HELP FOR TROUBLED YOUTH
Finding The Missing Piece to the Puzzle
By
Don A. Blackerby, Ph.D.
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HELP FOR TROUBLED YOUTH Finding The Missing Piece to the Puzzle By |
Introduction
We have a nation of troubled youth: youth who have trouble defining themselves, youth who are killing and maiming each other at an unprecedented rate. The rate of violence among youth in the United States is many times higher than other nations. Why is this? Why at this time in our history is this occurring?
Is it because of television? Is it the fault of gangs? Is it because of declining morals and values? Is it because of the break-up of the family unit? Is it the fault of our educational system? Our correctional system? Our welfare system? Are our churches failing us? All of these have been pointed to as causes.
Proposed solutions have been just as numerous. We want the government to fix the welfare system, to
change the correctional system, to put more money into education, to upgrade the television programming. We want other institutions (such as churches, families, schools, etc.) to teach more and better morals and values. The list goes on. Why don’ t these solutions work?
Why Our Youth are so Troubled
So why are our youth so troubled? And why do we have more violence committed by our youth of today? I think the answer is in a combination of factors which are coming together in a unique way. These factors are:
Many adults are affected by these factors also. Since most of them grew up in a much slower paced world with more defined role models, they had the opportunity to learn some values to help keep their emotions in check. However, there are many adults today who are feeling more and more overwhelmed and angry. They also do not have adequate learning strategies to keep up with the fast moving changes; such as having to change jobs and careers and learn new terminology and technology and new procedures and to learn it NOW. Many times their old learning strategies (that worked in a slower paced classroom in which the teachers spoon fed them) fail them in the fast paced workplace.
Sometimes these adults release their frustration and anger in their families. The result is a high divorce rate and the breakup of the family unit. This further adds to the frustration and anger of the child and takes away one of the last remaining bastions of stability. They turn to peers and gangs who are feeling the same way so that they can feel a sense of belonging and of stability.
Many adults wonder why it is so different for our youth of today in school. They reason that they were able to succeed or at least cope in school and they cannot understand why their children are having so much trouble. There are several reasons:
First of all, we have been pushing more content down into our schools. The students of today are learning things that some of the adults did not have to learn until college or later. In fact, some of the information that our children are learning now did not even exist when the adults were in school.
Secondly, we are in an information explosion brought about by all the factors cited above coupled with the high tech society that is pushing back the frontiers of knowledge at an increasingly faster pace.
Thirdly, our information dissemination systems are getting faster and faster-- computers, TV, the Internet, satellite communications, etc.
We adults are overwhelmed by the information explosion. Our children are overwhelmed even more because of the above factors and because they do not have the resources to cope. The result is the growing frustration and anger that we are seeing in the troubled youth of today.
The Problem
When babies are born, everybody is so amazed at how fast they can learn. Even as they grow into toddlers and very young children, their ability to learn very rapidly and easily continues to amaze us. The unspoken assumption or presupposition out of which we start operating is that they can learn anything easily and rapidly. Then they hit school. The opening of school is eagerly anticipated and awaited. Sure there is some anxiety, but we think it will soon dissipate once they get used to their new surroundings. For many, school starts out as a fun experience where they value learning new things. For others, the anxiety generated by school activities and other factors combine to create a bad experience that has a major negative effect on them for the rest of their lives.
One of the major reasons that students of all ages have problems in school is the presupposition that they can easily and naturally learn in school without specifically being taught HOW to learn the academic subjects. We give them academic tasks such as spelling or math and assume that they can and will learn in the same amazing way that they had been learning prior to school. The problem with this is that learning in school is VERY different than learning skills that we are genetically wired to learn -- like walking and talking and social skills. The printed word is a man made (or person made) idea and skill. We have to learn HOW to read and understand it.
Unfortunately, we leave it to the student ‘s creativity to figure out how to do these academic tasks. The learning strategies that many students use are ineffective and inefficient and boring. This leads to low grades on tests and school work and a serious lack of motivation. This leaves the students, their parents, and their teachers very frustrated.
Even more important than the frustration, though, is the meaning that the student, parent, or teacher attaches to the low grades or lack of motivation. When we assign meaning to a grade, we can attach it at any of the "logical levels." Many times this meaning then becomes a part of the student s psychological makeup and personality in the form of a limiting belief. If the belief is negative then it has a limiting effect on the progress and development of the student. For example, I was recently talking to a 29 year old woman who recounted the story of how she had great trouble learning her 7's in her multiplication facts. She was called stupid by her older sister and was traumatized and has carried that stigma with her since the fourth grade. She still has problems with math and test anxiety to this day even though she is a college graduate and very intelligent.
