Divergent Thinkers

I have spoken with several homeschool moms in the last month about children who are easily bored or can’t sit still or just don’t seem to respond to the same teaching methods their siblings do. I know from experience that teaching a child who doesn’t think like I do can be frustrating and can lead to wasted time, crying, yelling, and temper tantrums, and that’s just the moms.

For years I faced my child’s seeming lack of attention and discipline with threats. I didn’t learn until we were well into our schooling career that his discussions of topics unrelated to the subject we were studying were not the result of bad behavior. They came from a mind that processed information differently than the average person. My epiphany came as a result of Lucy Jo Palladino’s book, Dreamers, Discoverers and Dynamos: How to Help the Child Who Is Bright, Bored and Having Problems in School.

When I read the book, the subtitle was The Edison Trait. That is what drew me to the book originally. My son enjoyed inventing things, so in my quest to understand how to teach him, I reached for information about the great inventor. What I discovered not only changed the way I taught him, it altered my perspective on learning and how our minds work in general.

It turns out lots of people seem like they aren’t paying a lick of attention when someone is trying to instruct them. People like Thomas Edison and Bill Gates. These people have brains that process information in a manner Palladino calls “divergent thinking.” Most of us get information and funnel it into larger pathways, finding ways the data is alike. These divergent thinkers, on the other hand, receive information, and then their minds take that tidbit and branch out with it. It’s the difference between a funnel and a tree.

My son wasn’t goofing off (well, some of the time he was). When he came up with some off-the-topic comment, it was because that is the path his mind traveled with the information. If we were talking about Africa, that might lead to thinking about deserts, which might make him think about being thirsty, which might lead to thoughts of Gatorade, which might make him respond with a question about how many teams are in the NFL. Frustrating? You know it. But understanding that he wasn’t messing around helped so much. I finally realized my child/student wasn’t broken. He just spoke a different language.

Sound familiar to anyone? Let me know if you’ve struggled with this sort of thinker. We will talk about it more on Wednesday.