I’m not disagreeing with you, just wondering who this is aimed at. The posts on this thread seem to be primarily from parents of ADHD children and seem to be a thoughtful discussion of the issues.
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I do not know much about German or Japanese education systems. But I read about Finish education. They have tons of hands-on activities and much less standardized testing. Read this. I wish we would have it in the US.
27 Surprising Finnish Education System Facts and Statistics.
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One of my son’s friends went through exactly this. His dad responded in a similar way, and the son is now entering his final year at MIT. Great job, dad.
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Thank you for being so open and honest about it.
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As a teacher, I observe that:
more boys have “ADHD” on their files than girls in both the private school I used to teach and the public school I currently teach.
almost as many girls as boys have trouble staying focused for more than 5 minutes.
students with diagnoses (ADHD included) can request various accommodations.
when the school is being evaluated/assessed, the number of students with accommodations may make a difference on the outcome.
in both private and public schools, when a teacher sees a student displaying a pattern of behavior, such pattern is usually documented and reported up to the admins, who then contact the parents. In the private school it almost always led to a conference and an action plan; not as often in the public school.
there’s a large range in which a student’s (disruptive) behaviors can be corrected/redirected with or without medication.
for many disruptive/undesired behavior pattern, there are usually multiple ways a teacher can choose to implement, largely depending on the available resources and the teacher’s willingness.
In the years I taught middle school robotics, almost everyone in my class was diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, or Dyslexia. Some kids would take out their homework for other subjects (math, history, science, english, spanish, etc.), lay it on their desks, get on the robot field (in another part of the classroom) to work on the robot, come to the desk to do some history homework, go back to work on the robot, come to do some english work, go back to robot, so on and so forth. For reasons unknown to me, it worked for them. They were capable of bouncing between several tasks and getting them done.
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Teachers at both private and public schools sometimes think they are qualified to hand out medical diagnoses, and that is extremely unfortunate and can be infuriating. When situations like this arise (they have in my family) I hope that the families consult with their own pediatrician/ medical professionals about the comments, and proceed from there. This may or may not include finding a different school.
That said, and speaking generally (not about anyone mentioned here) I am not sure that successful future performance at MIT (or any school) tells us much about whether or not a real ADHD diagnosis would have been appropriate years earlier. Some students can succeed at MIT with ADHD, whether or not diagnosed and treated. There are lots of professionals out there who went to great schools who may have benefited (and/or would still benefit) from proper diagnosis and treatment.
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I wouldn’t discount experienced teachers. At our LPS the teachers knew within the first month who had adhd; after interacting with literally hundreds or thousands of children over 20 or 30 years, it is not that hard to recognize which behaviors were so outside the norm as to warrant follow-up. They were precluded from ever suggesting anything, however, and could only tell parents to consult a health care professional.
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I don’t discount experienced educators provided they don’t pretend they are trained and experienced medical doctors. When behaviors are well outside the norm, there is nothing wrong with a school suggesting that a family consult with a health care professional.
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Actually, very often schools resist outside diagnosis and accommodations suggested by professionals. They pretend that they know students better… Schools perform retesting by school psychologists (some are good and some are not)…Also schools often suggest wrong and useless accommodations. Parents often need to show up with education advocates for those useless planning meetings… And even if the school with a fight agrees to do A, often they do B and the student wants to do C. And parents just pull their hair…
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Accomodations can be expensive. Of course schools try to avoid them
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All the more reason to seek out guidance from your own medical professionals rather than relying on the school.
I dont think the prior poster was suggesting relying on the school as much as the difficulty in getting accomodations ( proposed by anyone) thru a school IEP mtg. Or even if they get approved as an IEP, getting implemented is a whole other story.
I think you greatly overestimate the willingness and expertise of family doctors and pediatricians to diagnose and address such issues much less propose mitigation strategies. Families often have to wait months to see specialists for an accurate diagnosis.
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Speaking as someone who was in the classroom for many years, all we were allowed to do is indicate the behaviors that we saw and indicate that the family may want to speak with their medical providers about them. Nothing related to a diagnosis or recommendation for medication was ever made.
With respect to accommodations and evaluations, yes, it can be an uphill battle. Even with a private eval done, the school may well do their own as well (after resisting doing anything), if the kid is being “successful” at school. A kid can be at the 26th percentile for an area, but that’s not considered low enough to receive services. And if a kid is performing at grade level, they may say that whatever impairments are there are not sufficiently hindering their performance to get them services that anyone else would say are needed.
I will say that in a school setting, ADHD is more noticed when it’s the hyperactivity kind than the inattentive one. Something active that is drawing attention away from the instruction/learning that’s supposed to be taking place will always be noticed before someone who is “merely” inattentive. But as a teacher, I would let kids have a stress ball or stand at their desk, or be seated near the back if they would need to get up and pace or otherwise need to move around more. More often than not, that helped. Additionally, making sure that there was movement built in (even if it’s just rotating from one station to the next) would also help, but also incorporating physical actions into games, having students come up to illustrate or explain their points, etc.
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I think the prior poster did a fine job of speaking for themselves.
I think your estimation is mistaken. I didn’t say that the pediatrician should be the one providing the diagnosis or treatment plan. In my family’s experience (which didn’t involve a suspicion of ADHD) our pediatrician helped us come up with a plan which involved consultation of other more suited medical experts very well-equipped to diagnose and propose mitigation strategies, if necessary. (Fortunately there was no need, as the whole thing was a very bizarre false alarm.)
But if a pediatrician/primary care physician is unable or unwilling to help direct a family to suitable medical evaluation and treatment, then perhaps the family should reconsider their pediatrician. That’s very much part of their job.
Yes, those of us who live in an imperfect world do have to deal with reluctant pediatricians, overburdened specialists,under-resourced schools, and other obstacles.
I’m no expert in this area, but from what I can find, Germany and Japan don’t actually have parity.
Germany: Boys more likely to repeat a grade in the primary years. In secondary school, boys more likely than girls to get put on the vo-tech track while girls more likely than boys to be put on the traditional high school track. In Germans ages 24-34, women more likely than men to have completed college, but men more likely to have STEM degrees while women more likely to have education degrees.
Japan: The tradition of sending women to college started later here than in the US, and the percentage of women in universities is still rising. Until fairly recently it was the traditional norm to send women to 2 year colleges instead of full universities.
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This seems like a sound approach. Would you have preferred to have teachers giving medical advice regarding diagnosis and medication?
Well, both have close to 50/50 enrollment in colleges, so perhaps they are doing something worth studying.
I don’t think that teachers should be giving out medical advice. However, there are times that families will ask follow-up questions related to the observations and suggestion to speak with medical professionals. Teachers may say that they know of students who have displayed similar behaviors who were later diagnosed with X or that there were students who started using a medication (never specified), but that they are not a medical professional and that the family should consult with their own doctor(s).
Not all families know what ADHD is, or its various forms. Some may have noticed the behaviors but view that as normal (perhaps because they themselves had a form of it), and don’t realize it’s anything that might be addressed by a health professional. Some people don’t realize that doctors will handle anything besides a physical illness. In those instances, families may need some additional context about what might be an issue to help them to either see a need to see a doctor or to help them even do some internet research before an appointment to become familiar with some of the symptoms or questions that might be asked to see if it’s anything that’s ringing any bells for them.
So no, I don’t think that teachers should be giving out medical diagnoses and medication, but teachers can definitely be very helpful in flagging down a potential issue that the family either doesn’t realize is an issue, or doesn’t realize that there are treatments for the possible issue (and I am not saying that medication is the preferred treatment).
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Thanks for your thoughtful (as always) response.
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