When Bright Kids Can, but They Don’t : Education: Almost one of every five students has difficulty completing class work despite support from a loving home and all the skills to succeed.
When her first-grader Jay seemed easily distracted from schoolwork, Gail Worrall didn’t think much of it. Her son was a bright child: He could read and write before entering elementary school and had scored well on standardized tests. Yet “staying on task” was difficult for him, especially on writing assignments.
But as the Falls Church, Va., mother of five boys thinks back to her oldest son’s academic struggles since those first symptoms appeared 14 years ago, she sighs and says: “It was terrible. . . . It drove me crazy for a time.”
By third grade, Jay’s problem was “full-blown,” Worrall says. Despite being in the school system’s gifted and talented program, he couldn’t seem to get class work done. He rarely completed homework assignments. “His teacher said she had taught for 15 years,” Worrall recalls, “and had seen disorganized boys, but Jay was in a class by himself.”
In fact, he wasn’t.
Almost one in five students, from grade school through high school, shows signs of the same difficulties, according to Jerome H. Bruns, the director of pupil services for Falls Church’s schools who began studying this kind of underachieving child seven years ago in suburban Virginia public schools.
“Here you have a child who has a mother and father who love him, a bright kid, could read, good problem-solving skills, but sits in the classroom and just doesn’t do the schoolwork,” says Bruns, who has been a teacher, counselor and school psychologist. “Every teacher loves any kid who tries. But these kids don’t try.”
Intrigued by the enigma of smart and able students who refuse to do schoolwork, Bruns started surveying teachers to get a fix on how widespread the problem is. He charted personality traits, work habits, family backgrounds and standardized aptitude and attitude test scores. He interviewed frustrated parents and talked to shoulder-shrugging children in his attempt to discover what makes these students slam on mental brakes when it comes to school and homework assignments.
Along the way, Bruns labeled the problem: “Work Inhibition.” Now he’s written a book about his findings, titled “They Can but They Don’t: Helping Students Overcome Work Inhibition” (Viking, $20).
The profile of the work-inhibited student Bruns has pieced together over the years isn’t that of a typical troubled student:
* They score average to superior on intellect and aptitude tests--more than a third of them in the highest range. On reading, writing and math achievement tests, they score better than average.
* Outwardly, they are articulate and able to learn.
* Problems turn for the worst in the fourth and seventh grades--milestone school years when expectations and independent work loads increase.
* Obedient and personable, they aren’t behavior problems at school or home.
* Their attitudes toward school are more negative than those of other students.
* Almost all of them have “reasonably to very well-educated” parents who are devoted, loving and place a high value on education.
* Forty-one percent live in single-parent families (50% greater than their age group in general).
* Seventy-four percent are boys.
“You can’t attribute this problem to intelligence and you can’t attribute it to socioeconomic status,” says Bruns. “There is something else at play here.”
At the heart of the problem, he believes, are unresolved issues of independence and identity.
“Something has gone awry” with their development of social and emotional skills needed to function apart from parents, he says. “Individually, these kids are very dependent. They’ll work--but you have to be a kind and nice adult, sit next to them and hold their hand.”
Further studies indicated that while not severely emotionally disturbed, many work-inhibited kids are weak on other psychological traits.
“They have poor self-esteem,” Bruns says. And they tend not to be as mature as their classmates; they often act silly and find it difficult to express their opinions and feelings.
“Forgetting” to do their homework and not finishing chores seem to be their passive-aggressive way of expressing the anger and confusion they don’t express openly.
Adding to the problem is that work inhibition is rarely diagnosed correctly. Once considered laziness, it is now more likely mistaken for a subtle learning disability, or an attention-deficit disorder, or a fine-motor-skill weakness that makes writing difficult.
“Teachers want to help these children, so they keep them in from recess and give them low grades,” Bruns says. “It is the No. 1 reason kids are held back a year. Meanwhile, everybody agrees we’re going to make this kid do his work. Notes go home. Parents have to sign off on homework. That’s the usual course of action. And you know what? It doesn’t work.”
Bruns believes that because work inhibition stems from dependency and self-esteem issues, a heavy-handed approach backfires.
“Rather, they should be saying to the child, ‘Hey, I know school is hard for you, but it’s your life and let me know what I can do to help you,’ ” he says. “If instead you’re always worried, you are sending messages to your child that hinder his confidence . . . and reinforce the child’s feeling of incompetence.”
“It’s critical,” Bruns says, “that parents let their children know regularly and often that they love them” not because they cleaned their room or can kick a soccer ball, but “because they are their children. . . . Most kids, with the proper encouragement and support, improve and find their way.”
