What to do when your child hates school

Exerts adapted from the blog: Radical Teaching

School Can be Stressful     

From a neurological standpoint, our attention is hard-wired to alert to signals of potential danger. The most primitive parts of the brain are those that determine what gets our attention and what information gets priority entry into the brain. This attention system is essentially the same in humans as in other mammals. When the brain experiences stress that attention system is on autopilot seeking the potential threat that might be causing the emotional disturbance, and ignoring other sensory information such as lessons.
      

Stress goes up with boredom and frustration in humans and animals. Animals restrained or understimulated "misbehave" with aggressive, destructive, and even self-mutilating behavior. The stress causes their brains to attend only to imagined or real threat. In that state behavior is no longer influenced by the higher, thinking brain. Stress takes control of the neural pathways that determine where information is processed and where behavior is controlled.
     

The same responses take place in the human brain. If children are stressed by lessons that have little personal relevance and by the frustration of not keeping up with the overloaded curriculum, their brains do what they are programmed to do. Input is diverted away from the thinking higher brain (the prefrontal cortex) and sent to the lower, reactive brain. In this situation, in humans as in animals, the involuntary behavioral reactions are essentially limited to three responses: Fight, Flight, or Freeze.

Building Bridges

Your challenge as a parent is to reconnect your children with the joy of learning. You can make a difference in how they relate to school and even reverse their brains' reflexive reactions. The key is to build bridges.
     

You can distress your child's automatic reaction to the boredom and frustration of school and homework by linking your children's positive emotions to their one-size-fits-all classrooms. You can enrich and expand your children's learning experiences and help them be more successful on tests and other school assessments. More importantly, you can revive the love of learning and discovery they had when they started kindergarten.
    

The positivity you can provide is to connect you children's classroom studies to their interests to help them the find personal relevance that busts the stress and opens up the neural pathways to their upper, intelligent brains where true learning and creative thinking take place.
     

You can use strategies with your children at home to reverse school negativity and promote the mindset your children need to regain and sustain a positive attitude about themselves and school. With this outlook and reversal of negativity, their brains will be more receptive to attentive focus and memory making during class and when they do their homework.
    

The success your children will see from their effort will promote new neural pathways with which they'll respond to learning more efficiently and store what they learn in their long-term and memory so they will retrieve the information not only for the test, but for the challenges and opportunities that await them in the 21st century.
     

The key to this process is to connect your children to what they learn at school through their interests and past positive experiences so they will WANT to learn what they HAVE to learn. 

Practice 

Each time your children focus attention, this activation of their alerting and focusing pathways makes neural circuits stronger and increases their attention focusing abilities. They will certainly need this strengthening of attentive focus if they are to actively learn from time spent on activities at school and then come home with any attention left to devote to homework, especially with the lure their videogames, iPods, social networking, and television.
     

Practice or repetition, of these processes of active learning for long-term memory, is like exercising a muscle. The neuronal circuits involved become more developed because of their repeated activation through the process of neuroplasticity. Each time a memory is activated, especially when one memory network is activated in connection with another, related memory circuit, the networks become stronger, more accurate, and more extensive. Repeated linking of related memories with new learning is brain glue. The new information increasingly grows more linking connections (dendrites, synapses) each time the new and prior memory are used together for a new purpose.  

An example would be activating the memory of family camping trips for your child to link with the new learning about the settlers traveling across the country in covered wagons. When you help your children link the new learning about the settlers with that long-term stored memory of family camping trips, the school-based social studies lessons grow more dendrites that carry information between neurons that hold the memories. When your children want to remember facts about the social studies lesson for a test, recalling the camping trips retrieves the associated information they need to answer the test questions. The added bonus is that because the camping memories are positive and long-established, the same permanence will extend to the facts they learn for that school unit.

Brains Keep Track of Effort that Does or Doesn't Pay Off

It helps motivate children exert effort when they believe it will pay off.  The brain is wired to remember the outcome each time the brain evaluates a situation (challenging test question, confrontation by a classmate, choice of studying or playing, decision to pay attention to a lecture, whether to try out for a team) and predicts whether effort will pay off. There is a special structure in the brain that's only job is to squirt pleasure-evoking dopamine into the prefrontal cortex (the place where past memories are activated to make the prediction) when a prediction (choice, answer, social response, decision to put in physical effort, prediction that doing homework is a better choice than playing) is found to be an accurate prediction.

This accumulated information, about the predictions made and the results, is used by the brain in animals and humans, to evaluate new, similar situations when effort is called for. A fox that tried chasing a rabbit up a steep hill, exerting effort and using valuable energy stores in the chase, only to be outrun by the rabbit, keeps a memory of that prediction. The fox builds a memory network that the effort exerted failed to produce the predicted result. A few more such failed attempts and the fox's brain builds a more and more accurate memory network to better survive. It now uses that network to predict whether to exert effort based on previous experience relative to the steepness of the hill and distance from the prey. The fox now will not extend effort if this network predicts that chasing the rabbit up a steep hill is unlikely to be successful. 

When children's brains develop school negativity, it is usually the result of the effort-preserving mindsets constructed by unsuccessful prior efforts. Through a past history of failed efforts -past efforts to sustain attention in class, do homework carefully, persevere at challenging classwork- that did not result in success, children's brains learn to automatically resist putting mental effort into subsequent similar activities.

Help foster interest in the topics they will be studying

Connect their brains to the topics the will be studying at school by looking at photos or videos of family trips, objects they own that were made in countries they study, read favorite stories that relate to topics in science, history, and math. The curiosity prompted by your reminders of their past experiences and current interests is a brain bridge ready to link with the information the must learn for school. The neural circuits are prepared to grow the dendrites that will physically link the new information with their permanent memory circuits. Plus, they have the interest and positive mindset to WANT to know what they HAVE to learn!

Ask Questions: You'll further preheat the memory links to connect their interest to school work when you ask your children questions that help them personally connect these stories, past experiences, possessions, or their interests to the current or upcoming school topics. Stimulate curiosity in your children so they want to discover answers and solve problems. Their brains are attentive because they are personally interested in the answer to the question.

As long as you know what material will be studied in the next class unit, you can find ways to bring it into active discussions at home, in the car, or while waiting on line at the grocery checkout.

If you child likes skateboarding and the city council voted down the proposed skateboard park there is the opening to discuss if the decision was fair. How does the current system work? How do these council members represent what you want? Should children vote? Should people who pay more taxes have more say in how tax money is spent? All of these questions can be linked to topics in history such as the Revolutionary War (taxation without representation), the Civil War, poll taxes, voting rights for former slaves and women - which came first and why?

Negativity grows into motivation

Their increased, attentive interest in the information they HAVE to learn becomes the motivation to connect to learning through personal interest to apply effort. The results will more than offset your planning and preparations. Smiles will replace groans and eye-rolls you use neuroscience to return to your child the joys of learning.

Dr. Judy Willis, a board-certified neurologist and middle school teacher, is an authority on classroom strategies derived from brain research.

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