when Ms. Star has made a request of her.

Ms. Star is now looking sternly at Annie with a firmly set jaw and an expectant expression. Annie is too nervous about getting yelled at in front of the whole class to collect her thoughts in order to remember what an attendance-sheet is. Annie cannot bear to be yelled at again in front of the whole class. Every time she has been yelled at it has been because she could not remember the meaning of a word. She is terrified the other kids will figure out she has trouble remembering words and they will start treating her the way they treat Luke. All the kids refer to Luke as the ‘dumbest’ kid in class and nobody plays with him. Ms. Star reprimands Luke in front of the whole class more than any other kid, but Annie knows she is running a close second.

Annie has no good options available to her in this moment. She simply cannot call up what an attendance-sheet is in her mind. Whatever she says right now will cause Ms. Star to admonish her about her poor attention and her bad attitude in order humiliate her in front of the class, albeit for her own good.

In a split second Annie assesses how to choose the kind of humiliation she is bound to receive because she cannot call up the meaning of the word attendance-sheet. She thinks to herself with lightning speed. “Should I:

A.) admit I cannot remember what an attendance sheet is,

B.) pretend I wasn’t paying attention and get reward points taken away,

C.) tell Ms. Star I cannot take the attendance-sheet because I have go to the bathroom,

D.) throw my pencil at Luke so I will get sent to the principle’s office and won’t have to take the attendance-sheet any more.”

Annie chooses D. So she extemporaneously makes up a fib that can justify her throwing a pencil at Luke and then lets her pencil fly, screaming, “Luke, you stole my notebook.”

Annie has nothing against Luke, it’s just that throwing her pencil at Luke is the perfect distraction for getting her out of taking the attendance sheet to the office and exposing her confusion with word meanings. Annie knows she will receive a punishment but the other kids will see her as cool instead of a dumb loser who can’t remember the meanings of words.

The pencil hits Luke in the lip. Luke knows he did not take Annie’s notebook and a tiny tear trickles down his face. He wipes it away quickly, but another one replaces it, and then another, and another. Luke is devastated because he thought Annie was one of his good friends. She is usually nice to him and sometimes even sits with him on the bus. Nobody ever sits with him on the bus. Luke is embarrassed and confused. He wants to crawl under his desk and hide his eyes because he cannot stop crying, compounding his already searing embarrassment.

It is only 8:53am.

Meanwhile Ms. Star is quite upset. She calls the principal’s office over her intercom. “Mr. Lewis please come to Room 1. It is urgent. One of my students engaged in violence”

Ms. Star then addresses the whole class. “Class, as you all know by 3rd grade, our school has a Zero Tolerance Policy for Violence. All violence will result in a week long suspension. Annie will now be suspended for one week. Let this be a lesson to all of you. Annie, pack your things. Mr. Lewis will call your parents from his office to take you home. Mr. Lewis will speak with you about our Zero Tolerance Policy for Violence.”

Mr. Lewis arrives and whisks Annie away to his office, gives her a serious talking to about the consequences of student violence, suspends her officially for one week, calls her parents, and sends her home. Annie had not remembered the whole concept of zero tolerance for violence. She is still unclear about what suspension means.

Annie was expecting the usual punishment of having to stay inside for recess, so being forced to go home is extremely disorienting and confusing for her. She starts to cry and hyperventilate because she becomes so confused and humiliated without completely understanding what is happening around her

Luke spends the day trying to be invisible inside his brand new oversized Star Wars sweatshirt he had been joyously excited to wear to school today. He thought his classmates would admire his new sweatshirt so much that they would ask him to play. He believes everyone likes Star Wars as much as he does. He cannot imagine otherwise.

At least Luke can use the hood to his advantage. Luke pulls the hood up and down over his eyes to hide his intermittent tears. All the kids are mad at him for allegedly stealing Annie’s notebook and getting her in trouble. They mutter mean comments under their breath and give him dirty looks all day long.

Ms. Star calls Annie’s mother that evening. She recommends Annie’s parents find a psychologist for Annie due to what Ms. Star believes are anger management and negative attitude issues stemming from either possible Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder or ‘trouble at home.’ Rumor has it Annie’s parents are on the verge of divorce and it is commonly accepted that children ‘suffer psychologically’ when their parents are on the verge of divorce. Nobody knows exactly, precisely, or scientifically what the term ‘suffer psychologically’ means, but it is nonetheless widely accepted as a real phenomenon.

