I remember from my school days, a girl near me was meticulously folding a handkerchief while the guest teacher was speaking. He stopped, said he was disappointed she was not paying attention and said, "I know you can't repeat the last thing I said."
She did, word for word, proving she HAD been listening. What makes this stick in my memory - the teacher apologised to her and told her to go right on folding her hankie if it helped her have such a good recall. And in future lessons he encouraged any others of us who wanted to draw or colour in while he talked, to do so. After all, why do we doodle when we're talking on the phone to people?
We have found with our boys that sitting in a classroom full of kids and having the lesson presented by a person out the front talking, was the worst way for them to learn. They simply couldn't cope with all the input. Kids like this can listen better if they focus visually on something meaningless and under their control (such as shredding paper).
What we did for difficult child 3 - we found if he listened to music he was able to keep his focus just on his bookwork. So knowing he had his music to listen to as soon as the teacher finished made it easier for him to concentrate on her words for as long as he could. When the work sheets were handed out he was allowed to go sit at his special isolated desk on the veranda and put his headphones on (cheap CD player, semi-disposable). The only drawback was that if the teacher wanted his attention, she had to go to him and touch him on the shoulder. But since you just about have to do that anyway once he engages his concentration, it was no big deal.
A rule with choice of music - nothing with lyrics (so he won't sing along and disrupt others); nothing too loud and distracting; music preferably classical. Best composers - Stravinsky, Mozart, Handel (Water Music is great), Vivaldi (The Seasons) and even some classic Beethoven (5th Symphony is a wonderful exercise in minor thirds - the original primal music, because our first music for all of us is minor thirds; think how a child calls out, "dad-dy" in two notes - they're a minor third). For more modern music, anything from animé soundtracks and just about any synthesiser music, especially Isao Tomita.
We burnt school CDs for difficult child 3, he was allowed to help choose the music. And because of his insistence on reading labels, he quickly learnt the names of the piece and its composer, for everything he played.
If you can, teach meditation/visualisation/relaxation techniques, especially using the same music (or similar). If they're relaxed they can often work more efficiently. Then you build up a conditioned response - they hear music, they relax, they work. It all connects.
We now use an iPod instead of a cheap CD player, but that's because it's under MY control, not at school. When we drive to the city for the occasional study day at school (an hour's drive each way), difficult child 3 chooses the music we listen to in the car - on the iPod. It's amazing how it calms him down. And he can still do his schoolwork on those long car trips.
Marg
