All Kinds of Minds

THE IMPORTANCE OF SUCCESS
Success is like a vitamin. Everyone needs some of it. When you don't have enough success, it's hard to feel very good about who you are, especially when other people around you seem to have plenty of success. When you're growing up, school is the place where you learn the most about success-what it is, how to find it, and how much of it you usually have. You can tell how successful you are just about every day in school. You compare yourself to other kids, and other kids compare themselves to you. If you learn quickly and easily, if you are good at pleasing your teachers and your parents, if you feel as capable as other students, school can be a great experience. But for some kids, school is no fun because they have trouble succeeding, and they just don't feel good about learning.

THE IMPORTANCE OF KEEPING AHEAD IN SCHOOL
Often students who are doing poorly in school subjects come to feel that they are behind in everything. They don't realize that there are many ways to "keep ahead" in school. When you are having a hard time in school, you can keep ahead in your feelings about yourself, in your desire to overcome your difficulties, and in the activities in your life that you are very good at. Everyone can and should keep ahead in some ways. Many students have to work especially hard to keep ahead in their feelings about themselves. This is because their performance in school is so disappointing to their parents, their teachers, and themselves. Very often these students have various kinds of learning disorders.

HOW LEARNING DISORDERS AFFECT YOUR LIFE
Learning disorders are problems that affect some students. These problems make it hard to keep up in school. This doesn't mean that students with learning disorders are dumb. Their problems are not their fault. In fact, a student can be born with a learning disorder but no one will know about it until the student tries to do certain things in school. For example, it is possible to be born with a weakness in your memory that doesn't cause any trouble until you try to learn the multiplication tables or write a book report. Learning disorders can affect just about everything you try to do in school and also many things you try to do outside school.

KINDS OF LEARNING DISORDERS
There are many different kinds of learning disorders, and some of them cause big problems for kids. Learning disorders may make it hard for someone to learn to read, write, spell, or do mathematics. As we shall see, there are also learning disorders that wreck your ability to make friends and be popular with other kids. A learning disorder may make it hard for you to concentrate; it may cause your mind to drift or wander a lot of the time. A learning disorder can affect your memory or your ability to understand and use language as well as other students in your class. One form of learning disorder can ruin the way your brain figures out certain kinds of information coming in through your eyes. Another kind of learning disorder makes it hard to solve problems and think about certain types of ideas. Some learning disorders affect the way your muscles work. Somehow, your brain may not tell your fingers or your arms and legs exactly what to do and when to do it. Poor messages from your brain to your muscles can make you hate writing or have trouble playing certain sports. Most kids who have school problems have more than one kind of learning disorder. For this reason, we will talk about a kid's learning disorders instead of his or her learning disorder.

THE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SIDES OF LEARNING
A learning disorder is not a disease. When you have a disease or an illness, it usually has a definite cause. The disease is abnormal, and we hope it can be cured. A disease like chicken pox has no good parts to it. But learning disorders are not completely bad for you. In fact, sometimes, having learning disorders can help you develop your strengths. For example, dealing with learning disorders can teach you how to bounce back from feeling low, how to solve problems, how to come from behind and end up a winner. Some students who have nothing but success all through school never really learn how to deal with problems. Such students may not be ready for the real world when they grow up and have problems at work or at home. So, there really is a bright side to learning disorders!

Unfortunately, though, certain learning disorders can make school very rough for you at a time when you'd like to be admired and in a place where you should be feeling successful. Also, if you can't learn and work very well in school, you may have a hard time becoming the kind of adult that you would like to become. So, if school is a problem for you because you have learning disorders, you need to understand them and try to overcome them so that they won't stop you from having success when you grow up.

THE CAUSES OF LEARNING DISORDERS
Sometimes learning disorders seem to run in families. Brothers and sisters, cousins, parents and their children may be similar in their learning disorders. You may have trouble reading, and you may find that your mother or father or uncle had the same kind of problem in elementary school. Sometimes an illness that you have early in life may bring on a learning disorder later, but proving this kind of connection can be pretty difficult. Actually, we don't really know what causes most learning disorders. We do know that they usually have something to do with differences in the ways people's brains work.

HOW THE BRAIN AFFECTS ABILITIES
In most cases, a student with learning disorders has part of his or her brain that does not work well when it has to do certain things. In fact, though, nobody's brain is perfect. Some people can't learn to whistle. Others have trouble remembering names. Some people can never learn to play the piano, juggle, sing, or recall telephone numbers. Because everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, we are all different from each other in the ways in which we function. That's why kids with learning disorders are really not so different from everybody else. But, unfortunately, kids with learning disorders have differences that interfere with their academic lives. For example, if you're not so good at juggling, you can still do well in school. However, if you are not so good at remembering what certain words look like, school can become a big problem for you. Fortunately, we can work on learning disorders even when we don't know what caused them. Of course we do need to figure out what kinds of learning disorders are causing a student to have trouble when he or she is trying to succeed in school. Since most learning disorders have something to do with the way our brains operate, it is probably a good idea to present some facts about the human brain and how it is supposed to work.