Ms. Star also calls Luke’s mother and recommends Luke’s mother find a psychologist for Luke because Ms. Star believes he is suffering from childhood depression due to either Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder, Pervasive Developmental Disabilities Not Otherwise Specified, and/or the trauma of having an absentee father who is a soldier. It is commonly accepted that children ‘suffer psychologically’ when their parents go on extended military duty.

Luke has all kinds of learning challenges. Instead of giving him cognitive and physical supports to make up for his poor short and long term memory, his poor ability to generalize, his low muscle tone, and his weak eye/hand coordination, Ms. Star has decided Luke’s problems are mostly due to the ‘psychological stress’ of having a father away at war and his poor ability to sustain his attention on her lectures, directions, and the tasks at hand during class. Ms. Star believes Luke just needs some good old fashioned behavior management.

When Annie returns from her week long suspension she has missed the whole introduction to identifying nouns in Language Arts. She has missed the introduction to the social studies unit on map reading. She has missed the explanations for all the new concepts and words involved in these units. Due to her trouble remembering the meanings of words in the first place, Annie cannot make heads or tails of the work expectations when she returns from her suspension. Ms. Star, though not a psychologist herself, becomes convinced Annie definitely has ADHD and repeatedly urges Annie’s parents to ask their psychologist to to refer her to a psychiatrist who can prescribe the appropriate medication for Annie. Annie’s parents begrudgingly relent. They want their daughter to succeed, and they do not want to offend Ms. Star or disrespect her position of authority .

The psychiatrist, based solely upon the written reports of Ms. Star, quickly confirms Ms. Star must be right, and prescribes Ritalin for Annie without even asking Annie any questions.

Teachers, like psychologists and psychiatrists, employ widely varying kinds of methodologies in the field. Teachers, like psychologists and psychiatrists, are given many open ended, non specific, vague,personality and behavioral theories to choose from in their preparatory college courses. The plethora of behavioral and personality theories exist because there is no singular, evidence-based, verified, verifiable, or uniformly agreed upon theory of personality or human behavior within the field of psychology or biology. Biologists, ironically, rely upon psychological theories of the human personality with which to build their theories of human behavior.

Psychology teaches eight personality theories. From these eight theories, one could come up with an infinite number of practical applications to use in the field of either teaching or psychology. An infinite number of practical applications for assessing student behavior in our schools is exactly what we have. There is no uniformity.

Our children have confusingly different kinds of experiences in school from year to year because it is up to each teacher to adopt the personality and behavioral theories of their choice from the array of theories they are taught in college. Teachers also develop different understandings for what student behaviors mean to them. And finally, teachers develop applications of the theories of their choice in ways unique to them. There is no uniformity.

Annie’s teacher, Ms. Star, is an earnest and devoted no-nonsense third grade educator in her 20th year. Ms. Star is the kind of teacher who lets her students know SHE is the one in charge and that she is the KIND of teacher will NOT accept defiance, laziness, bad attitudes, or misbehavior.

Ms. Star, like many devoted and earnest educators, has never stopped to analyze the meanings behind these kinds of words and the concepts they represent. Ms. Star was taught to think about these words as if they have specific, quantifiable, and measurable meanings attached.

Ms. Star was taught she could make objective assessments about her students by measuring their achievements up to the quality of the behaviors they exhibit. She believes the kinds of behaviors her students exhibit expose the quality or lack their of, of their attentiveness, attitudes, and work ethics. Ms. Star was taught students who are not achieving in any academic area need only to improve their behaviors involving their attentiveness, work ethic, work effort, and attitude.

Ms. Star aggressively combats what she believes are her objective assessments of student defiance, laziness, bad attitudes, and misbehavior. She believes by doing so she not only sets the bar high in her classroom but also lights a fire under her students to enable them to achieve optimally.

Ms. Star, like many teachers, becomes extremely irritated when her students do not pay attention to her. To be fair, Ms. Star has an enormous amount of crucial information to impart to her students over the course of one short school year. Her students will not succeed up the educational ladder if she does not do right by them. Like most teachers, Ms. Star very much wants to do right by her students. For this reason Ms. Star aggressively combats the negative behaviors she believes prevent students from paying quality attention to her during class.

