© 2003-06 by Tom Daly Free 5-part report Lesson No. 1: So, who’s really the one with the learning issue? I’m going to start by saying something that may shock you.  It may even tick you off. I don’t care.  I happen to believe that what I’m about to tell you gets to the heart of everything that will ever help you and your students. If you can truly grasp what you’re about to hear, then you will be well on your way to improving your students’ behavior, raising their grades, getting them to respect authority figures (that's you), and having them view education as their true ticket in life. Warning --- You might not “get” this at first because it will seem too simple.   (But then again, aren’t the most profound truths always the most simple?) Here it is . . . Your ADHD student is not the one with the “learning issue.” YOU ARE! There!  How do you like them apples!  (Hey, I TOLD you that I’m not like the other websites out there!) But what I’m saying is true.  And I will not only prove it to you right now, but I’ll tell you how this truth can transform the dynamic between you and your students, leading you to a completely new future for your classroom. Let me tell you how I arrived at this politically incorrect truth.  It’s crucial that you understand this so that you can apply it to your own situation. A wake-up call You see, as a new teacher 12 year ago, my skills were dime-a-dozen, and the only teaching job I could land was as an eighth-grade substitute history teacher at the pay rate of $70 per day.   I couldn’t live on that, and since I had a special-ed emergency credential, I was asked if I would be willing to teach a “special” class for a higher salary beginning with the next school year.   “Special” is hardly the word --- this class was at a day school for disturbed children.  This school taught the absolute worst 110 students out of a district of 141,000 kids.  How bad were these kids?  Well, the “best” of these students were poster children for a host of attention deficit problems, and the worst had been incarcerated for violent crimes.   I also learned that this class’ previous teacher had taken a leave of absence after suffering a breakdown of sorts.   I’m not ashamed to tell you why I took this job.  I needed the money, plain and simple.  And I wanted to be a teacher more than anything else. So how bad did it get?  . . . Let me be perfectly blunt.  By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I was ready to quit.  I was getting my butt kicked by these students on a daily basis.  This was clearly the nightmare teaching assignment from hell.  I admit it --- they were winning the fight.   I tried yelling at them.  (I call it the “Yell-and-Hope” method.) I tried rearranging the classroom furniture.  (All it gave me was a sore back.) I tried using point systems.  (Which my kids found pointless, sigh.) I tried opening a classroom store from which I gave away free stuff for being good.  (That just made me broke.)   I tried giving kids raffle tickets any time they answered a question correctly, and then I held a drawing at the end of every month (as if kids with near-zero attention spans were capable of looking ahead that far!) I watched other teachers, too.  I noticed that the teachers with strong personalities exerted more control, but they also tended to suffer more stress --- and so did their students.  The “cool” teachers were relaxed . . . but their kids didn’t learn much and the principal was looking for a way to “reassign” them to other sites.   The thing is, I truly cared about learning.  I sincerely wanted my students to care about their schoolwork.  I wanted them to care about their lives.  That’s why I tried everything I could.   But guess what?  Caring is not enough!  This was a revelation to me.  Here I was, discouraged, unhappy, and slowly going broke from buying things to try and induce these kids with what amounted to cheap bribery tricks. I was trying my best, just like you probably are.  But I’ll say it again: caring is not enough. Of course, I received lots of free advice.  Administrators who hadn’t stood in front of classroom in 25 years told me to try this or that (usually some sort of “get-tough approach”).   Well-meaning friends listened to my stories and nodded sympathetically, but how could I tell them that trying to corral a classroom of disruptive kids is nothing like trying to keep their one kid quiet in a grocery store?  School district seminars gave me lots of theory and gobbledy gook, but nothing that would actually work in a real classroom. Like I said, by Thanksgiving, I was toast.  I was ready to throw in the towel on these kids. Finally, a breakthrough! My breakthrough came with a discussion I had with one of my students (CLUE!!!)  I was walking somewhere with my teaching assistant and one of my better students asked if she could tag along.  I said sure.   I was so fed up, I told this student that I was going to quit, and she said, “Mr. Daly, you’re not a bad teacher.  You’re really cool and all, but maybe you’ve got things backward.  You want Shawn and Nairobi to work instead of hitting Justin on the head, but being mean isn’t going to work because those boys are going to jail for sure anyway.” I had to agree with her on this one.  She went on to tell me that buying Herb a pizza last week had only resulted in Herb laughing his butt off at me.  She told me, in so many words, that I’d be better off getting inside the heads of my students to find out what they really liked, who they really were, what made them tick.   She said, “Do you know that Javier goes to the pier every day after school to watch the fishing boats because that’s all he wants to do?”  I asked her about some of my other kids, and she easily recited each student’s likes and dislikes, dreams and hopes.   She knew the secret life of my students.  She knew what they really cared about.   (CLUE!!!) I had no idea.  It suddenly hit me that I had been so consumed with my own frustration with these kids that I had never really bothered to look at things from their point of view.   Don’t get me wrong, I had no intention of becoming their “friend” and blurring the very important authoritative line between teacher and student, but I suddenly had a crucial insight . . . These kids weren’t intentionally misbehaving for the sole purpose of driving me batty!  Rather, their misbehavior was actually a secret message that the student was (unwittingly) trying to convey to me.  And usually that message was this: “Reach me.” Do you realize how profound that is?   I now understood two things: 1) If I could reach these kids in a likeable way while also maintaining their respect, I would probably prevent 90 percent of the problems I had in my classroom.  (The good news: it can actually prevent almost 100 percent of your problems!) 2) I never would have had this insight if I hadn’t been talking to my student Liza in an informal, casual way, away from the classroom.   These two realizations formed the basis of a new approach I developed that has helped transform kids from underachieving disruption machines into diligent students who went on to graduate and succeed in life. To read about the new approach, move on to Part 2. Take me to Part 2 please . . .