Product Description

Learning with YOUR purpose in mind -- not your parents', not your teacher's, not your school's

Every day, your school, your teachers, and even your peers draw lines to

measure and standardize intelligence. They decide what criteria make one person smart and another person stupid. They decide who will succeed and who will just get by. Perhaps you find yourself outside the norm, because you learn differently -- but, unlike your classmates, you have no system in place that consistently supports your ability and desire to learn. Simply put, you are considered lazy and stupid. You are expected to fail.

Learning Outside the Lines is written by two such "academic failures" -- that is, two academic failures who graduated from Brown University at the top of their class. Jonathan Mooney and David Cole teach you how to take control of your education and find true success -- and they offer all the reasons why you should persevere. Witty, bold, and disarmingly honest, Learning Outside the Lines takes you on a journey toward personal empowerment and profound educational change, proving once again that rules sometimes need to be broken.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14150 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com
Criticism for the public school system in the United States is nothing new; kids of all skill levels are slipping through the cracks at every age and in every city. Rather than attempting to change the system or point out it's failures, Jonathon Mooney and David Cole have created a practical guide to help kids jump through the necessary hoops to achieve whatever larger, postschool goals they may have. While much of the material is written for kids who've received the label LD or ADHD, many of the suggestions can be just as helpful for those who've been labeled "gifted," or any other student who feels frustrated with the daily routine of standard education.

The introduction (personal histories of the authors) is great reading for parents of LD or ADHD kids, and much of it has a humorous tone that makes it equally appropriate (and approachable) for discouraged adolescents. From the terror of weekly spelling tests to the few inspiring teachers and tutors the two encountered, the tales are equal parts entertaining, poignant, and encouraging to others who may well be experiencing quite similar events. There's little discussion of what methods are right or wrong--ultimately, both authors take a fundamentally pragmatic view, and it's "right" if it worked. A steady focus on study skills fills the majority of the book, and Mooney and Cole take what are generally pretty familiar stands on note-taking and test preparation and break them down into easily digestible concepts. With different methods for different types of learners (visual thinkers are encouraged to use maps and brightly colored markers), students will find plenty of help in creating notebooks, focusing their attention, and even appropriate ways of conducting the infamous all-nighter. Including information on how to recover lost class notebooks, how to make the most of a syllabus, and "The Seven Habits of Highly Disorganized People," Learning Outside the Lines provides students with plenty of tools to further each reader's personal idea of success. --Jill Lightner

About the Author
Jonathan Mooney is a dyslexic student who did not learn to read until he was twelve years old. After attending Loyola Marymount University for one year, he transferred to Brown University, where he graduated with an honors degree in English. Mooney is also the recipient of the distinguished Truman Fellowship for graduate study in the field of learning disabilities and special education.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter Three: Institutionalized

On August 10, 1997, we unknowingly sat across from each other at the opening night of transfer orientation at Brown University. Two kids who were supposed to be a pair of statistics, now Ivy League college students. Next thing we knew, we had paired off and stood next to each other reading off a list of "wacky facts" -- an icebreaker where each student had to guess what his peer's fact was. About halfway down the list, Dave read: "I didn't learn to read until I was twelve" -- Jon's not-so-funny fact. And then Jon read: "I learned to weld when I was eleven and dropped out of high school when I was sixteen" -- Dave's less-than-stellar fact.

At that moment, we both knew something about the other that was hidden to the world. Throughout our lives, we had looked to the idea of succeeding in school to define our worth and our intelligence. In childhood, we were told we were defective goods, and to be better we had to be other than what we were. In our adult lives, we tried to use academic success to define ourselves. In both of these situations, however, we fought a losing battle. Regardless of whether we were trying to fill up our holes or looking to be told we were whole, this thing called academic success still held our identities in its grip.

As we would learn that semester, after growing together as friends, arriving at Brown was not the end of our struggles. Arriving at Brown was in fact the beginning of a profound new challenge -- the challenge of moving beyond "academic success," to truly using our education to redefine our selves and find personal empowerment.

In order to achieve that, we had to come to an understanding of how institutionalized education affected us. Recognizing how institutionalized education affects all of us allows us to take concrete steps toward becoming personally empowered and ultimately frees us to find academic success for our own reasons and our own goals.

In this chapter, we take a critical look at the oppressive nature of institutionalized education. First, we look specifically at how everyone suffers losses during their trek through the institution of education. Then we turn to the present and explore how becoming personally proactive is the first step toward taking ownership of your education. We explore some concrete tools that will give you control over your environment. Then we introduce our study skills, and explore how they can empower you to revolutionize your higher education.

