Tutor, Toot Thyself! (TMI Digression)

Adult ADHD, you say?

     About a month ago, I was in a group of some nine people around a conference table. Each person was sharing some personal experience while the rest of us listened. I had been in this situation hundreds of times before, and you probably have, too, but something was very different for me this time. As I shifted my gaze from the third speaker to the fourth, I realized with some surprise that that gaze had been steady and continuous on each speaker so far, and I had registered everything that each had said. This never happens for me, unless

a. the meeting is a high-stakes work meeting during which hyper-vigilance and anxiety combine to enable hyperfocus,

or

b. a particular speaker catches my emotions by stating something with which I identify strongly, or care about deeply...

But this day I was simply listening--carefully, attentively--to all that each person said, without interruption from thoughts of insecurity, thoughts about the food or fun to be had later that day, or even just a series of thoughts sparked by a reference the speaker had made, which would then hop like a stone skipping across a stream from association to association to eventually alight upon some bizarrely impractical and unrelated topic... until the person finishes speaking and I mentally return to the room, frustrated and curious about what I’ve missed, though also resigned to missing the majority of the rest of the group’s reflections as well: that has always been the way for me, as long as I can remember.

As startling as that experience was, the one that followed on its heels was the one that brought me to quiet tears; the very thoughts I just described--my reflecting in that moment during that meeting on that very experience--did not behave as my thoughts always had. When I noticed I was hearing everything, and reflecting attentiveness with my affect and gaze, unintentionally, I immediately thought, “Well, this will stop now that I’ve noticed it.” But it did not. 

While the fourth speaker continued, I realized that I was still hearing what she said, even as I had these internal thoughts, because the thoughts did not carry my mind uncontrollably into further associations and musings, like that skipping stone, but instead they proceeded along this one parallel track, upon which I noticed my experience, confirming and reflecting on it briefly before filing it away for future reference, and then effortlessly returned my entire focus to listening. Limited to these two tracks--listening and reflecting narrowly--I could actually follow both simultaneously and effectively. It was a completely novel oasis of blessed mental agency.


I asked Emily, my wife, later that day, if what I had experienced was “normal,” or at least, if she experienced meetings in that way. I honestly expected her to say “sometimes” or “not really,” because I simply couldn’t fathom an experience of the social world that was so profoundly different for some of us, making it so much harder and stressful to participate in life. Had I been working against some sort of chronic executive handicap in all my interactions, all my life? Was I possibly more than just a scatterbrained, narcissistic mansplaining underachiever? Surely not.

But Emily narrowed her eyes a little and nodded, saying that she thought it was probably normal to focus that way. I was flabbergasted and pretty emotional; it was shocking in the moment, to be sure, but its implications for my life’s work, and for my perpetually difficult relationship with myself, were kind of unfathomable.


Several months back, someone I trust strongly suggested I get screened for ADHD, and to my amazement, the screening came back positive, and the experience I described above was my first glimpse of what medicine might do for me. It was the high point, so far, of a difficult process, but one that I wouldn’t want to miss.

I am still working out the implications. For one thing, I don’t really know how to make it up to myself, at least not yet. I have been so cruel, and so judgmental. In adulthood, I’ve come to see myself as nice, and reasonably responsible, with really good intentions. And I often say that kindness is the most important thing, which I do believe... but part of me has always been deeply ashamed of the gap between what all the adults around my youthful self saw as my “potential,” and the actual productivity I’ve mustered over the last half-century. And that shame becomes cripplingly acute when my absent-mindedness hurts the people I love. I judge myself as chronically unkind because I’m a self-centered spaz, who can’t get anything done for anyone, including himself, and is destined to tread all over loved one's toes in perpetuity.

But it’s not over yet.

Before that meeting experience happened, I had actually suffered an agonizing increase in the symptoms of ADHD during the first week of medication. I would be making lunches for the girls and I’d suddenly find myself brushing my teeth above a banana and an orange on the bathroom counter. I’d soap up half a dirty dish, then write half an email, then edit a death metal playlist, then put blueberries in the blender, then wash the rest of that original dish, all with one sock on. It was dizzying and frustrating. I went to take some recycling out, saw that Emily’s car was dirty, and was halfway through the nearest car wash before I realized I had been a little impulsive, and called home to say where I was. I sent an angry work email without a moment’s thought about the consequences, and then followed up with four more in rapid succession, backpedaling and explaining and making things worse and better at the same time, but mostly worse.



