ADD and the importance of repetition and physical memory.

I have studied a lot of music. One of the things I did was speed rhythms. This was a way to prepare an absolute focus, because one had to break down every movement, and then speed it up. One worked this until a whole scale was played. The process focused one on the task totally. This in turn developed a focus that enabled a process of developing an absolute focus, to the extent that that focus as a behavior became embedded. When I used this, and it was very calm, I could learn something much faster. This meant that how one focused determined how much time it took to learn something.

Repetition done with absolute focus has no emotion to it, no feelings about it. It develops a clear understanding of the form without added values. Dancers know that repetition places the move into the physical body, where it can be easy to direct, easy to recall and then the dance move can be done with ease and directed, played with. it was the same with the repetition and focus mechanism in music for me. Because of this, I realized that there was a state of being where learning was not all that difficult. And, I had a master teacher tell me about this. He said, “ if you focus correctly, the time spent learning is shortened.”

Let’s look at words. Words develop conceptual ability. For instance, until I had the words that described chemistry I could not answer the questions. If I had to get these words through layers of memory as impulsed values of good and or bad, as a past of negative reprimand or positive reinforcement , which is what behaviors of peer pressure and social competition is that is the life in the classroom,  it would take me a really long time to absorb the new vocabulary.Thus, by the third grade, my ability to take in new information while focusing on and  juggling all the values that had accumulated within, would slow down my ability to learn. As this, I have lost my natural divergent thinking ability that can only exist within absolute focus, here. And, within this, imagine a teacher having to teach a lesson and resolve all this in the classroom that is itself a peer group? They can’t. To move through emotional values present and teach the lesson in the space allotted and provide the repetition needed that will vary by degree, is an impossibility within the present systemic form. 

Within this, can we begin to understand how our children’s promise and potential is slowly lost, taking years to recover. And, does this cost money? And, by the time the children are adults, years of development, within a natural ability to learn at greater levels, is lost and or, has been suppressed.

Does this behavior describe our children, our autistic children and our ADD children and our ADHD children? Does it describe us, the adults?

Is there a way to refocus the child from their natural learning/ divergent thinking ability, to get in a broad vocabulary without emotional values, and with clear meanings to words? Can the structures as the words be placed directly into the physical memory, where the words as placeholders are recalled with ease, enabling the child to answer questions and thus see patterns, because the fabric as the building blocks are stable and used with ease? Thus, when a compound structure is given, that child is not juggling uncertainty on top of new forms.

Would this build a self confident child, a child that builds self trust and skill, leading to a successful adult? Would this create an adult that is focused here, instead of that distracted ADD, ADHD child. Is there solution in the starting point of the dis-ease, instead of trying to answer to reactions as the consequences?: I mean, look at the word as the dis-eased state of being: attention deficit dis-order, or attention deficit hyper-activity( distraction) dis-order?

Our school systems have structure that is beneficial. But, if the starting point of the child and how we learn and take in information is not understood by parents, our children lose what is a natural ability to learn. Our public schools are designed to teach a specific sequence of lessons, with each given a certain amount of time. Thus it is the responsibility of the parents to ensure that the child’s natural learning ability is of a sound structure.