Another typical story involves a 40 year old man who was in charge of the meeting room in which I was teaching. I noticed he would hang around in the back of the room listening very intently to the learning strategies I was teaching. At a break he came up to me and said, " What you are doing is very important. If I could just spell and read better I could manage this motel instead of delivering coffee and cleaning up the room. But I can’ t spell so I can’ t write memos or letters I get embarrassed because so many words are spelled wrong. And, since I can’ t read very well I wouldn’t be able to read memos or letters either. When I was in school I was told I had a learning disability because I couldn’t keep up. So they put me in special classes all through school. And I still couldn’t do the work. I remember one day in the sixth grade, I was at the board working fraction problems and couldn’t do it and the teacher screamed at me "Just go sit down. You are just dumb and you will never be able to learn." That happened a lot to me and I dropped out of school in the tenth grade because it was no use to go to school. Then I got into trouble and served time in prison. Now I am out and have a family and am trying to take care of them. But I am limited because I can’t spell or read very well.
The class I was teaching was based on my book "Rediscover the Joy of Learning", and I invited the gentleman in to tell his story to the class. My comment to them was "This is what we are about. What you are learning can help keep this kind of thing from happening in our schools". The good news is that I invited the gentleman into the class and had some of the students teach him learning strategies. He was able to learn them very rapidly and easily and was very excited about his new skills!
If you listen to how he described himself, you can hear the different beliefs he had at the various logical levels:
Learning the learning strategies is important. What is more important, though, is helping a person change his limiting beliefs at all logical levels to beliefs that empower learning.
Let’ s suppose that a student has just flunked a spelling test. Examples of the different meanings that could be attached to the different logical levels would come out in the language patterns and sound like the following:
LOGICAL LEVEL STATEMENT
Spiritual/Greater System "The school is dumb for making us learn spelling words."
Identity " I am dumb."
Beliefs/Values " Learning spelling words is dumb."
Capability " I don t know how to learn my spelling words."
Behavior " Should I write my spelling words 5 or 10 times?"
Environment " The classroom is too noisy."
Sometimes the student connects the meaning on their own.
Sometimes other significant persons make the connection (like the 29 year old cited
above). When the meaning is attached it acts like a thought virus that very rapidly
spreads throughout the remaining logical levels. In my experience, when a struggling student is taught HOW
TO LEARN in a way that really works, it sets off a chain reaction of success. This can
eventually positively affect their self esteem. Particularly if significant others
(teachers and parents for example) know how to give positive feedback at the appropriate
logical levels AND if they know how to change the limiting beliefs at the various logical
levels. These changed beliefs become antidotes to the thought viruses. Another way I use the logical levels is to observe how
students take feedback (test results, oral correction, etc). Most of us have an automatic
response to receiving negative feedback. It can range from " I’ ve done
something wrong" to "I’ m a failure." Many students will get a low
grade on homework or a test (which is feedback at the behavioral level) and assign the
meaning of it to the identity level. They will take it personally by assuming that the
grade means something about them as a person. Other students will assign meaning at the
beliefs/values level by degrading the value of learning or the subject matter. Other
students will take it to the highest level and blame the school system or the teaching
staff. Still others will assign it to the capability level by assuming a bad grade means
they can’ t do it. If a student would just accept the grade as feedback at
the behavior level so they could learn what behaviors to do differently, the feedback
would not be nearly so traumatic and would be more helpful and easier to utilize. The
purpose of feedback is to be able to make adjustments and improve. However,when the above phenomena occurs, the student is sometimes
traumatized and develops non useful and limiting beliefs all up and down the logical
levels. The answer to dealing with the frustration and anger lies
in dealing with the basic processes that are the cause of it. The presupposition that
children know how to learn in the classroom is just one of the faulty presuppositions that
undermine the foundation of our school system operations. Our school systems are based upon a shaky foundation of bad assumptions or
presuppositions that dictate how we behave and operate the system. These faulty
presuppositions have been inherited through the years and feel natural as though
"they are just the way we do things". Taking a hard look at them gives us a real
opportunity for some significant changes. Some of the presuppositions are: BEHAVIORAL PRESUPPOSITIONS OF OUR SCHOOLS Students naturally know how to learn in the classroom. I have been in education for many years and this never
occurred to me until I started noticing that what students would attempt to do to
accomplish the academic tasks we gave them would not work and they did not know what to do
differently. Then it dawned on me that NOBODY (or at least no official part of the system)
was taking responsibility for teaching children how to learn in the classroom. Sure, some
individual teachers would share some of their learning strategies with students that
struggled, but no part of the school system does it on a systematic basis. The result is devastating to students because they assume
something is wrong with them if they can t do the tasks assigned to them. So do their
parents. So does everybody else. The truth is that most students do the best they can with
what they know to do. If it doesn’t work or if it doesn’t work very well, they
don’t know they are supposed to do something different. The idea hasn’t been
broached because we have presupposed they already know how to learn. All students learn at the same rate and in the same
way. Back in the industrial age, we designed our schools to
resemble factories. We placed students in the same room according to age and proceeded to
teach the content of that particular grade level. This presupposes that all the students
learn in the same way and at the same rate of speed. We know this is not true, yet we
continue the practice. This presupposition combined with the next one practically
guarantees that many students will be traumatized. A certain percentage of students will fail and/or do
poorly in school The bell curve has become almost an icon in education
which justifies the presupposition that some students will fail and/or do poorly. In fact,
if a teacher gave all A’ s and B’ s, they would be accused of being too easy or
of grade inflation. But what if we assumed that all students were capable of learning
equally well and we taught them to succeed in the classroom? What if we expected all
students to learn easily and quickly in the classroom? How would it affect our schools?