THE CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM
As you may know, your brain and your spinal cord, which runs down your back, make up your central nervous system. It is called central because it serves as the central "office" for all kinds of information and jobs.

The Spinal Cord: The central nervous system is divided into regions, each with its own jobs to accomplish. The region at the bottom is the spinal cord inside the middle of your back. The spinal cord receives all the information from nerves in your skin and muscles-information about things like temperature, pain, and your position in space. The spinal cord is also responsible for sending out orders through nerves that connect with muscles so the muscles can move the right way when you want them to. This information that keeps coming into and going out of the spinal cord connects the higher parts of the brain to various parts of your body.

The Brain: Your brain, located inside your skull, is made up of billions of tiny nerve fibers that connect with each other in many different ways. The brain is so complicated in its "wiring" that it should not be surprising that no two brains are exactly the same. This means that there can be a great number of different learning strengths and learning disorders among people, including kids in school. Sometimes it's hard to be sure what's normal and what's abnormal.

The Brainstem: The brainstem is just above the spinal cord. It gets information and sends out signals to the skin and muscles of your head and neck. The brainstem also works like an extension cord for some of your senses, including hearing and touching. For example, if you touch something with your left thumb, the feeling that you get has to pass through nerves that go through the brainstem to get to parts of your brain that can think about what you've touched. Incidentally, smelling and hearing do not have to go through the brainstem. They are allowed to connect directly with the thinking parts of the brain (without an "extension cord").

Your brainstem also has other responsibilities. It controls swallowing, breathing, talking, heart rate, the flow of your blood and your ability to see. By the way, the brainstem does not have only pleasant chores; it's the part of the brain that makes you vomit!

The Cerebellum: In the back of your brain is a region called the cerebellum. The cerebellum is responsible for fine tuning your muscle movements. It is the cerebellum that can make you really excellent at doing things with your hands or at playing a sport.

A great football player, artist, or guitarist must have a super cerebellum! The cerebellum almost never gets any credit for its work. It may be that a great athlete should receive a trophy for having the "cerebellum of the year." The cerebellum works very closely with the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia are groups of nerves that cooperate with the cerebellum to make muscles work very smoothly so that they don't shake too much or keep missing the mark when they try to do something.

The Hypothalamus and the Thalamus: Up above the brainstem are two important parts of the brain called the hypothalamus and the thalamus. The hypothalamus performs many crucial functions. It helps control your appetite, your thirst, and the temperature of your body. The hypothalamus also has a lot to do with certain feelings that you get. For example, the hypothalamus helps you deal with both angry and peaceful feelings. The thalamus, which is right above the hypothalamus, is like a great relay station. It receives all the signals from lower parts of the body, such as your arms and legs, and sends them up to the higher regions of your brain. Every sense except smell goes up through the thalamus. You can also say that the thalamus is like a fuse box. Just as electricity comes into your home through the fuse box and then gets sent on to various rooms, information from your senses goes through the thalamus on its way to the regions of the brain that will think about it and use it.

The Cerebral Hemispheres: The highest region of your brain is divided into two halves that are joined together by millions of nerve fibers. These two halves are called the cerebral hemispheres. The two hemispheres look alike. But if you study them carefully under a microscope there are differences between them. In most people, the left hemisphere controls language and information that comes in or goes out in a particular sequence or order. The right hemisphere often specializes in visual patterns and in information like the parts of someone's face, that comes in all at once. The left hemisphere often likes to work more quickly, while the right hemisphere is a bit slower.

The Lobes of the Brain: To complicate things, each of the hemispheres is divided into lobes. The frontal lobes are right behind your forehead. In some ways they are the "orchestra leaders" of the brain. They help you to concentrate by allowing you to find and use the proper part of the brain for whatever you're doing at the moment. Your frontal lobes will "light up" the part of your brain that figures out language when someone is talking to you. At the same time, your frontal lobes might turn down the visual parts of your brain so you won't be too distracted while you're listening. The frontal lobes also help you control your behavior and your emotions. Therefore, they can help you get along with other people. A lot of popular kids have outstanding frontal lobes!

Behind the frontal lobes are the parietal lobes. The parietal lobes contain the sensory cortex which is the part of the brain that receives information from all of your sensory organs such as your eyes, your ears, your skin, and your sense of smell. The sensory cortex helps you figure out what these different sensations mean and what to do about them. Once you have decided what to do about your sensations, you can tell your muscles to work in a particular way. Getting muscles to move takes place at the back of each frontal lobe just in front of the parietal lobe in the motor cortex. Each motor cortex may seem a bit mixed up because the motor cortex in the right hemisphere controls all the muscles on the left side of your body, and the motor cortex in the left hemisphere moves all the muscles on the right side of your body. The motor cortex works closely with the cerebellum and basal ganglia so that your muscle movements will be smooth and accurate.