Then the pendulum swung to attentive, and it was like I could see and hear for the first time. Though the outward craziness I just described was new to me in its intensity, my inward cognitive experience has always been much like that. I have come to understand that the primary breakthrough in my late twenties that enabled me to return to college was about learning to systematically construct and maintain the necessary elements to induce hyperfocus--the flip-side, superpower of inattentive ADHD--when I needed to. It is fragile and tentative, and very difficult to re-access when the house of cards is toppled (say, by someone innocently saying “Hi!” or chomping a chip nearby). At my last job, I could be writing an email when someone would innocently knock on the door and politely say, “Is this a good time?”... and I would immediately have absolutely no idea how to end the sentence I was in the middle of. I could reread what I’d written before all I wanted, but that sentence would never have an end. I would have to come up with a completely new direction for the email--presumably with the same overall objective, but no clue what my original argument or chain of logic might have been. So I always said, “Yes, now’s a good time. Sure...” because the damage had been done (and at the time I thought it was a personal flaw and shame that my focus was so fragile).



But the pendulum has swung back now. That attentiveness in conversation and meetings lasted for about a week. One wonderful, brief week. It didn’t swing all the way back to loony; I am not freakishly inattentive and compulsive, but I am very much the same old Mike whose brain is a bucking bronco in a funhouse. As you can imagine, knowing what one kind of attentiveness might be like, I am quite disappointed, and very eager to get it back if I can. I keep telling myself that, worst case scenario, at least I now know what it’s like and I can be kind to myself when I can’t focus, gently nudging myself back toward that place which was once utterly alien, but now feels familiar, if remote--like a warmly remembered early-childhood vacation spot. And we’re not done trying medicines to see if there’s a healthy, robust solution in that realm for me. We shall see! I’m also working on meditation and other kinds of self-care to try and bolster this reorientation of my heart and mind, because that’s a good idea anyway, and it may be all I have if the medicine doesn’t work or the trade-offs just aren’t acceptable.

---------

Thus, I find it hilarious and a little uncomfortable to realize that I am not, in fact, the empathic genius I imagined I was, identifying and commiserating so effortlessly with my students. And how has it been that all of the coping strategies I developed or learned to survive college are so valuable to my students with attention challenges? Well, it seems that now we know.

To be fair, hyperfocus and a penchant for demonstrating deep care in a dangerous, alienating world have enabled me to build a remarkable skill set as an academic helper, in addition to this foundational, constitutional starting place. I have not simply stumbled into my life's work through an accident of nature, and I am not only valuable to students with attentional challenges, but much of my empathy is quite a bit more honestly come by than I'd thought!

I want to highlight a few insights this revelation has brought to my practice, in particular.

1. Please, please, please let’s be thoughtful when we see a student doing “fine” relative to her peers. She may be much more capable than is obvious, putting profound energy and resources into independently overcoming attention or other learning challenges in order to do as well as she is doing. If we judge OK-ness primarily by regarding a child’s achievement in relation to the mean achievement (by some arbitrary academic measure(s)) of her peer group, then we are likely to be doing her a tremendous disservice. Her potential may actually be in the 99th percentile by those same arbitrary measures if she can only access the tools she needs to understand herself and enable full manifestation of her strengths--by addressing the challenges that hinder her, no matter where she falls among her peers unaided. That achievement bar should be personal and individual, unrelated to group means and norms!

2. ADHD guides for parents and teachers are constantly suggesting the breaking down of tasks into smaller steps or chunks. I have always absorbed this from a deficit point of view: the poor child lacks the working memory to hold all the parts of the task at once; they lack the grit to be motivated through the overwhelming onslaught of instructions and looming effort of a project or task, so we must spoon feed their fragile productivity engine.

These things may be true to some extent with any given student and any given complex task. But my own experience is actually quite different. Smaller chunks present multiple intermediate opportunities to experience success and achievement along the way toward completing an overwhelming task. These are motivating, and create momentum. As I climb the mountain that is a book report + presentation, or a research project, if I keep looking toward that mountain’s summit, I will feel my fatigue increasing and my enthusiasm waning MUCH more rapidly than I perceive the summit coming closer to me. If, instead, I watch my feet, making sure that my steps are careful and solid, and occasionally I lift my gaze to look backward toward where I have been, I see MUCH more immediate progress, and this keeps me going. Tiny chunks feel way better, in addition to being more cognitively manageable.