How would it affect the students? How long would any business expect to last in the
corporate world if 20-30% of their product was expected to be shoddy or poorly made? The school system is more important than the
individual student The most common response to some of these presuppositions
is "How else could we operate the schools?" Even if we know we are hurting
students, we continue the practice so that the system can operate. We seem to be in some
sort of denial regarding the trauma we are causing students. More money will solve all the problems of our schools. Asking for more funding for schools dominates our
lobbying and legislative activities and even our public relations. My concern is that more
money is just going to be used to perpetuate the current system. And, if these
presuppositions truly are symptomatic of the faulty foundation on which our schools are
operating (as I believe they are), then more money will simply deter us from dealing with
serious defects and we won’ t look for structural solutions. Students are motivated only by punishment and/or
reward. Our whole grading system is based upon this
presupposition including the threat of suspension, expulsion, and other radical
punishments. The truth is that there are far better ways to motivate students that will
fit into their natural motivation strategies. Natural motivation strategies which utilize
the highly valued criteria of the student provides a win/win situation that offers valued
and motivating choices. Learning activities cause learning to occur. So many times I have had students tell me that they were
good at learning spelling words or vocabulary words, etc. And yet, in my experience, the
student’ s learning strategy for these tasks was inadequate. When I would inquire
further into how they were judging the success, I would find that they would be handing in
assignments that did not contribute to the learning process but yet would be easy to do.
For example, they would be asked to simply copy down each spelling word 10 times and hand
it in. Or, asked to look up definitions of vocabulary words in the dictionary and copy
them down and hand them in. When the student would do this boring task as asked, they
would get high grades but very little learning would occur. Since most teachers are not
trained in how the mind works or how learning occurs at the process level, they are left
to assignments designed by textbook publishers. NLP has a golden opportunity to be a major
force in teaching others how learning best occurs. Something is wrong with a student who does poorly in
school. We are a society accustomed to placing blame or finding
who is at fault when something goes wrong. Unfortunately, when a student is doing poorly
in school we almost automatically blame him or her. Usually, we accuse the student of not
studying hard enough, or of not being motivated, or of being lazy, or of being rebellious or stupid. Many times we will label them with
some form of learning disability. After a while, when the feedback becomes overwhelming,
the student starts to believe the labels and it affects their self esteem in a devastating
way. The better the teacher, the better the learning. The reason I include this is not to demean great teachers
but because it takes away from where the real responsibility lies in the learning
process-- with the student. Also, believing that it depends upon finding the right teacher
keeps us from solving the real problems that are limiting our schools. Besides, if we did
change the presuppositions that form the foundation for how we conduct our schools and how
we treat each other, the great teachers would really be empowered and could do their job
even better. SOME EMPOWERING PRESUPPOSITIONS So, if our schools operate out of faulty presuppositions,
what would be some different presuppositions that would empower students, teachers,
administrators, and parents? I am sure I will find some more, but when I have envisioned
our schools operating out of the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) presuppositions, the
shifts at all logical levels are incredible. Imagine for yourself, by going second position at all
logical levels, what it would be like to be in a school system operating out of the
following presuppositions as a student, a teacher, a school official, a parent, or the
public at large: I led a group of Master NLP Practitioners through
this exercise and we all agreed if we could just get the first presupposition into our
schools, it would have a transforming effect on us and our schools. If all of them were
Implemented, there would not be chronic frustration and anger. There would be only VERY
capable teachers, students, parents, administrators, and the public at large focused on
helping everybody achieve their highest potential. Now, imagine what the world becomes as
these students graduate, become parents and enter the workplace and take leadership
positions. AWESOME!!! We would be truly helping to make the world a better place to live. About the Author Don A. Blackerby, Ph.D. is founder of SUCCESS SKILLS/NLP
of Oklahoma. He has been involved in NLP since 1975 and specializes in helping struggling
students in school. Please contact him at his NEW address and phone numbers: SUCCESS
SKILLS, PO Box 42631, Oklahoma City, OK 73123. His new fax # is (405) 773-5427. He can
also be reached at his new phone # (405) 773-8820. He also has a new web site:
www.nlpok.com. His E-mail is [email protected],
For more information, please call or email:
SUCCESS SKILLS
P.O. Box 42631
Oklahoma City, OK 73123-3631
(405) 773-8820
800-775-3397
fax (405)773-5427
email: [email protected]