We talk about things like laziness and ambition as though they’re static - as though a person either is or isn’t lazy; is or isn’t ambitious.  You don’t have to look very far to prove that one wrong.  You can probably think quickly of an area in which you’re lazy, and another in which you’re ambitious, which means that you can’t BE either one in any kind of permanent all-or-nothing way.  I, for one, cannot stand filing receipts, so anyone who tracked my filing behavior could accurately call me lazy.  But give me a bunch of walls to paint, and I get fiercely ambitious.  I have to be reminded to stop and eat.  ”Just one more edge!”  I’ll cry.  Lazy?  When it comes to filing? Yes.  Lazy?  When it comes to painting? No.

The same is true of descriptors like focused, distractable, motivated, smart, determined, perceptive.  Try it on yourself - choose a word, then see if you can find evidence for and against.  Then try it on your kid.  Set aside for the moment that we think kids just need to be certain ways about certain things in certain circumstances.  Think about how they actually are and whether those words apply summarily or occasionally.

I read somewhere a quotation from Michael Phelps’ mom that his teachers would say he couldn’t focus.  They weren’t seeing him in the pool, she said.  It’s so important to get rigorous about what we’re saying, because it has such a strong influence over what we’re doing and how we’re responding.  It wasn’t that he couldn’t focus.  It was that he wasn’t focusing at school.  Or, probably, most any time he wasn’t where he belonged, in the pool.

I was walking back from the bus stop and heard two city employees talking about the granite curb they were about to install at the corner.  I was surprised by what I heard, and then annoyed at my surprise.

“The thing I’m concerned about is…”

“Well, the worst that could happen is…”

I can’t finish the sentences, because I don’t know enough about granite-laying to have retained the content of their conversation.  But my surprise came from the fact that I don’t expect to hear city guys in Carhartts negotiating with each other in the course of their work.  Apparently I think they’re just out there doing manual tasks free of thought and interaction.

Of course, I know better, but it reminds me of Matthew Crawford’s book about the dying off of technical training in high schools.  We have a tremendous bias about what constitutes good work, and what’s enough to merit good pay and treatment, even though we need people to do this work, and do it thoughtfully and well. And there are young people who are smart in the right ways for that who get discouraged from doing it.  Crawford reminds us that “work that is straightforwardly useful can also be intellectually absorbing.”  (Not to mention lucrative, a point that, bafflingly, often gets lost in platforms about how kids need college degrees to have good jobs so they can earn a living.)

A.J.’s teachers tell me he’s bright, but struggles with slow processing speed.  Things take him a very long time to do.  I noticed early in my work with him that he didn’t actually seem to be processing anything slowly.  He was just doing things slowly.  He could produce a response to a question fairly quickly, but he would think about his answer for quite awhile before offering it.  I pointed out a few times that if he worked more efficiently (in his case, that would mean choosing to write down the first answer he came up with, which was always plenty sufficient for the task at hand) he would have more time to spend on the books and music he likes. It didn’t change the pace of his work, and I finally got to thinking.  What if there’s something in this pace of his, a pace we’re trying to teach out of him, that’s serving a purpose, or making room for something?  What is there to discover if we step back and watch what they’re doing before we start trying to mess with it?

A quick glance at even a portion of Thomas Armstrong’s list of titles will give you a good sense of whether or not you’re likely to enjoy his work: You’re Smarter than you Think, Awakening Genius, In Their Own Way. Armstrong takes an unusual and highly effective and wise approach to his writing about children and development. His work is based on the assumption that children are capable of overcoming challenges and can be honored and included in the process of taking on those challenges. Read more