Institutionalized

Alexandra is in third grade and lives in LA in an apartment complex across from Jonathan's mom. After Alexandra's third week of third grade, Jonathan's mom, Colleen, ran into her in their complex. Unlike her normal greeting, a dance and smile, Alexandra looked very serious. She sat down quietly, with her head down. Colleen asked what was wrong. "I don't get stars on my math homework," she said. "All the other kids get gold stars on their homework, Miss Mooney. I study all the time. I just don't get that stuff. What's wrong with me?" Alexandra was not LD/ADHD, just a little girl, but she suffered the same losses we suffered. From the simple task of doing math problems at the age of nine, she had been taught that there was something inherently wrong with her.

Her experience is not at all uncommon. There are very few people in this country who escape their education without leaving behind some hostages. Our experiences are not the aberrant stories of two cognitive freaks, but rather narratives from a battlefield that consumes us all, like Alexandra.

This section briefly goes back over our stories to provide insight into an educational institution that takes something from everyone. Our goal is to face our personal losses with courage -- not to allocate blame, not to play educational reformers, not to influence policy, but ultimately to discover what we want to change in our lives now and how our higher education can do that for us.

A Case Study

The day we were diagnosed as "disabled" is one of those memories that burns too bright ever to go away. It sits at the core of our identity, bridging our consciousness and our subconscious, holding the key to our development, and it flickers like the buzz of a white fluorescent light bulb. This flickering light, however, not only gives us insight into the LD/ADHD experience, but also illuminates the educational system that affects all of us. In the end, the biggest challenge for us was not overcoming our weakness as LD/ADHD thinkers but transcending the biases and oppression of the institution of education.

Our case study starts when we are in third grade, when all kids want to be the same. But we find ourselves pulled from the group and sitting in front of two "doctors." At least that's what our moms call them. They might as well have had white coats on and dragged us from our classrooms in front of the other kids, because we knew something was wrong. We knew it had something to do with us not being "smart" and "good," words the teachers used when they thought we weren't listening, or when they yelled at us in the hallways. We were being tested in our minds because we were stupid and bad -- not merely different from the rest of the kids, but much worse.

And then the testing began, for varying amounts of time. A standard children's intelligence test, a battery of other IQ tests, and the infamous Rorschach, where all the images looked like weapons or darkness. It didn't matter that the test gives both an average total score and a breakdown of subtests, and that each of us was dramatically above average in intelligence. What mattered was that on our subtests, the results were spiked -- some abnormally high and others abnormally low. And following an established clinical protocol, this type of scatter pattern, equaling a standard deviation, along with other variables in the subtests, meant we were LD/ADHD.

Despite our intelligence, despite the areas of profound strengths that were in fact vastly superior to those of our peers, we became simple and easy to understand. We knew it all along, but it now had a name: "chronic disorder of the central nervous system" and a "chronic disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written." And...

And then we found ourselves back in the classroom, in the environment where we failed to begin with. But it was no longer the environment's fault. As the "diagnosis" showed, the problem was within us. And they were even nice enough to give us a special room away from the normal kids for some of the day. In one way, it was the logical thing to do. As a medical diagnosis, LD/ADHD identified a problem or a disease in isolation. It did not matter that our testing showed we were abnormally strong spatial and logical thinkers. That would make things too complicated. The diagnoses identified a disease of the mind, and no possible strengths could result from a disease of the mind, could they? (Just ask Professor Russell Barkley. This "defect" logic is at the core of his belief that ADHD is an inherent deficit.) Again, it did not matter that we showed strong alternative learning styles such as tactile kinesthetic learning and artistic abilities. But these strengths were ignored, and we lost the chance to learn in ways that suited our cognitive differences.

Ultimately our diagnoses and the subsequent attempts at intervention allowed people to blame us, two powerless kids, for our failure instead of turning a critical eye toward the environment. It took us fifteen years of personal and academic struggle to stop blaming ourselves, to stop believing that we are inherently defective like "they" thought, and to come to realize how profound an effect the environment had on our inability to succeed. Only as time went on did simple interventions like the ability to get up out of our seats, the use of a spell checker, and progressive ideas like project-based learning and other modifications to the learning environment allow the pathology to slip into irrelevance and enable us to be successful.

Our hard wiring is a simple cognitive difference. We all have them. But an oppressive educational environment that blames children for their failures caused us to grow up with the stigma of pathology. We learn differently, and our success at Brown illustrates that we always had these alternate learning styles and were never defective. We faced a punitive educational environment, fanatically concerned with socializing behavior, and we fought against an idealized conception of normalcy, not an inherent life-threatening disease in our head. Our stories as case studies force all of us to look outside, toward the institution of school, to understand what we all lose in our attempts to become educated.