Ms. Star’s many behavior management courses, in her mind, allow her to see into the minds of each of her students to know exactly when and how each one of them is lapsing into a state of attending or behaving that is sub-par or negative. Ms. Star believes she can spot a bad attitude and sub-par behavior from a mile away and will call a student on it instantly. She believes strongly in her authority to make determinations about what the behaviors of her students mean ‘objectively’ due to her educational background and position as a teacher. She is comfortable and confident with her assessments of her students’ behaviors.

In essence, Ms. Star believes a child’s behaviors are the window into understanding the quality of a child’s efforts. Ms. Star has fixed understandings for what behaviors are acceptable and unacceptable from her students. Moment to moment Ms. Star measures her students’ behaviors up to her fixed understandings in order to form her assessments about how adequate or inadequate her students’ efforts are in her classroom.

This method for assessing student behaviors has been taught to Ms. Star both directly and indirectly, formally and informally, her whole life. As a child and a student, Ms. Star became used to adults telling her when she was thinking and behaving in unacceptable, acceptable, inadequate, adequate, optimal, or suboptimal ways. Ms. Star grew up learning how to manage her thoughts and behaviors by making decisions in terms of how the outcomes of her decisions would impact the judgements of the adults in charge of her. Ms. Star is applying this same pattern to her students, only now she is the adult in charge of interpreting and judging student behaviors in terms of how their behaviors impact her interpretations of what their behaviors mean to her.

Fundamentally changing how Ms. Star understands and manages her students’ behaviors would require a monumental kind of intellectual shift in order to dislodge her whole lifetime of memory storage that is informing her current concepts, beliefs, and practices.

As it stands, many educators and psychologists believe the only thing standing between students being high or low achievers is their negative attitudes, lack of attentiveness, inappropriate behaviors, and laziness. Combatting these negative behaviors is the recipe followed by many. This recipe sounds quite reasonable on paper. Furthermore, student achievement is often above average, at least in the short term, when student behaviors are managed with this recipe. These results are measured by questionable research studies which have thus far gone unquestioned.

Ms. O’Boyle, a veteran teacher like Ms. Star, has chosen very different personality and behavioral theories from which to build her teaching practices than Ms. Star. Consequently, Ms. O’Boyle has developed very different recipes for how she understands her students’ behaviors and manages her classroom. Ms. O’Boyle and Ms. Star have almost identical educational backgrounds. They both went to undergrad and grad school together. They both started teaching 3rd grade at Northside Elementary 20 years ago. They both take all the same continuing education courses together so they can share transportation and lodging when necessary.

How is it possible they both assess the meanings behind student behaviors and achievements so completely differently than one another? This is the million dollar question. It is also the question behind the fact that if I went to 25 different psychologists and 25 different psychiatrists for the same mental health problem, I would end up with 50 different assessments and 50 different treatment plans and goodness knows how many different meds. This state of affairs points directly to our lack of unified, verifiable, and verified theories of the human personality and human behavior.

If we get our theories right, we will be able to account for and solve for the individual thinking differences that exist among all teachers and students. Our current theories are weak and incorrect in many ways, particularly in their failures to account and solve for the consequences of the infinite number of cognitive differences we each have from one another.

Let’s pretend Annie and Luke have Ms. O’Boyle in Room 2 instead of Ms. Star in Room 1. Let’s pretend the same attendance-sheet issue arises.

“Annie, please take the attendance sheet to the office,” says Ms. O’Boyle in Room 2. Annie cannot remember the meaning of the word attendance-sheet. Ms. O’Boyle sees the worried look on Annie’s face and quickly walks the attendance- sheet over to Annie. “Here’s the attendance-sheet, dear,” she says to Annie softly.

Annie thinks to herself while walking towards the door, “Oh ya, I remember now. The attendance-sheet tells who is absent. If you ask me, it should be called an absence-sheet.”

Ms. O’Boyle interrupts Annie’s thoughts and asks her to hang on a second just as Annie is about to step out into the hallway. “Luke, will you go to the office with Annie? Once Annie delivers the attendance-sheet to the office, will you both go into the P.E. Room and ask Mr. Philco to give you all the jump ropes for Room 2? We need those jump ropes for today’s recess activities.

Ms. O’Boyle believes her students each have very unique ways of organizing and understanding information. She believes they will always come to conclusions unique to them due to how they are capable of thinking through a problem given their unique cognitive, sensory, and motor systems.

Ms. O’Boyle knows Luke and Annie have cognitive challenges in terms of how they are able to organize, generalize, and remember information. Ms. O’Boyle takes care never to mistake their cognitive challenges for defiance, laziness, lack of attention, bad attitudes, behavioral problems, or psychological problems. Ms. O’Boyle supports her students’ thinking abilities to make sure her students are as successful as possible everyday at school. Ms. O’Boyle does not use intimidation, humiliation or her position of authority to garner or demand their attention.

