Individualized Education Plans for Inattentive ADHD Child (ADHD-PI)

Individualized Education Plans for Inattentive ADHD Child (ADHD-PI)

Just as all politics is local, all education is personal. As adults we do not pay attention to things that ‘do not speak to us’ yet we expect children to go into classrooms and learn things that are totally irrelevant to them as people and are completely, as far as they can tell, inapplicable to their daily lives.

So often a young Inattentive ADHD (ADHD-PI), and ADD child in a classroom is dealing with their new surroundings, a yearning to be home and a cast of adults that are not often foreign to them but demanding as well. It is no wonder that these children are not paying attention; they have got a lot more going on in their heads that, according to them, is more important.

Children with Inattentive ADHD are often amazingly intuitive and what they lack in attention they more than make up for in intuition.  I have included a post on Intuition and ADHD-PI at the bottom of this post. These children respond to impersonal surroundings and an impersonal teacher by shutting them out of their heads.

These ‘nothing but talking head’ teachers may be especially destructive to the education of children with Inattentive ADHD but most children can sense when a teacher does not personally know them or for that matter care to know them and this lack of connection adversely impacts the education of all children.

Many schools today have teachers that teach the masses but not the individual. It is amazing to me that only children with disabilities qualify for Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). Every child’s education should be individualized because every child has unique strengths, unique weaknesses and unique interest.

I recently came upon a fantastic quote by Dr. Richard Selznick who wrote a book entitled The Shutdown Learner, he writes that essentially only Caring, involved and connected teachers can give students the “emotional fuel” that is needed for the “Shut-Down Learner.”

When my son was in pre-school he attended a program where everyday the teachers spent tremendous amounts of energy engaging the children in elaborate arts and crafts projects. Some of the children loved these activities, some of the children never engaged in these activities and left these projects to engage in other activities and some of the children just shut down completely and zoned out.

One day I asked my son why he did not want to make the fantastic plastic milk jug skeleton that his teachers were busy as bees getting the kids to assemble for Halloween and his response was “Those people don’t even know me.”

In his very young mind, “knowing me” preceded any learning or any engagement in available activities. He had very succinctly informed me of what I knew to be true for me, and for probably the majority of students, and that is that before you can teach someone, you must know who they are as people.  Teaching that does not take into account individual strengths, weaknesses and interests works poorly if it works at all.

I believe that he was stating that all education must be individualized and that all education should be personalized. I think that his assessment was,and is , ‘spot on’. What do you think?

Intuition and ADHD Inattentive, A Gift

The Shut-Down Learner: Helping Your Academically Discouraged Child

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