3. Finally, so far, I hope to explore with students the possibility of focusing less on “dealing with the inattention” and more on “fostering and directing the hyperfocus.” I need to be careful with this third idea, because one colleague of mine suggests that I am actually quite atypical in some ways that should keep me from carelessly asserting that others will be able to do as I have done. There were two atypical things about me that may have helped me fly under the radar (in addition to the fact that the ADHD “radar” was under construction when I was in school):

• I was not hyperactive, 

        and,

• though, like many kids with attention issues, I could only really focus in areas in which I was highly motivated/interested, I was freakishly interested in many, many things! I have met lovely students who have only been able to hyperfocus on sports, Fortnight, and social drama. Every academic subject was like cognitively swimming through chilled molasses, motivationally speaking. Yet, this hyperfocus in these areas really is a major superpower in ADHD, and my gut tells me that there is a way, at least for many of my ilk, though probably not all, to learn to wield this ability, intentionally. For me, it was about many things, including: using the heightened social stakes of study groups in college to create associations strong enough to aid my retention; classical music at the right volume to keep my mind from wandering when I study or write (Schumann at the moment); as above, looking back not forward, and checking off tiny chunks of completed work along the way (like, say, blog posts instead of a BOOK), to build momentum, and which also allows for the likely toppled house of cards without the loss of everything; lots of little card lean-tos instead of a card mansion. And more....to come!

Onward! Upward!

The Brilliance of Struggling Readers (Things Students Need to Know)

Unfortunately reading rarely makes people feel smart. We either take it for granted or we struggle. This means that a helper trying to use a strengths-based approach with a struggling reader has an especially challenging task if they want the student to enjoy what the student already does well even before there has been any “improvement."

Many students learn the alphabet, some sound-symbol correspondence, some sight-words... and then BOOOOM, they are off into the World of Text, enchanted by how much of the world all around them is suddenly filled with more and richer meaning than it ever had before. Each new hurdle--blends, vowel pairs, silent-e’s, irregular spellings--seems less daunting as the momentum builds and the sheer joy of this flood of information coalesces and empowers elementary schoolers to follow the path of their own curiosity like never before.


If kindergarten, first grade, and second grade readers are little reading-birdies lined up on a high branch, the problem becomes this: no matter how much grown-ups may encourage “working at your own pace”--rarely is any birdie pushed off that branch--the sheer spectacle of seeing fuzzy-feathered peers leap off into space with raptor-like grace, or swoop and twirl with barnswallow-like acrobatics, has a tremendous pull. And the kids who flutter-stumble off the branch to meander awkwardly like Woodstock can completely miss the miracle that they are FLYING, at all.

When a student sits down with me to work on reading, I generally notice things they are doing well, immediately. But even when I name those things for the student, out of context these things are so alien to the student’s way of thinking about themself as a reader that they carry no weight. It’s gibberish. Students generally judge reading skill by their smoothness and expressiveness when reading aloud, first, and their comprehension at the concrete level, second. Do these two things well, and you are an OK reader. Any other criteria are arcane and irrelevant. And in the context of a student who desperately needs help--who has barely allowed themself to consider the possibility that sitting down with a tutor might provide some real help, as in relief from suffering--the clock is ticking. I cannot spout arcane gibberish for long without being tuned out as more useless adult noise.

So I tell them a story about the reading brain.

Of course, there are a lot of processes going on when we read or do anything else, and they’re all connected--I could talk about respiration and neurotransmitters and white blood cells, and these would be germane, though it would be a weirdly comprehensive framework, and not very efficient.

That’s why we focus on three processes your brain uses to try and make sense of text. I draw three circles whose center points would make a triangle if we connected them. And I suggest that it’s like you have three different kinds of experts, who are each totally into their own point of view, and who argue with each other about the meaning of what they see. When they agree quickly, things are super easy and smooth, but sometimes one of them is just confused, so the others have to swoop in to the rescue. And sometimes they actually disagree. This is when a different part of your brain has to step in and be a peacemaker, making sure everyone has their say, and we reach some kind of a handshake agreement. Nothing good comes from just fighting. That’s super stressful.

The first expert is the phonetic decoder. That’s the one who sees the letters, knows the sounds they can make, and puts those together for you. This is the one who sees C A T and goes kuh aah tuh kuh-ah-tuh CAT! You really need this expert when you see a word you don’t recognize. But it would be really hard to read if that expert were the only expert you had, right? <--- That question right there would read like “buh uh tuh ih tuh wuh ow? Oo?ool? hmmm Duh buh ee rr eee luh ee huh ah rr duh...” etc. So obviously, you don’t read like that, right? No, you have at least one or two other reading experts helping you out.

