BRAINS DON'T COME WITH AN OWNER'S MANUAL

By Alice Thomas, M.Ed.

Every person on Earth has his very own incredible "thinking machine" - his brain. The human brain is more powerful than the biggest computer and yet small enough to fit in a shoe box. It can create new buildings, figure out ways to travel beyond the universe, solve difficult math problems, and understand an emotion as complex as love. This amazing organ weighs only about three pounds but has billions of parts called neurons and "wiring" that, if laid end-to-end, would stretch over 62,000 miles.

There are more neurons in your brain than there are trees on all the Earth, and there are more connections between the neurons in your brain than there are leaves on all of the trees on all the Earth. The memory capability of all those neurons has been described as being equal to 1,000 CD-ROMS, with each one containing an entire set of encyclopedias.

One great feature of the human brain is that it is capable of working totally on its own, whether or not we understand how it is doing the job. It controls our breathing, digestion, and blood flow from the moment we are born. The brain also helps us learn to walk and talk before we are old enough to know we even have brains. But, like any good piece of equipment, the more we understand how the brain works and what we can do with it, the better we will become at using it.

Every one of us has a brain that is capable of almost anything we can imagine. The only problem is that this incredible brain we each have been given does not come with an owner's manual, or a manual for teachers and parents. We start out without even one clue about how it best operates.

Our minds - what our children use and develop in school (we hope!) - are housed inside our brains. All of our thinking and remembering goes on in our minds. Since our children's minds need to think and remember a lot every day, it's important to find out how minds work so we can teach them more effectively and so we can help our children learn how to use them efficiently and effectively.

According to Robert Sternberg, a professor at Yale University, most successful people understand their strengths and weaknesses, capitalize on their strengths, compensate for their weaknesses, defy negative expectations, and developself-efficacy, a belief in their abilities. They understand how their minds work. They understand how they are smart.

To know how children are smart, it is helpful for teachers, parents and other professionals who work with children to understand more about how learning takes place. There are at least nine areas that affect the learning process and connect together to define how children - and adults - are "smart." This might be a little easier to understand if you think about your mind like a Rubic's Cube. Each Cube, or "mind," is made up of the same number of blocks.

Set the cube on a table or flat surface. There are nine blocks touching the table. Pretend that these are the nine areas that affect the learning process. Now let's imagine that the cubes are not attached to one another. They can be placed in any order on any of the nine "learning process" stacks, but all the blocks have to be used. Some stacks will be much taller than others. Some stacks will be smaller or possibly even empty.

Every Rubic's Cube has the same number of blocks, but they may be stacked differently. That is how intelligence is "stacked" in your brain and in the brains of our children. Children may be very intelligent in some areas and rather weak in others. If you understand how you are smart, you can use your brain more effectively; if teachers, parents and other professionals who work with children understand how children are smart, they can help children develop and use their brainpower more effectively. And, if this information is passed along to children, if each child understands how she is smart, the child can use his/her brain more effectively.

We need to stop asking ourselves, "How smart am I?" and start asking the right question: "How am I smart?"

Among the most important things you can do for yourself and your children is to understand how you are smart, what learning methods work best for you, and what your talents and interests are. In learning about yourself, you will learn enormous amounts of information about how to help your children learn how they are each uniquely smart, what works best for each of them, and what their special talents and interests are. Dr. Ned Hallowell, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and a well known psychiatrist, says we should all be asking ourselves, "What kind of brain do I have?"

We all should want all of our children, whether they are our biological children, our students or both, to become as successful as they can be. That's why we must keep up with the new knowledge that becomes available almost daily to raise our awareness and understanding of intelligence, how your mind works, how minds work, how to identify strengths and weaknesses, some strategies for dealing with areas of weakness, and how to monitor learning. Then all of our children can answer the question, "How am I smart?" and know better how to manage school and lifetime success!

Alice Thomas, M.Ed., is the founder, president and CEO of the Center for Development and Learning.