The occipital lobes sit just behind the parietal lobes. The occipital lobes help you understand information that comes in through your eyes. They figure out what you're seeing so that you can tell whether something is on top of, underneath, or next to something else. The occipital lobes help you catch a ball and do other complicated things with your eyes.

The temporal lobes are just beneath the parietal lobes. They have a lot to do with information such as language that comes in through your ears. Your temporal lobes are also needed for memory. But memory is scattered everywhere throughout the brain, and there are many different kinds of memory. For example, there is memory for faces, vocabulary words, spelling, and smells.

Since nobody completely understands all parts of the brain and their connections, nobody completely understands all the possible disorders that can cause kids to have a very hard time at school. Fortunately, there are many important things we do know. This book is intended to help students understand what we know about learning disorders. If a student has learning disorders and understands what they are and how they work, life will be a lot easier.

What you have just read in the preceding paragraphs is actually a very quick "tour" of the brain. As we have said, the brain is extremely complicated. Different regions of the central nervous system have to work very hard during a school day. Parts of the central nervous system are connected with each other, and they have to communicate with little time off. There are still many brain parts and activities that nobody understands. Experts spend their whole lives studying the human brain, but we still don't know exactly how people think or how they remember.

HOW LEARNING DISORDERS CAN CREATE MISUNDERSTANDINGS
One of the big problems with learning disorders is that they can cause kids to be misunderstood by grown-ups. Also, a kid with learning disorders might not understand himself or herself. Learning disorders may look just like laziness, when really the problem isn't laziness at all. A student may appear to be lazy because she is not getting good results in school, and then she just stops trying. For some students, schoolwork requires superhuman effort, so much effort that they may decide not to try.

This can make people think that they are poorly motivated or that they just don't care (when they really do care a lot).

WHY SOME KIDS WITH LEARNING DISORDERS PUT ON DISGUISES
Learning disorders can make a kid look or feel dumb or stupid. Sometimes when students feel dumb, they intentionally put on some disguises, hoping no one will find out that they feel dumb. These disguises might include being very cool, becoming a class clown, acting tough and getting into fights, pretending not to care about school, criticizing school (saying it's useless or dumb) or becoming very quiet in order not to be noticed.

Unfortunately, a disguise may cause more problems than a learning disorder itself! Sometimes parents or teachers notice behavior that is really a disguise, and they think that the behavior itself is the whole problem. A teacher might say: "If only you would behave, you'd start doing better in school." Down deep inside yourself, you might think: "If only I could do better in school, I might start behaving. If I got good grades, I wouldn't need to act so tough and cool."

The disguises that cause the most trouble are found among students who do not understand their own learning disorders. Misunderstandings can lead to nasty arguments. Once you understand your learning disorders, as well as your strengths, there is a whole lot you can do about them, so you may not need to disguise them as much. You can actually work on them and around them!

Some kids try to put down school. They criticize it. They say it's useless. Often, they say these things because they feel bad about how they are doing in school. In other words, they are trying to cover up their true feelings or fears about schoolwork.

HOW THIS BOOK CAN HELP YOU
This book is not supposed to help you diagnose yourself or figure out exactly what's right and what's wrong in your brain. That's very hard to do. There are experts who are trained to give tests and study your schoolwork to find out which learning disorders are a problem for you. This book should help you understand many different kinds of learning disorders; you might wonder about the presence of some of these in yourself or in your best friend! If there are parts of yourself that you recognize in this book, you can mention them to your parents, teachers, or other adults who are trying to help and understand you. For example, you might say to a school psychologist, "I think I might have a language disorder. From your tests, do you think this is possible?" In other words, this book may help you to help other people think about you. In a way, you can become a member of a team that is trying to understand and improve your life at school. Your ideas and your opinions are very important and often correct. You should not be afraid to speak up about yourself and what you think you need. More than anything else, this book is intended to help you feel good about school, about yourself, and about the things that make you different from everyone else.

Many students have problems that they take to school with them. They often feel it is important to cover up their problems, to appear happy when they are really worried. To do this, they "put on" disguises to make other people think that they have no problems. Inside, however, such kids may be very anxious.

A WAY TO READ EACH CHAPTER
Each of the upcoming chapters in this book will begin with a story about a student who has one or several kinds of learning disorders discussed in the chapter. As you read these descriptions, or stories, notice not only the learning disorders but also the strengths that each of these kids has. Following the story, there will be questions for you to think about or discuss after you have read the chapter.