In fact, let’s look at C A T again. When I first wrote that, did you think “kuh aah tuh?” No, you saw the whole word CAT and you recognized it as CAT: not a group of sounds, but a whole word. This is your orthographic reading brain, a fancy way of saying “sight word” reading: you see the whole word at once. It’s like looking at a tree. I don’t start on the left and scan right, going “Lessee, leaf, leaf, branches, leaves, bigger branches, trunk, branches, leaves branch...Oh, TREE! It’s a tree.” I see the whole thing at once and go “that’s a tree” (if I even care). This is more like how we read sight words.

This is also when it gets interesting from a reading-teaching point of view. Some kids have an amazing ability to decode phonetically, but also have a really hard time remembering the words, so they have to decode words over and over again. The sight word part of their brain just shrugs and apologizes a lot, and the phonetic part works its butt off. For other people, it’s just the opposite: the phonetic part of their brain may have trouble remembering which sounds go with which letters and groups of letters when, or it may have trouble seeing the order the letters are in--maybe they see a kind of pile of letters instead of any meaningful arrangement of letters--but once they figure out what that pile means, they never forget. This person has a shruggy phonetic decoder and a tired but determined orthographic memory. Both readers are working really hard, but in spite of that hard work, you can also get shrugs from both of these experts when the words are too challenging.

I've been described more than once as a "big picture" guy. Well, we have a "big picture guy" in our reading brains, too, who often comes to the rescue when the other two are stumped. In fact, this is probably one of the most thrilling indicators of the hidden genius of many struggling readers. When they do get shrugs from the sight word and phonetic decoders, the context expert works overtime to come to the rescue. As a teacher and parent, it can be agonizing to reflect upon how often students show incredible cleverness--perhaps synthesizing information from numerous sources at once, reflecting amazing working memory and higher-order synthesis--coming up with a smart guess in a heartbeat when the letters are indecipherable, only to be casually corrected with a “try that one again” or “not quite” because the more instinctive text-decoder peer or teacher only notices the miscue, not the genius of it.

Consider, further, how much bandwidth this student is using to construct a guess, versus their peer who decodes the word easily. As long as their sense of wrongness or impending wrongness doesn’t tip the scales of anxiety into the realm where learning stops and internal fight-or-flight emotions start, the reading experience of the highly contextual decoder can actually be far richer, cognitively, than that of an easy reader, as their brain scrutinizes the information they can decode, and simultaneously applies every related clue they can muster from class discussion, past life experience, and everything else, to make meaning from the text. If we can help this student see this coping strategy for what it is--an ingenious survival method that, when instinctively over-applied, will fail them more and more often as novel vocabulary is increasingly introduced via text in the upper grades--we can find motivation where there may have been mostly despair. Replacing the deficit model (you have a “reading problem”) with a difference model that requires work to overcome, but which also provides hidden superpowers, is key to helping struggling readers find motivation. And we have to show them, not tell them about, these superpowers, by pointing them out in the moment they reveal them to us, which they will do repeatedly.

But I digress from the story.

Near the third circle, I write “The dog chased the_____.” I ask what they expect to be in the blank. They may say squirrel, or mail carrier, or car, but usually with a sly smile. I point out the sly smile and ask if I’m right assuming that it was because they guessed I wanted them to say “cat.” Of course there are a lot of things that could go in that blank. I talk about how some students will only think about the words in that sentence, and not notice that we just used ‘cat’ twice before, and that ‘cat’ fits. Others will be thinking about the things that we said before, and also every sentence they’ve heard that sounds remotely like that, as well as their knowledge of dogs, their understanding of what makes me happy (I like surprises), and a lot of other things. This part of the reading brain notices context.

We talk about how useful this part is, and how sometimes when the phonetic decoding expert gets super determined to identify the sounds and put them together, they can be so caught up in the victory of a solution--any solution--that when they shout “‘Flurgbidunkle!’ Eureka!” They neglect to check in with the context expert to see if they have an opinion (such as "um, are you out of your mind, Phonics Expert? Flurgbi-what-what?!").  The point is, for some of us, at some times, checking in with all the experts has to happen on purpose, or it won’t happen at all.

