2013-05-19T11:58:11-04:00 Katherine Ellison http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=katherine-ellison Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Katherine Ellison Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.841667 2011-03-29T14:04:59-04:00 2011-05-29T05:12:01-04:00

Katherine Ellison http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katherine-ellison/ School of One.

That name conveys the philosophy of the program -- now running in a limited form at three Manhattan middle schools -- which is to customize learning for each student, so that no one is held back, nor pushed forward. For more than a year, School of One has been winning raves from education experts, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation president Arthur Levine. Its strategy is to make smart use of technology to personalize education, which can make learning more interesting to students while providing teachers with daily information they can use to plan each kid's day, according to his or her past progress. The theory is that children who need extra support from teachers or mentors will receive it, without feeling the anxiety of falling behind in class. Teachers' greater flexibility will then allow them to plan more engaging, hands-on projects during time not spent at the computer.

Rose, as he revealed over the coffee, is now taking his winning idea to a national stage. He told me he is leaving NYC's education department this month to finish raising $30 million so that he can duplicate School of One in hundreds of other U.S. classrooms. An early backer is the New Schools Venture Fund, co-founded by Silicon Valley investor John Doerr, whose sharp eye helped launch Amazon and Netscape.

"President Obama has been saying that this is our Sputnik moment in education," says Rose, a former Teach for America elementary school teacher. "But where is the goal equivalent to putting a man on the moon?"

Rose has a vision for what that goal should be: transforming a quarter of American classrooms to the School of One model. It's an objective that may easily win political supporters who'll appreciate the money it could save at a time when education is so woefully underfunded. Yet it should be undertaken with caution, especially before we start thinking about substituting laptops for teachers. To the degree that technology ramps up in the classrooms, administrators will have to pay quality attention to whether the many students in need of strong relationships with actual people still have them.

Even with these concerns, however, I wish School of One had been around when my kids needed it, or for that matter, when I did. I so clearly remember being bored out of my mind all through grade school -- a form of mental torture that I hope we will one day consider as ridiculous as letting principals deliver spankings.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.837704 2011-03-22T17:53:00-04:00 2011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00

Katherine Ellison http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katherine-ellison/ he was the problem. After all, I was getting constant calls from his teachers, complaining that he was misbehaving or hadn't done his homework, or had lost another field trip permission form. At home, he'd routinely melt down, taking out his frustrations by picking fights with his younger brother and me.

Like so many other parents, I'd read dozens of guidebooks. Many contained wise advice, and most suggested complicated routines and discipline plans. All made the common assumption that parenting guides tend to make: that the reader, unlike most mortals, has exceptional self-control and organizational skills. And none of them helped much at all.

I reached the point of considering boarding school for him, or maybe going AWOL for me.
Then, after a particularly awful fight while driving him on the freeway, I decided to take a closer look at what was going wrong, and how I might try to fix it. By then, I knew that I shared my son's diagnosis of ADHD. This is a surprisingly common predicament for parents, given the strongly hereditary nature of the disorder. But what many parents -- including myself, until then -- fail to realize is how much that double whammy can aggravate your problems.

By forcing myself to be more honest than I'd ever previously dared, I realized how I was contributing to the arguments with my son. As one therapist put it, "He's provocative, and you're reactive." I focused in on that reactivity by admitting it, talking about it, getting help for my own clinical-grade distraction and practicing techniques to help me manage my emotions, such as meditation and neurofeedback, biofeedback for the brain.

Along the way, I got some simple advice from my wise niece: when you find yourself in a tug of war, she said, drop the rope. I tried this during the very next argument with my son. When he started to huff and puff over some imagined slight, I smiled kindly and put my arm around him.

This isn't a technique you'll find in many parenting guides, but it de-escalated our conflict right away. And things have been getting better ever since.
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Katherine Ellison http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katherine-ellison/ 5 million U.S. children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, it's no wonder so many parents are desperately seeking some kind of magic bullet cure.

The latest hope comes in a recent study in the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, suggesting that a rigorously restricted diet can do the trick.

The researchers studied 100 children ages four to eight, and all with symptoms of ADHD. They divided the kids into two groups, one free to eat without restrictions, and the other limited to a small number of hypoallergenic foods, including water, rice, lettuce, carrots, and turkey. Four weeks later, the scientists interviewed the children's parents, and concluded that 64 percent of the children on the special diet had improved so much that the disorder was no longer impairing.

Psychologist Lidy Pelsser, of the ADHD Research Center in the Netherlands, described the results as "shocking," concluding that diet is the main cause of ADHD symptoms, which include restlessness, impulsivity, and distraction. And not surprisingly, many parents seeking a non-pharmaceutical treatment have hailed the findings.

There are good reasons to be cautious about this and other promises of quick fixes, however, two of which were cited in The Los Angeles Times Monday. One expert criticized the researchers' decision to recruit such young children, in whom, he said, it's harder to be sure of an ADHD diagnosis. But more strikingly, as the Times noted, the parents of the children on the dramatically restricted diet necessarily had to be paying much more attention to those kids on a daily basis-- particularly hopeful attention which was helpful to their children in itself.

This rings especially true for me, having spent a full year working to focus my attention on the nature of the ADHD diagnosis that I share with my teenage son, and how best to cope with it.

One thing I've learned, as I've interviewed the field's leading experts, is that there are many different causes of the vague cluster of symptoms we call ADHD, but that the main one is most likely hereditary. ADHD is nearly as likely as height to be passed on from parent to child.

Food sensitivities may indeed play a part in aggravating symptoms, and a previous Lancet study has highlighted the role of additives and artificial coloring. Other research has focused on the harmful impact of pesticide exposure.

At the same time, it's important to note that ADHD can also be more or less impairing to a child in accord with his or her environment. Our overcrowded, antiquated public school classrooms are usually a very poor fit.

All this is to say that, alas, there's still no magic bullet, even for a parent willing and able to muster the extraordinary focus of monitoring his or her child's every bite.
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