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Fall 2004
Connecting Minds
New Yorker Leah Keith and her husband, Dan Cohen, have been loyal supporters and advocates for All Kinds of Minds® since they saw the difference that our programs had on their own child. We asked Leah to share why she believes so strongly in our work.
Early on in elementary school, it became clear that our oldest child was a little like a square peg in a school environment offering a rich array of round holes. The problem wasn't that he wasn't capable-his learning needs were just outside the ordinary.
What we needed was a set of operating instructions for his mind that could be shared with his teachers. What fix-it job isn't easier when you have a set of operating instructions? That said, we found that the traditional approach to the process of diagnosing learning disabilities was not especially kid-friendly. How does a child relate his score on a block design test to his life at school? The scores from a traditional evaluation didn't seem particularly helpful to my son's teachers, either. We were optimistic that our son could
do well, but we didn't know how to help
him succeed.
I attended a lecture by Dr. Mel Levine, where he said that neurocognitive development could be mapped, with each part given a name. His map seemed like a section of an operating manual with diagrams of all the parts of the thing you are struggling to fix. Dr. Levine's approach seemed so sensible I was inspired to attend a teacher training course by All Kinds of Minds. My husband and I figured if I absorbed enough of the training, we could export it to my son's classroom. This was five years ago, before the Schools Attuned® Program was as widely available to teachers as it is today.
The training was really helpful. It became clearer to my husband and me how to help our son outside of school. We took him for an assessment at the Student Success CenterTM in North Carolina, and returned home with something approximating that much-needed set of operating instructions. The happy results we have seen led us to become volunteers for All Kinds of Minds and to recommend its programs to others. Happier still, today my son is not just surviving-but actually thriving-in high school.
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