On the other hand if I write “the dog chased the cap,” a lot of readers might read it as “the dog chased the cat-cap” or even just “the dog chased the cat,” because the context expert is overconfident. Luckily in this case the sight word expert and phonetic expert are likely quick to huddle up and raise a hand to correct the context expert. If I write “the dog chased the cag,” it is even more likely to be missed because the phonetic decoder is the only one who sees anything strange; if we’re lucky, the orthographic decoder at least goes “hmmm” before shrugging and looking to the others for guidance.

From here there are many different directions we can go to apply this understanding to practical academic success, and the rest of this blog will go many of these places! The key value of this conversation is that from this point forward, the student

• can see reading mistakes as the smart misfires that they generally are, and

• can intentionally engage the missing expert(s) to try to get a better result immediately and hereafter.

There is an even more fundamental conversation that I should elaborate upon in its own post, but should at least touch upon here, too. I think everyone needs to understand the natural manner in which wise, self-protective creatures will instinctively tend to employ established natural talents, and avoid more difficult skills, when approaching a novel task. Thus, in school, where novel tasks are de rigueur each day, children are positively reinforced for what they do well easily, and negatively reinforced for what they find more challenging--the emotional stakes are straightforward, whether they come from internal pressure, peer pressure, or old-fashioned teacher talk. Thus, we systematically improve upon what we are already good at, and specifically avoid improving the areas most in need of improvement, because it isn’t safe.

This dynamic is why many students hit a wall between fourth and ninth grades, when the volume of material they must comprehend and retain finally outstrips the work-arounds they have so cleverly employed to succeed up to that point. They need to understand 

• the subconscious emotional wisdom that got them into this predicament, 
• the hidden commonness of this experience among their peers, and 
• the possibility of systematic catch-up work and/or mindful employment of scholarly tools to overcome these challenges, without the creeping anxiety that invariably bubbles up when these things remain obscure, or even shameful, for students.

This dynamic is also why some readers are so profoundly skilled at employing one or two of these reading experts, while the third may be distrusted and neglected utterly: they have naturally focused on the parts that work best to overcome any deficit. This is the benefit and the danger of having a “team” of skills for completing a complex task like reading. Students need to understand how and why this happens, and to get help identifying how much skill-building in the weakest area is possible, as well as scholarly ways to support complete comprehension and retention of reading, while that skill is being built. Of course, a specific aptitude may be unattainable or the progress may be very slow, which is why, again, it needs to be remediated in tandem with the construction of a toolkit that includes healthy self-advocacy and the kinds of transparent work-arounds that will serve a student forthrightly and effectively in perpetuity, throughout their academic life and beyond.

Black Folks, White Folks, Big & Small (Things Helpers Need to Know)

Hello white colleagues.


Please know this:

Vague negative language is a primary channel for the transmission of institutional racism through well-meaning white folks directly into the ears, hearts, and souls of our Black colleagues and students.

If we use it, we are perpetuating injustice--no matter what our intentions are.


If we call a colleague “difficult,” a student “defiant,” a parent “confrontational” or anything else that carries the weight of an accusation yet deprives the recipient of the specificity that enables correction or refutation, we are abetting institutional racism, and practicing interpersonal racism.


Furthermore, when we have those judgments, but we keep them to ourselves without reflecting upon the actual evidence, and avoid risking the confrontation, appearance of pettiness, or even accusations of racism, that might spring from direct discussion with our Black colleagues, we are adding fuel to a time bomb of obliquely racist insinuation that perpetually drives our colleagues and students out of institutions that so desperately need their talents.


There is disbelief in the concept of “microaggressions” among many white folks these days. So be it--that arguably makes the term microaggression itself “vague negative language,” doesn’t it, so let me demonstrate specificity. When teachers repeatedly mistake one black 12-year-old for another; when pinkish band-aids disappear on the arms of white students but stand out on the arms of black students; when e-mails to working groups repeatedly leave off the Black member of the group; when colleagues express both enthusiasm and surprise at the quality of their Black colleague’s input during a meeting... when things like this happen all day, every day, people get tired, and angry, and depressed. And then, often, a white gaze that cannot risk exposing these connections for fear of appearing biased, quietly connects fatigue, anger, and depression as parts of Blackness, flaws of Blackness.


If vague language is the vehicle that drives bias directly into the hearts of Black folks while white folks steer that vehicle or stand obliviously by, white fear is the fuel. The injustice is staggering: the collective white fear of embarrassment costs millions of Americans a fair shake at access in all the halls of power, all institutional gateways, every arena in which diverse paths cross. Please let’s be brave, and share our own experience, not as facts or truth, but as our own experience, and if we are uncomfortable or put-off by a person, or their language, or any of their actions, can we admit that it is a result of mutual difference, not their wrongness and our rightness? Can we start with curiosity, respect, and kindness? And the willingness to be wrong? The willingness to learn? This means listening more than we speak, but not neglecting to speak at all.

