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Opening Mental Doors

When I first met Jose as a junior in high school, he had spent his first two years in resource (special education) classes where the teachers are specialized in addressing different types of learning disabilities (LD). LD is a very inclusive term that characterizes thousands of challenged students whose main difficulty lies in reading comprehension and/or math calculations. Jose was a very slow reader who had trouble understanding the concepts described in his textbooks. Needless to say, his self-esteem was very low and he often experienced severe mood swings from elation to total despair. He was sure that he could never graduate.

Acquiring Concepts

Teens usually acquire second degree conceptualization during puberty, building on the first degree concepts obtained at a very early age that we can call conceptualization of concrete objects. Piaget, the famous Swiss biologist whose research on the development of intelligence established a cornerstone upon which the whole cognitive theory is built, named the ability to remember objects the Internal Representation System which occurs according to the scientist between the ages of 18 and 24 months. In other words, a child that age begins to remember the toy even when it has been hidden under the rug for example. The baby doesn't need to see the object to know that it exists. What seems to be so obvious for adults is actually a tremendous feat that will eventually culminate in our higher order of thinking or second degree conceptualization. As an example, if we ask the question 'What is life?', a child 8 or 9 years-old will usually respond in very concrete terms, such as 'The opposite of death' or he may actually be stumped for a answer. Now ask a teen between 15 and 18 and you will get a much more sophisticated answer.

Closed Door

Unfortunately, for some teens, that second degree of conceptualization never opens. For some reason, and that it the case for Jose, some adolescents remain at the childhood level of concrete concepts or 'Internal Representation System'. Some argue that low levels of intelligence prevent some people from passing to the higher level; others claim that these youngsters were never exposed to adequate stimuli as children and that too much television did not allow for the practice of concept forming offered by the written text. Thus, whatever the reason, the door to higher order of thinking remained closed. Schools struggle to tailor instruction to such students,

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