Today’s edition of Education Week,  education’s news site of record, contains a Commentary piece that I wrote on the importance of valuing the strengths of students with special needs.  In the article I write about my experience as a special education teacher almost forty years ago.  I share the disillusionment I felt when I realized...Read More

The American Institute for Learning and Human Development has just produced five short videos that take up the concept of neurodiversity (the idea that disabilities should be regarded instead as diversities), and apply it to the following diagnoses:  learning disabilities, autism, ADHD, intellectual disabilities, and emotional and behavioral disorders.  In each video, the executive director...Read More

A new study reported in The Journal of Pediatrics, reports that exercise may benefit children with ADHD.  In this study, kids with ADHD were matched with a same-age, same-socio-economic status group of “normal” children.  The groups engaged in two experimental conditions:  one day then engaged in 20 minutes of quiet reading, and the next day...Read More

In an Education Week article entitled “Studies Link Students’ Boredom to Stress,”  Ulrike E. Nett, a student motivation researcher at the University of Konstanz, Germany, is quoted as saying:  “Although teachers try to create interesting lessons, they must be aware that despite their best intentions, some students may still perceive interesting lessons as boring….What is imperative...Read More

For almost two decades now, I’ve been criticizing the diagnosis of ADHD and the use of Ritalin and other psychostimulants with children (see, for example, my book The Myth of the ADD Child).  Now, a new report in The New York Times today, says that physicians are starting to prescribe these drugs to poor children...Read More