Even if we don’t yet have the courage to step up and stop fueling the time bomb, moment to moment; even if we do keep silent when something troubles us, though the consequences of us stepping up are so utterly insignificant compared to the consequences for others when we don’t step up and speak up, at least we can all eschew the vague language, can’t we? And correct it when it slips in on the fly?

Please let's tell the parents exactly what was said, exactly what their child did, and exactly what other children did, or were doing, at the same time. And if we can only describe positive specifics and negative generalities, or vice versa, let's reflect on why that might be. What eyes am I watching with? What do my colleagues see, looking at the same situation? All of my colleagues.

When speaking to a colleague, student, or parent, especially one of color, let’s think about our words ahead of time. If I am offering a criticism, is it specific enough to be addressed? Otherwise, I am basically name-calling. If I do that, and expect anything but push-back and resentment, then I am too awash in my privilege to be helped. If we really mean to help, we will be specific and frank. If we can’t, then we shouldn't criticize, but we should reflect upon our own biases.


Please.

Effective Proofreading for Frustrated Writers (Nuts and Bolts)

Writing can be one of the most demotivating subjects in school. I recently started physical therapy for a knee injury, and the parallel was almost funny. I was assessed and given exercises. They were very hard and I felt like I was doing them badly. I was corrected, and did them better, but it was still very hard, and progress was very slow. Finally, I got to the target 20 repetitions in all my exercises and arrived at the physical therapist very proud. She said, “Great!” and immediately gave me new exercises, which were harder, and I felt inept again, now with an edge of hopelessness--it seemed clear that I was destined to spend 99% of my time struggling, and about 1% of my time celebrating.

In English class, teachers are often excited about students’ progress precisely because they are getting closer to the good stuff: From Dick and Jane to A Wrinkle in Time to Ulysses; from sentences to paragraphs to stories... and then away from stories forever and into exposition and argument (sigh); from capitalization to commas to complex structures with juicy details. As in any subject, when the teacher comes from a background of great love of the material, it is likely that they are teaching many things they learned instinctively, and this often means an incomplete understanding of the effort and grit it has taken less language-oriented students to achieve foundational skills. This, in turn, can mean that students achievements are “celebrated” with the introduction of the next, proximal skill. “Hey, you really capitalized everything in this paragraph correctly! Great! Now let’s work on your fragments!” Even when the communication is a carefully constructed love sandwich--"I love your description of the firetruck and how you used more than one of your senses! Let me help you fix some run-ons to make it even stronger. You did a really nice job punctuating the dialogue, which is hard!”--the take-away afterward may be that the compliments were window-dressing for an endless stream of wrongness. English class can be like painting the Golden Gate Bridge if we are not careful.

Without belaboring the point, I would suggest that the goal is not simply to celebrate more at each benchmark skill, but to simultaneously

1. Micro-celebrate every tiny improvement, especially the ones that students do not see or believe count--which forces teachers to become scholars of learning far beyond their own experience, and to really understand the myriad parts and overlaying processes involved in learning tasks, especially those that came easily to them as students.
2. Make the entire process a joyful one. One of the hallmarks of students demotivated by their school experience is a deep product-over-process orientation. Skilled teachers work against this, modeling fallibility as well as the joy of bringing curiosity to those foibles, and providing materials that are rich and meaningful at every level. Moreover, curious critical thinking, removed from the pressure to be right and the language that reinforces that norm, can make all kinds of materials “rich and meaningful.”

Frankly, we often miss the forest for the trees, day to day, and we unintentionally model the same for the students--each person in that classroom is a neutronium trove of compressed miracles, navigating a world that is a tapestry of miracles as well. The Universe begins with hydrogen and gravity, and somehow wrings out heartbreak and glaciers and froot loops in a few billion years. The child muttering and stuttering through a 4th grade social studies paragraph is a bona fide miracle worker, doing an incredible collection of tasks, simultaneously. The appropriate reaction is awe and celebration, at every stage. Everything else should be embedded in that (wisely titrated, of course, so kids don't become afraid of the kooky overgrown hippy pollyanna who doesn’t understand how mean kids are and how hard school is, but embedded in such an understanding nevertheless).