Looking Outside: Past Self-Blame for a Better Understanding

We spend the vast majority of childhood in school. Our politicians and intellectuals debate issues such as vouchers versus charters, but no child is ever encouraged to question why he or she is in school. On the margins of our schools are the outsiders: the art punks, the drug addicts, and the losers who challenge and criticize the codes of school, its function, and its importance. Many teachers and reformers ignore these kids, writing them off as angry, misdirected punks from bad families whose parents, or the media, are to blame -- or that ultimately the kids themselves are to blame. These messages are ignored because they threaten a core concept of cultural power; they threaten our blind belief in the objective nature of education. But when the kids bring guns to school, we finally listen. When something as horrific as Littleton occurs, our society, appropriately, turns its critical lens on social sources, such as the media, the parents, and gun control laws. But no one has had the courage to look at the fact that those two kids at Columbine High School wanted not only to kill themselves and their peers but tried to blow up their entire school by wiring it with explosives.

No blanket statements w...

Customer Reviews

Awesome book for people with or without ADHD
Anybody can use the great tips and techniques in this book from students who procrastinate on studying to people with ADD or ADHD that have a hard time focusing on studying and preparing for projects and tests. I highly recommend this to anyone who has difficulty with school regardless if you have ADD or ADHD or not.

Extremely Disappointing
I purchased this book because I have ADHD, I am in college and I am struggling some with test performance and grades (GPA is 3.65 but I want to increase it). I found *nothing* about what I was searching for in this book, and here's why.

For one, the first part "deviant minds", the one telling the school story of the two authors, is no use whatsoever, because it constantly blames the system (which doesn't work for ADHDers, true, but DOES work for 85% of people --- and they omit reporting this essential data). On top of it, the two stories are about how the entire world should be preoccupied with accommodating LD/ADHD kids as if nothing else mattered. Furthermore, the whole take on non-LD/ADHD people's feelings and behaviours (especially teachers) is *very* confrontational and displays an overall (and well-known) lack of empathy that many ADHDers have toward whoever doesn't have either LD or ADHD. As I also am a significant other of people with ADHD (my mom, a coworker, some other friends), I found it *appalling* to see how the strains that ADHD puts on relationships are completely overlooked when not entirely blamed on others, abuse included.

A second reason I don't suggest this book is, it's full of useless advices, such as "when the teacher says the word example it means he is about to give you an example" (I have ADHD, I'm not *dumb*!!!), "make summaries" (I know I'm supposed to summarize but the ADHD-related difficulties with summarizing are *precisely* linked to the fact that we see ALL the endless ways to do it... how about providing strategies to sort out which way works best in a specific contest???), "structure your answer" (yeah, how clever! That's what I've been told since grammar school... care to provide a template or at least explain *how* to do it??). When conflicting advices are given (like in the case of multiple ways of taking notes), there is no explanation on how to figure out which way might work best for the individual and/or the specific situation. They only say "do what's best for you", again, yeah right I've been trying to figure that one out for my whole life -- care to help some for 15 dollars?

A third reason I found this book useless is that it gives you no strategy for memorization... so if you are in medical school (like me), law school, are becoming a pharmacist or a vet or simply are facing an exam that isn't some dumb English Literature or Writing class, you can safely skip this book and buy *any* other available one.

Finally, having ADHD is about overcoming one's shortcomings, whereas the authors try to teach you how to cheat the system. In the specific, they teach you several tricks to pretend that you've studied something well enough that you manage to get higher grades. However, what I was trying to do was, getting higher grades as a consequence of having *really* learnt something!!!

In other words, unless all you are a victim and all you're interested into is cheating the system and never *really* face the challenges that comes with ADHD, run away, it's not for you.

EVERYONE should read this book.
I have always thought that there is a piece of ADHD in everyone. Some people has a bigger piece, some people has a tiny piece. How can anyone be so "perfect"? My children are not "scientifically" diagnosed to be ADHD. But there are times when they can be showing bits of "symtoms" of ADHD.
I was in tears when I read about what happened to young Jonathan and young David. It must have been hard for them and their parents.
Everyone should read this book.
Parts of this book are going to help you with raising your own child since, like I said, everyone has bits of ADHD, and you just never know when anything in this book would come in handy.
Plus, we should also try to UNDERSTAND why some other children are doing what they have done. They are not ill and they are not stupid. It is just that they cannot walk within the lines like everyone else. Yet they CAN still learn and bloom, only that, just like the title of the book, they need to do it "outside the lines".