Tuesday's Teacher

Teaching very young, high-energy children means understanding how they learn best.

Movement, multiple levels, complexities are all a part of interesting a high-energy child. But another, simpler reality needs to be addressed first, and that’s the issue of sitting.

For many hyperactive children and adults, the very act of sitting down is threatening. Sitting means losing command of the self. It means a kind of terrifying submission.

Hyperactive people survive by means of their strength and vitality. To remove that through forced docility is as threatening as it would be to put your foot on an average child’s head and pin him to the ground.

What few people know is how high energy children suffer by sitting. It actually hurts. The quality of stillness for a hyperactive body is not just simply a discipline we must endure. Stillness means the things driving a child to move must be arrested. The need to move doesn’t just “go away” because a child is finally doing what the teacher wants.

The suppression of movement causes the skin to crawl, itch, and feel as if bugs were crawling all over the body. Muscles that are restricted from moving suddenly become leaden and ache with a nervous tension that is agonizing. It feels like dull growing pains. Headaches, stomachaches, nervous habits, and temper, can all emerge when a body that is meant to move, can’t.

Unfortunately, in a world where movement in the modern classroom is limited, these children have twice the work, twice the discipline, and twice the bend that other children must endure when days of play at home become days of sitting in nine square feet. Turn the tables. Imagine jumping all day while you work.

One strategy for helping hyperactive children do well is to let them move in the classroom. Hyper kids do better standing up or lying down. Who cares if they are reading on the floor if they are doing the job? Perhaps the discipline of sitting should be saved for group discussions when a child’s mind can move him out of his body.

When the mind of a hyperactive child is fully engaged, his mental imaging actually pulls him out of his body. The very idea that a child can’t focus is absurd when you see him rivet in on something he finds interesting. Interest, of course, comes from nearly anything not predictable.

“Carry me” hands-on learning is a good compromise. Once a child understands a simple math concept, letting him work with manipulatives by carrying math manipulatives from a bin on one table to do the problem at another table. Then he can exercise his muscles while fulfilling the work. It’s a compromise to sitting with pencil and paper. Problem: It can’t be brought home.

Yes, he will be distracting, but average students aren’t supposed to lose concentration from extraneous stimuli, so other kids probably won’t notice if someone is working in the back of the room.

In time, nature will let the high energy body slow down. Puberty helps. But it won’t happen if loving compromises aren’t made. Medication might slow him down now, but what will he learn? The high-energy child is often very intelligent, and depriving him of natural knowledge about his own body is a form of deprivation.

The key to understanding a child like this is to recognize his profound differences. High-energy children will never be ordinary no matter how much parents wish it and work at it. Trying to neutralize him is a little like foot binding. Once you’ve broken the child’s feet, he becomes a prisoner of someone else’s agenda. But here, we are not speaking of feet, we’re speaking of the whole child. Don’t break the child.