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Sidebar: Asset-Focused Parenting

How Jerome Learned to Read: Fostering Children's Unique Intelligence
By Dawna Markova
Issue 122, January/February 2004

"Learning emerges from our individual and collective abilities to tap existing human capabilities and transform the forces that interfere with their expressions."
-Maya Angelou

When we hold an infant in our arms, we all feel it-that gaping awe and amazement as we look at the prints at the ends of those diminutive fingers. At that moment, it is as if a door inside our hearts opens-we feel a wave of wonder at the miracle of this child's uniqueness and potential. Perhaps, in that moment and a thousand times since, you've asked yourself how you could best cultivate this being so that he or she could blossom as fully as possible.

But the door closes. We forget. We seem to develop some kind of perceptual dyslexia. As a nation, we have developed a handicap of trust that limits our perception of the unique island of brilliance on which each child stands. The focus of our attention has shifted-from what might be natural assets that need to be developed, to what could be deficits that need to be fixed. We limit not only what could be possible for children, but also how we might champion their innate gifts. We see Martin as "hyperactive" instead of energetic. We call Sally "inattentive" instead of imaginative. We label George "oppositional" rather than independent. Jennifer is described as being "oversensitive," not empathetic, and Jerome, a young man I was privileged to meet in a Florida school several decades ago, was labeled as "retarded" and "resistant" instead of . . . well, let me tell you a story about Jerome.

He was a six-foot-tall, bittersweet chocolate, 14-year-old sixth grader living in a migrant labor camp with his mother and two sisters. I was the "learning specialist." My office was the former broom closet. The principal referred Jerome to me on the day school opened. "Just keep him out of trouble. He'll never be able to learn to read; he's trainable, not educable. Train him to behave in my school."

Jerome's cumulative folder was full of labels listing all of his deficits and disorders. His deep eyes held both mischief and misery. He told me the first day not to bother trying to teach him, because he wasn't ever going to read. That made it almost unanimous-and a challenge.

I learned from Jerome's mother that he was the chess champion of the migrant camp. I went to watch him play one night, which was evidently rather unusual. No white teacher had ever done such a thing. I found Jerome surrounded by a small crowd, sitting on boxes or squatting. As Jerome paced, no one made a sound. His eyes scanned the board, and then, suddenly, he pounced. "Checkmate!"

I had an idea. I brought a large book to my office; its title, A Black History of America, was spelled out in gold letters. Jerome, who had never seen a book with photographs of African Americans, did everything he could to try to get me to read it to him. Finally, I offered to play a game of chess with him, but only on these conditions: If he won, I'd read the book to him. If I won, he'd have to learn to read it.

It must have been divine intervention: I was a beginning chess player and Jerome was an expert, but I won that game-the only game of chess I have ever won. It took us the rest of the school year, but Jerome did learn to read that book. We explored the pattern his mind used when he played chess, and figured out how to use that pattern to help him read.

"I need to be standing and moving. It's gotta be real quiet so I can think. Then I have to look steady with my eyes at the whole board until I can see it in my mind. After that, a voice way inside tells me what to do." While he moved, I traced words on his back. He'd say them while he looked at the book, then write them on paper. It was laborious, but Jerome learned very quickly. He taught me as much as I taught him.

On his last day of school, he disappeared, leaving the book behind, even though I had given it to him as a celebration present. His mother told me he was afraid it would get stolen, and that would hurt too much. She handed me a poem he had written for me: I don't know how to show the delight of feeling right about what was wrong or so they said with my head. Thanks.

I mourn when I think of Jerome, caught in a battle for control of his spirit, whose only ultimate power was refusal. I feel despair when I hear someone say how children are "unmotivated" and "resist learning." They may be resistant to being taught, but not to learning.

I don't like what we're doing to children in this country. As a grandmother, a teacher, a psychologist, a human being, it hurts my heart. I want us to pay attention to Jerome's message, to begin to study, identify, and develop children's strengths, their assets, with the same intensity and fervor with which we have studied children's deficits and disorders.

I write this to and for other mothers because we can profoundly change the way we have been taught to think about our children's abilities. We can start an evolution in which the full range of children's natural intelligence can flourish, where all who are different can belong, and where uniqueness is not a disability but the norm. We can shift our perspective from worrying about what is wrong with our children to wondering what could be possible for them. Young children remind us that there is a seeker of excellence built into our DNA. They embody this inherent impulse in their rampant curiosity about themselves and the world. What interferes with this innate passion? Why do kids complain that they're bored, that they can't do it, that they don't know how to do it, that they don't need to know it? How can we, as mothers, transform the forces that limit the expression of our children's natural intelligence, and foster the love of learning that is the birthright of every child? A logical place to begin is by exploring four principles of what I call Asset Focused Learning. Understanding and implementing them can help you transform the limitations of your children's capacities into their liberation.

Differences are not a disorder. We now know that there are many kinds of intelligence-we don't all think and learn in the same ways. There are also many ways a child can access and express those intelligences. We must come to understand the nature of the different ways different children use their minds. Think of violins and flutes: Each child's brain is a unique instrument, and thus has a particular way it is meant to be played-specific conditions that need to be met if it is to express its own music. Nature loves diversity; intellectual diversity is a natural condition, and a gift to our species.

