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Retraining the Brain
by Sari Steinberg

Back in December 2004, Annette Goodman received a phone call from the Jewish day school in New York where her 5-year-old daughter Avital was a kindergartener.

“They expressed significant concern,” recalls Goodman, a 36-year-old mother of three. “They didn’t feel she was learning at all. My daughter was weak in all three cognitive areas that come together to accomplish the task of reading. The consensus was that she would [be] functionally illiterate [for life].”

As if that weren’t enough, Goodman’s son Moshe Shlomo, then a 9 year old at a Long Island yeshiva, had also been struggling since kindergarten.

“My son essentially couldn’t read Hebrew at all,” Goodman says. “[His] writing was very, very, very primitive. He couldn’t write a book report, couldn’t get his ideas down on paper.”
Understandably, Goodman was shocked.

After all, she had a high school-aged daughter who excelled academically. How, she wondered, could her two younger children be falling so far behind? And who could help her treat the source of her children’s disabilities?

Almost immediately the solution dawned on her: she could.

“Hashem makdim terufah lamakkah (God sends the medicine before the affliction)!” Goodman says, recalling a Jewish proverb. Fifteen years before, when she was a graduate student at New York’s Brooklyn College, Goodman had taught at a laboratory school that was testing a groundbreaking Canadian learningdisabilities program called Arrowsmith (named for its founder, Barbara Arrowsmith Young).

“I remember sitting in my car in my garage,” Goodman says. “I hadn’t dialed the phone number in 10 years, but it came to me immediately. I decided then that if I couldn’t get the program in New York, I would take my younger ones to Canada for the program.”

LEARNING’S GOLDEN ARROW

Her eagerness for Arrowsmith stemmed from experience with the three- to four-year program, which addresses 19 different learning dysfunctions through the use of computer and auditory exercises that stimulate underperforming areas of the brain. “When the weak areas of the brain are strengthened,” Goodman explains, “the learning disability is reduced or removed.”

If a student is having a hard time with abstract concepts, for example, she might do repeated clockreading exercises to learn how the hands move in relation to each other. Thus, rather than teaching students to compensate for problem areas, Arrowsmith helps them attack the learning disability directly.

According to Goodman, the program has been getting “spectacular” results for over 25 years in Canada, where its founding school is located. Indeed, Dr. William J. Lancee, head of research in the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and associate professor at the University of Toronto, confirms Arrowsmith’s efficacy.

“All deficit areas identified by the Arrowsmith Program improved as a result of the application of Arrowsmith Program cognitive exercises,” Dr. Lancee wrote in a November 2005 report, funded by the Donner Canadian Foundation, summarizing the findings of a three-year study. The results, he said, “strongly support the effectiveness of the Arrowsmith Program for a wide spectrum of learning problems.”

Still, his study notes, and Goodman agrees, that the program is best suited for students with “average to above-average intelligence” and without behavioral or emotional issues. Additional criticisms of the program have included complaints from some Canadian parents that while the program is effective, it is also expensive.

Due to Arrowsmith’s success, however, in the last seven or eight years, administrators at Toronto’s Arrowsmith School have developed a program that has been implemented in many public and private Canadian academies. While the program is available to any English-language institution, it is unknown to most U.S. schools.

But Goodman wanted that to change. Set on having her children in Jewish day school, she began approaching various New York yeshivas about adding an Arrowsmith program to their curriculum. In April 2005, she contacted Rabbi Heshy T. Glass, principal of Hebrew Academy of Long Beach (HALB), who immediately expressed interest.
The next couple of months were a whirlwind of meetings, presentations and trips to Toronto. By May, HALB had decided to move forward with the program, and the following fall, the start of the 2005-2006 academic year, the school became the first in the U.S. to implement Arrowsmith.

AND THE VERDICT IS …

Once it was official, Goodman pulled both of her children from their schools and enrolled them at HALB. They became part of a pilot class that included 12 students in grades one though eight working on reading, writing, mathematics, comprehension, logical reasoning, visual and auditory memory, non-verbal learning, and attention deficit.
Within two months, parents at HALB began reporting changes in their children’s academic and social performance. Some noticed improvements in handwriting, others in reading comprehension and still more in math, Jewish studies and classroom behavior.
“We’re seeing results—higher scores in reading, in math,” Rabbi Glass says. “Students learn sequencing, language acquisition and a lot of other skills that will help them in the regular classroom.”

Since the successful implementation of Arrowsmith at HALB, Goodman, Glass and several other parents have become nationwide advocates for the program, primarily within the Jewish day school community. A number of these schools, Goodman says, are looking to implement the program as soon as next September, though only Maimonides Academy in Los Angeles has made it official.

Jay Gelman, president of HALB’s board of directors, agrees that the interest in Arrowsmith is strong. “My prediction is that this will be in many institutions over the coming years … Arrowsmith can become a standard in addressing educational issues.”
As for Goodman, she is ecstatic with the improvement she has seen in her children.

“By the end of last year, my son’s teacher said that he didn’t think Moshe Shlomo needed Arrowsmith anymore because his Hebrew reading was so good,” she says. As a sixth grader, he is now in a gifted program.

Her daughter Avital, now 7, is also making great strides, especially with her auditory memory and spelling. “Before it was so severe that she would play with friends for hours and not remember their names,” Goodman says, “and she couldn’t spell a single word correctly. Now she’s remembering names, phone numbers and homework … And recently she came home with a spelling test that she got only two wrong out of 12!

“It’s so telling about this program,” Goodman adds. “Once you develop the capacity, you can learn.”

Sari Steinberg (SariScribe@aol.com) is a freelance writer and the author of “… And Then There Were Dinosaurs” and “King Solomon Figures It Out.”