The Bottom Line
By Howard Eaton, Ed.M.; 264 pages. Subtitle: Stories of Children with Learning Disabilities and Attention Disorders Who Changed Their Lives by Improving Their Cognitive Functioning
Parents eager for a solution to their children's learning disabilities have good reason to be interested in research on new techniques and case studies indicating that the brain can be changed for the better. Brain School is interesting reading and may validate a lot of your thoughts about the failure of traditional accommodations to help your child and the inability of testing to paint an accurate portrait. Unfortunately, if you decide you'd like to get some of this good stuff for your own child, the book doesn't do much to help.
Pros
- Text is well-written and engaging
- Case studies accentuate children's abilities and perseverance
- Parents are treated with respect and shown to be helpful and proactive
- Results are impressive and heartening to those who want to believe in change
- Stories look at kids with a variety of learning challenges
Cons
- The book's intended as research, with no practical application for parents
- If exclusive private schools are outside your means, this program probably will be too
- There's not much detail on what the actual exercises are like
- Would have been interesting to read, at least briefly, of kids for whom this was not successful
- Lists of websites and resources for finding more about the program would have been helpful
Description
- Part I: The Journey
- 1. The Boy They Called Persistent
2. "My Boy Is Not Slow" - 3. The Woman Who Helped Andrew Build a New Brain
4. Brain School Opens -- with Controversy - Part II: The Stories
- 5. The Awakening Brain
6. The Girl Who Read to Avoid Socializing - 7. The Valedictorian
8. Dyslexia and the Arrowsmith Program - 9. The Irish Dancer
10. Is It Really an Attention Problem? - 11. Can IQ Change?
12. She Inspires Me - Part III: The Outlook
- 13. Arrowsmith and the Future of Education and Neuroscience
Guide Review - Book Review: Brain School
As the mother of a daughter who struggled with learning disabilities all through school, always doing better than any testing suggested was possible but never well enough to really get her academic feet under her, I'm always interested in research that suggests the traditional way of doing things isn't foolproof and children's brains can grow and change in ways unaccounted for by conventional wisdom. Brain School has plenty of that as it describes the Arrowsmith Program and the difference it made for nine students the author worked with.
The program uses cognitive exercises developed by Barbara Arrowsmith Young; they're designed to change the brain to eliminate learning problems rather than teach kids ways to work around them. The stories follow students of varying ages from the public and private schools where they were derailed by their disabilities to the Eaton Arrowsmith School. There, they focused for most of the day on repeating certain cognitive exercises over and over, with English and math their only academic classes. Eaton shares their initial results on tests both traditional and specific to the Arrowsmith Program, and charts their progress as they make their way through the program and return to their outside schools much stronger in all measures.
The stories are inspiring, both in terms of seeing what a different approach can do for challenged students and for the incidental portrait of highly motivated parents who learn of a program and do everything they can to get their children involved in it. If reading about these results gets you similarly motivated, you'll need to do your own legwork -- the book's just about presenting research and teasing possibilities, not about practical applications. You won't find a section of exercises at the back to do with your own child, or information on finding a program near you. You can go online and find a list of schools that offer the program, but you may find this particular solution to be geographically or financially out of your reach.
The book is possibly of more interest, then, to educators who are curious about the kinds of changes this program can make in students' scores and abilities. But if you like keeping up on new methods, enjoy inspirational stories of students succeeding against odds, or want to feel smug next time someone tells you that your child's brain is set in concrete and you might as well accept it, Brain School is an enjoyable enough read, engaging and not too technical. The practical application may be down the road a ways.