Ms. O’Boyle tells her students: “Since I am your teacher I am in charge of developing learning units for you. I am also in charge of establishing and enforcing the rules for our classroom environment. There are consequences for breaking the rules. Once you learn the rules and understand the consequences, I will expect you to follow the rules. You are always in charge of yourselves and your decisions in this classroom. The only person who can make decisions for you is you. I trust you will all figure out how to make decisions that will help you follow our classroom rules. Sometimes we all make mistakes and it is OK to make mistakes. Our rules are in place because there are so many of us in this small space. We usually change some of the rules throughout the year as you grow and change. If you ever have any ideas for good rules for our classroom that will help us stay organized, please let me know in person or in writing.

Ms. O’Boyle does not have preconceived ideas about what student behaviors mean as measured up to fixed understandings or standards. Ms. O’Boyle assumes a student’s behaviors are always in alignment with his or her ability to think through any given circumstance. Students, like all individuals, are designed to assess a constantly changing environment. Our human behaviors allow us to engage our sensory, motor, and cognitive capacities in order to do our assessing and decision making. As such, individual behaviors will be dynamic and completely unique and essential to the ability of that individual to engage reasonably in his or her environment.

Ms. O’Boyle believes it is extremely threatening and destabilizing to a child to have his or her behaviors analyzed from her point of view. She talks about classroom rules and academic expectations in terms of how to achieve them, not in terms of how NOT to achieve them. She understands every student will engage behaviors unique to them all day, every day. In fact, she never talks about behaviors. She talks about the expectations of her classroom and helps each student achieve the expectations in terms of their unique cognitive, sensory, and motor requirements and capacities.

If a student has trouble with academics or classroom rules, Ms. O’Boyle simply works through the conflict in a non-confrontational, non-humiliating kind of way. Her students never feel threatened by her and classroom conflicts are easily managed.

While Annie and Luke leave Ms. O’Boyle’s room to walk to the office together, Annie tells Luke she likes his new sweatshirt. Luke says, “Thanks Annie,” and smiles broadly from ear to ear. Luke gives Annie an original Princess Leigha Star Wars sticker he had been saving for her. Luke knows the original Princess Leigha is Annie’s favorite character of all. Annie’s dad is a Star Wars fan and Annie knows more about Star Wars than any other girl in the third grade. Luke thinks Annie is spectacular and pretty and nice. Annie doesn’t have a clue that Luke is the ‘dumbest’ boy in the class because Ms. O’Boyle has never singled him out to embarrass him into submission in front of the others for his mistakes, attitude, effort, or attention.

It is 8:53am in Room 2.

The day started out great for Annie and only gets better. No tears are shed. No suspensions are necessary. No psychologists are called. No psychiatrists are called; no medications subscribed.

Each year, your child will have a teacher who understands and applies behavioral theories in a manner completely unique to him or her. This situation exists for a number of reasons, every single one of the reasons have to do with our fundamental misunderstandings and mistakes within the foundational concepts of psychology.

If we want better results in our classrooms, we have to develop and provide teachers with evidenced based, verifiable, and uniformly understood theories of the human personality, child development and human behavior. To do this, we must replace the current non evidenced-based theoretical frameworks psychology has provided us and replace them with evidence -based biological theories of the human personality and human behavior.

I have developed some basic, straight forward, biologically-based and verifiable theories about the human personality and human behavior based upon my many years of observing children both in and out of the classroom. If verified through research and testing, I believe these biologically based theories will lead to practices that can allow teachers to provide uniform, consistent, and optimal services to students year after year, regardless of a student’s strengths or weaknesses.

What I have observed and inferred about human behavior, however, is once we learn a concept in a certain way, our brain protects and defends how we have come to understand that concept. Any intellectual challenges to our long held concepts are perceived as serious threats to our whole system. Our brain cannot see, hear, taste, touch, or smell. Any challenge to our stability, big or small, is registered as a threat. The only way our brain can register a threat is for an understanding our brain has created and stored to be challenged.

My new ideas about the biology of the human personality and human behavior will challenge how we have all been taught to understand ourselves and others. I am trying to figure out how to work around this conundrum in the book I am writing about my proposal for new biologically based theories of human personality and behavior.