But this is about proofreading :)

This is one of my favorite moments in one-on-one work because the sense of immediate, surprising success is generally strong, and, almost better, it generally translates into a success in the classroom that is reinforced by teachers. Particularly if a student has been having that slogging-through-drying-concrete experience in English class, this can be a real boon and possibly the beginning of a sea change.

There were a few issues I wanted to address when I started doing this:

1. How students could get “help” from parents, teachers, and peers that actually sticks and fosters independence, rather than just creating a sense of the eternal need for proofreading help from “a better writer.”
2. How students could feel more empowered in the process.
3. How students could reap more benefit from multiple passes of proofreading--similar to checking your math with inverse operations or alternate strategies in order to avoid making the same mistake each time.
4. How could the students get a clear, inarguable sense of the value of these multiple passes?

Thus was born Four Step Proofreading. Like everything else here, the basics of it are not ground-breakingly original, but it seems as though the presentation really may be.

First, I talk about the most common mistake I see when students proofread: they make a change, and then continue reading from the change, thereby missing the new problem(s) that their change has created. The cure for this is to be vigilant about always backtracking at least one full sentence before the sentence with the change when they start reading again. In a larger essay, I encourage them to backtrack to the beginnings of paragraphs.


Hilariously, most students backtrack when prompted the first time, notice a new problem, fix it, and then continue reading from the change, thereby missing any new problem the second change created. Because it is so common, it is easy to make light of (an important distinction: rather than making them “wrong” for failing to backtrack again, I make them “normal,” laughing about how ‘everyone does that!') I clarify that no matter how many times they change the same spot, any change means then backtracking at least a full sentence. Only when they backtrack and then read through with no changes should they continue on.

So, the prime directives of 4 Step Proofreading are:

• making any change immediately when the need is discovered, and 
• backtracking a full sentence when continuing to read after any change is made 

...and do this during all four steps!

Step 1:

Student reads silently to themself (as described above, making changes and backtracking as they go, until they read it from beginning to end without making a change).


As the student does this, I am keeping a tally of the changes they make.

Step 2:

Student reads aloud.

This sometimes requires gentle calibration, because they need to read with a pace, volume, and accuracy that allow them to hear themselves. Students who feel like this is a foolish step because they have just proofread will often race through the text.


It is also important to read along because sometimes students infer and recite language that is closer to what they mean than what they have actually written. This means another chance to surprise them with positivity: they are not “wrong” or making a mistake in their reading; they may be saying what they had intended to say when they wrote it, so I always gently say, “Oh! You just said_____ but it doesn’t actually say that on the page yet. Is that what it should say? Which do you like better?” Students who rely heavily on contextual decoding will often correct syntactic and even diction errors subconsciously as they read aloud, so this is a valuable assessment tool as well as an “a-ha!” moment for many kids to notice one of the flaws in their self-checking.


Again, I keep a tally of the changes they make. Often the changes are at a more complex level now than in step one.


Between this step and step 3 is often the moment when students realize we are onto something. Most of the time, the student has felt very 'done' with proofreading after step one. Almost always, after step two, I show them two identical or nearly identical groups of tally marks from the first and second steps. They have literally doubled the number of errors caught and/or improvements made by taking this second step. For a 1-2 page paper, it varies widely but I find that there are usually 7-20 changes at each step, and, again, about the same number at each step. And this generally happens again at step 3!

Step 3:

Student reads along while a helper (tutor, teacher, peer, parent) reads it aloud, exactly as written.


This is my attempt to get students to take the lead when working with others on their own writing, to make their learning more durable and proactive. I tell them they will have to "train" whoever reads for them, or the helper is likely to make it hard for them to improve. They can be told all about 4 Step Proofreading, or the student can just let them know they need them to:


a. Read exactly what is on the page, without giving any suggestions or even making any faces or compliments.

b.Stop immediately when the student says to stop, and only start again when the student says where to start (for backtracking after a change). Don’t be offended if they bark “STOP!” a bunch of times or have you read the same sentence a bunch of times. It really helps.

When we do this, with me playing the trained robot-reader, amazingly, the student generally makes the same number of changes again that they made in steps one and two, which still surprises me and almost always startles the student. I like to emphasize at this point that I’m never one to tell the student what to do, i.e. "you must proofread this way from now on!" but I do point out that even doing just the second step or the second and third steps looks like it would have a major impact on the quality of the writing they turn in. Of course, why wouldn’t anyone do all four steps?! But if it ever feels like too much, I want them to know that doing as much as they can is still a win.

