Journal Entry Post #4 - Changing Education Paradigms

One of the most interesting ideas I found in this video - was that ADHD is a "fictitious epidemic". The author backs his theory with reasonable doubt. If our students are interested and motivated by technologies and educators fail to use those technologies in the classroom to grasp their attention, it is understandable why they lose focus. If they are not interested in the means and method with which the information is presented they will easily lose interested in the entire lesson together. As educators we need to do a better job at understanding what grasps our students attention and use those ideas in our instructional methods to help provide a better learning environment for our students. The only thing that I did not understand about this idea was the fact that there are more cases of ADHD in the eastern United States, why is that?

Following along similar lines I like what he said about the fact that we anaestetising are our children and basically killing their creativity with our drugs, that we assume are helping our children focus. He says we should be more interested in inspiring their creativity rather than killing it. I find this very true. I am not against ADHD and I do not believe that it is a fake disorder, however I feel that it is an over diagnosed condition. Too many of our children are diagnosed with this disorder and pumped full of medication, which makes this seem dead to the world in class. Maybe we could cure the focus problems with different instructional techniques instead.

Thirdly, I agree with his idea that schools are still based on a factory idea. Not that I ever would have thought of it like that; however he makes a good point. We classify our student by their age and group them in grades according to that information. Why instead are our student not grouped by their abilities and their learning styles. If we decided to group students according to this criteria would we see improved learning and results. My hypothesis would be yes. Wow this is probably my favorite point of this video.