Most of us sense that our children learn in different ways. If you hold Sally and rock her while reading, she can pay attention for hours. But if you were to hold her brother Sam and try the same thing, you'd be black and blue. Yet we live in a society with a standardized educational system that judges children on the erroneous assumption that we all learn in the same way. This society values only one mode of thinking-the linear-and one mode of attention: focused. But because we are all wired differently, understanding how we and our children are wired is one of the most important keys to being able to learn how we learn. Perhaps if we accept that all who are different belong, then children, too, will stop judging, isolating, and bullying those who do not conform to the standardized norm.
Track Assets, Not Deficits. Observe natural learning at its most simple and powerful: Watch an infant learn to reach for a cup, a developmental task that is essential if the child is to learn to feed herself. First the baby reaches and gets Mommy's hair. Then air. Then Mommy's hand. Then air. Then cup. Then cup, cup, cup. What is natural for the infant's brain is to track success and discard failure. The brain records each successful encounter with the cup and ignores each miss.

We have been taught to do the exact opposite. Most of us end each day by tracking all the things we haven't done or haven't done well. In schools and offices, we track failures-what's wrong and what's the matter-rather than what works, what's right, what really matters. What if the first response we gave to our frustrated child was, "I understand you don't know how to do this. What part of the problem do you understand? How did you work out yesterday's math problem?" What if, instead of ending our own days with mental to-do lists of what we could have done better, we were to make a "Ta-Dah!" list, thinking of the moments of parenting our children that we are proud of, studying how we achieved our own "cup, cup, cup"?

Mistakes Are Not Failures, but Experiments. The latest research in cognitive neurobiology indicates that experience can actually shape the structure of the brain. (See Daniel J. Siegel, MD and Mary Hartzell's Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive.) Like Thomas Alva Edison, every child needs to be encouraged to explore his or her world through experiences and experiments. In the attempt to standardize the way we measure children's learning, we give them the message that getting it right is more important than having the experiences that will help them build trust in their own capacities.

It is difficult to accurately measure mental capacity, but it's quite easy to measure a learning environment. Just ask, "How safe is it to make a mistake here?" Since capacity is increased through experimentation, and experimentation requires making mistakes, an environment that humiliates, judges, corrects, embarrasses, criticizes, or labels a child for making mistakes is one that decreases capacity.

A safe and effective learning environment should be fun because play is the very essence of learning, whether it be the play of ideas and concepts or the play of imagination and dreams. Without it, children lose their sense of wonder and feeling of belonging to the world. What is at stake here is how a child relates to his or her natural intelligence-the wild and raw gift of life that waits to open each moment.

Learn from the Inside Out as well as from the Outside In. The word educate comes either from the Latin educere, which means to instruct, as in training horses; or from educare, which means to lead forth that which is within. For the past 300 years, schools and parents have been instructing from the outside in. We decide what children should learn and how they should learn it; we determine how long it should take, and how to evaluate how well it has been learned. We dismiss rather than foster children's own self-awareness of what works best for them, and what is most important to them. The result is that school often feels peripheral to children's lives. We have long debates about what should be taught, but rarely ponder how to foster the art of learning from the source-from inside the child-out. In addition, our children never develop the capacity to discern what is right for them. They become adults who don't trust their own judgment, and need someone on the outside to determine the direction their life should take.

Creating a World Worthy of Its Children

Watch a baby learn to walk. Each step is a falling forward: falling, collapsing, falling, collapsing, falling, catching, step. Initially, we understand that learning involves repeated and different fallings. When do we forget this and assume that falling is failing? Children should not fail. If they do, it is we who have failed them. They need to be enjoyed and valued as they were in infancy, not managed. As parents, we are the one consistent force in their education. No matter where we live or what school system our children find themselves in, we can engage their natural intelligence by helping to shift the focus from what's wrong to what can be possible. It's time for us all to move forward. It's time to help create an evolution in the way our children are being perceived. You began helping your child move forward when he or she was an infant and took those first faltering steps toward your outstretched arms. You wondered when your child would walk, not if. You encouraged your child to risk that reach.

Learning is discovering that something is possible. Parents and schools are meant to serve the gifts our children bring, to name them, bless them, help aim them. Imagine a world in which every child understands what his or her natural strengths and talents are, how he or she learns and communicates most effectively, how she or he thinks most effectively with others. If you can imagine it, then you can help create a world worthy of your children.

For More Information
Markova, Dawna, PhD. How Your Child IS Smart. Conari Press, 1992. Siegel, Daniel J., MD, and Mary Hartzell. Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive. J. P. Tarcher, 2003.

Inspirational speaker and writer Dawna Markova, PhD, is one of the world's leading experts on how people think, learn, and communicate. She is internationally known for her groundbreaking model of perceptual thinking patterns, which exposes the differences in how people's brains are wired-from learning-challenged children in Harlem to global CEOs and leadership teams. A former senior affiliate for the Organizational Learning Center at MIT, Dawna Markova is now a research member of the Society for Organizational Learning. She is the author of How Your Child IS Smart, Learning Unlimited, and Kids' Random Acts of Kindness. She is the parent to TK.