Step 4:

This is when we finally arrive at the more traditional kind of proofreading help. Get that person whom you think is a better writer than you to read your writing and make suggestions. Everyone is going to do this differently, of course, but I recommend a couple of guiding principles:


Just like in the first three steps, the student should stay proactive. Don’t just lay back and say, “Ok, I paid my dues in those first three steps. Now can you just fix me, for heaven’s sake, oh Writing Guru?” I say to try to stay reflective: what kinds of issue have you had trouble with in the past? How did they get fixed? If they come up again, try and figure out why. Don’t let the person offer corrections that you don’t understand. Figure out, or ask, what the problem is that is being solved, and how this change solves the problem. Collaborate as if you are the director whose vision is being shaped, and the other person is a technical expert, working with you to communicate what you want to communicate.


When proofreading for a peer or student, sequential corrections may be the hardest to learn from. If you correct a run-on in sentence one, verb agreement in sentence four, pronoun agreement in sentence eight, and a fragment in sentence eleven, the skills used to spot and then correct each kind of error are hopelessly diluted among the skills associated with the other kinds, and retention may be zero. This not only fosters dependence, but reinforces overwhelm and an incorrect sense of an imaginary but destructive rightness-to-wrongness ratio. For this reason, I approach peer-proofreading as follows:


I create a triage table and take notes as I go.

It looks like this:

I am usually really transparent about this, explaining to the student why we do

• All Communication before Grammar, and all Grammar before Style
• All of one type of error at a time, rather than than in the order the errors appear.

Often the “communication” box is just a place for some quick discussion: “When you say ‘____’ do you mean something like___?” If I’m correct, we move on. If not we puzzle out what would make it clearer, together. About 80% of the time it is just an instant smiley face, because I feel like I understand everything they are trying to say.

The great thing about addressing all occurrences of one type of correction at once is that each type can become a little micro-"I-We-You" lesson. 'I' describe how I found the first error of this type, what makes it incorrect, and how I might fix it (if there are multiple fixes, I defer to the student’s wishes--it’s their paper!). Then the student and I ('we') find and correct the next error of the same type together, and, if that goes well, the student ('you') corrects the third one of the same type independently. Of course, at each stage, flexibility to maximize success is key. It may be I-I-We, or We-We-You, or whatever else will foster successful, retainable progress. We may step out of the paper to do more exercises about the specific issue before coming back to address the last one in the paper, or we may also step out of the paper to do more practice or add the “I” and “We” steps for a type of error that only occurs once in the paper. Furthermore, we may do exclusively “I” steps, with the understanding that the student is going to do their best to remember what we do; this would happen because I can also see the need to backtrack more in-depth, perhaps to core phrase/clause/sentence-structure rules, or identifying parts of speech, in order for this type of error to become discernible to the student in the first place.

We do what works, as soon as we figure that out, together.

Word-Problem-Phobia Relief (Nuts and Bolts)

Word problems are the anti-reese’s-peanut-butter-cup of homework--a surprising combination that can make you feel bad about two subjects at once.

For many students, the concrete and discrete right-or-wrongness of math is a refuge from the more complex gray areas of other subjects, a refuge which is rudely breached by the introduction of written language into the work.

For others, a language challenge may make word problems much harder than just the conceptual/applied thinking challenge they are intended to be.

For still others, who have learned to cope with struggles in math and struggles with deep-reading separately, putting them together is a cruel trick that topples both houses of cards, and can quickly max-out cognition or resilience or both.


From early grades, many math problem-sets progress from simple to more difficult, and then repeatedly affirm that word problems are the uber-challenge because they are at the end of the set. This makes math homework feel like descending into quick-drying cement: slower...slower...annnnd stuck. That is a seriously demotivating experience. And when it happens daily or weekly....phewf!

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Helping students tackle word problems, I think the first order of business is overcoming that (legitimate, experience-proven) revulsion, and the certainty of the inevitability of failure. Admittedly the practical strategies I use are not unusual, but the starting place seems to be. We need a light to break through those clouds before we can do much else. So we ignore the words.

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This is how I've quickly described the process to parents (more involved dialogue-version below):




To be very clear, this technique does not actually overcome any of the learning challenges described at the top of this article, really, at all. It merely seeks to cut through the emotional baggage that tends to compound these strugges over time, so they can be addressed directly.


Here’s an expanded conversation about a different word problem: