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The Exercise Rx for ADHD: How Movement Improves Attention, Working Memory, and Executive Functions
Date: Thursday, February 28, 2019
Time: 1pm-2pm ET
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Expert: John J. Ratey, M.D.
Powerful evidence shows that exercise helps children and adults manage their ADHD — from attention and hyperactivity to behavior and motivation. Learn the latest research on how physical activity helps improve symptoms, exercise routines that are especially effective for people with ADHD, and more.
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Play Attention: Exercise for the mind! Play Attention is the most comprehensive neurocognitive training program available designed to strengthen Executive Function and Self-Regulation. But technology by itself is not enough. The mind also grows with exercise, coaching/counseling, good nutrition, mindfulness, behavior shaping, and parent training. These are all components of the Play Attention system. Call 800-788-6786 and learn how we can customize Play Attention for you. | www.playattention.com | Request a Free Professional Consultation
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THE SQUIRMING BUDDHA
By Robert C. Koehler
1019 words
The world hemorrhages. Refugees flow from its wounds.
Is there a way to be innocent of this?
People are washed ashore. They die of suffocation in humanity-stuffed trucks. They flee war and politics; they flee starvation. And finally, we don’t even have sufficient air for them to breathe.
For words to matter about all this, they have to express more than “concern” or even outrage – that is to say, they have to cut internally as well as externally. They have to cut into our own lives and personal comfort. They have to cut as deep as prayer.
“Wonderful column, Bob. It brings up the post-Katrina images of armed citizens blocking a bridge so that our own refugees could not infest their neighborhoods.”
These are the words of my sister, Sue, who emailed me last week in response to my column about the refugee crisis and the global shock over the picture of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi’s body, which washed ashore in Turkey after his family’s boat capsized during the short crossing to the Greek island of Kos in their attempt to flee to Germany. As she let her personal feelings wash ashore as well, I thought about where I had not gone with that column: into the realm of personal responsibility for the larger welfare of the human race.
“I thought,” she went on, “of offering to open my home, and then the multiple worries, inconveniences, fears, etc., etc. sounded in, trumpets shooting fire as ‘practical arguments’ shot down compassion.
“What in my life today, in myself, in my community, in my culture, prepares ME, not some other person in some border area trying to live his or her own complicated life, what prepares ME to take in a refugee?”
This is where I felt the cut of razor wire.
“My bigger TV? The little glider in my backyard? Any of my stuff? My careful savings in order to have enough to pay my quarterly estimated taxes and what’ll come due next April? My love of poetry and Shakespeare? . . . I look around at my conservative neighbors, who and wherever they are, and I wonder just how very different I am — not in what I believe but in what I will actually do.
“I’d contribute money — and occasionally do — but to which Band-Aid?”
I open this door of uncertainty not to pretend I have answers but precisely because I don’t.
Sue concluded: “I really and truly do not know how to work effectively for the changes that are needed. I know it is not ‘up to me’ — thank goodness for that — but my day-to-day life just leaves me so unfit for much more. Even taking the time for this email effort at dialogue means that I’ve blown the window of time I had to maybe catch up on my paperwork, a daily and weekly depressing dilemma for me. I’ve never fit in solidly with collective humanity, and that I have not remedied this in any realistic way, I can truly attest, is a failing.”
I confess not knowing what to say in response. I think about the words of Somali-British poet Warsan Shire: “no one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark . . .” I think about the refugees in my own city, Chicago, standing at intersections holding signs that plead for help. Help means money. Maybe it also means eye contact. Sometimes I don’t even have any of the latter to spare.
But no, that’s not quite it. Eye contact can be the beginning of God knows what. A dozen years ago I gave eye contact to an old friend, a Guatemalan who had fled U.S.-sponsored hell in his native country in the 1980s. I’d written about him when I was a reporter. We were friends, but I hadn’t seen him in a long time.
Then, there he was. It was 2004, a year into George Bush’s occupation of Iraq. We were at the Federal Building, at the end of a march protesting the war. When I saw him, my blood ran cold because I could tell in an instant that his life had collapsed. I could tell that he was destitute and homeless and utterly lost and the last thing I wanted to give him was eye contact, but I did. And with it I offered him the mirage of hope.
We talked. I invited him for dinner. He was a skilled carpenter and did some work for me. Eventually, a few months into our reconnection, I invited him to move into my house. He lived there for almost five years.
This was not an easy situation. His spiritual wounds were deep; he treated them with alcohol. I know that I helped him, but I don’t think I would be so open again. I’m careful about the eye contact I dole out, but I cannot sever myself from a sense of responsibility to others in need.
Once I found a $10 bill in a parking garage. As I exited the garage, I passed a man panhandling for spare change and kept on walking, but half a block later, stopped, paralyzed with guilt. Whose money had I just found? I returned to the panhandler, reached into my pocket and dug out a dollar in change. I was still $9 ahead. As I continued to my destination (a movie theater), I felt my inner Buddha squirming inside me with disappointment. I had selfishly kept the bulk of my lucky find, to be squandered, no doubt, on junk food. And suddenly I knew the title of my autobiography, if I ever wrote it: The Squirming Buddha.
I hate the idea of razor wire on national borders. I am torn apart by the suffering of refugees and the bombastic manipulation of politicians, who try to turn the planet’s most vulnerable into national enemies. But like my sister I don’t trust or understand my relationship with collective humanity. Who are we in relation to others? What do we owe them? What do we owe ourselves? How do we unite in all our flawed humanity? Let the dialogue begin.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~end~~~~~~~~~~
Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. His book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
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When Will We Ever Learn?
by Ellen Lindeen
747 words
On Tuesday evening, February 27, 2019, I attended a beautiful, yet painful, event, entitled, “Vigil in Remembrance of Those Affected by Gun Violence.” The event, sponsored by Moms Demand Action, was at a local church, in my hometown, in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Names of those who have been killed were read. Hopeful statements by survivors were also read by attendees, and while the familiar sites of many shootings were also named (Columbine, San Bernardino, Orlando, Sandy Hook . . . sadly, the list went on and on), we all lit candles. I was prepared to be there I thought. As a college professor of more than two decades, so many shootings have taken place at schools, that at the start of each semester, I have always looked around my classroom and imagined what I would do and say to protect students if someone with a gun appeared at the door.
Part of my usual classroom routine has always been to put quotes on the board for students each day we met. I have a long list of favorites, but the list continues to grow. In 2015, I felt I had to add the following when I learned the details. A fellow English instructor at a community college was killed on the first day of class. As a tribute to his life, I wrote on the board for my students:
“’Today is the first day of the rest of your life,’ written on the board on the first day of class in introductory Writing 115, at Umpqua Community College in Oregon by adjunct English professor, Larry Levine, 67, before he was shot along with nine others by a lone gunman.”
Honestly, I have become a bit numb when I hear of another shooting, but I still pay attention. Students in my classes in the last few years were born about the time of the Columbine shooting, so they’ve grown up with active-shooter drills. Yet, I still came to a difficult realization at the Vigil as I was listening to the featured speaker, Lauren Carr, a survivor from the 2008 shooting at Northern Illinois University. She explained that she was in the third row when someone entered her lecture hall at the right of the stage and began shooting. All the students around her were hit. Her laptop took a bullet and her seat had bullet holes, but somehow she escaped. She spoke bravely about her fears since the event, followed by anger, and then therapy, and now her active practice of looking for good in others.
Carr went on to explain that just a year ago, she and other survivors met in DeKalb, Illinois, on the NIU campus for the 10-year anniversary of the shooting, February 14, 2018. Many had stayed in touch but it was helpful to be together, facilitated by university professionals, to discuss their progress, to remember their friends, and to commemorate that they were still here and thriving, or at least attempting to thrive. Then Carr paused, and explained at a certain point during their reunion, some of them started getting texts, and then all of them did. The information they received revealed the facts of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida actively taking place. Ten years later, on Valentine’s Day again, another mass shooting disrupted our country, killed more young people, and destroyed the faith and trust the survivors from NIU were just beginning to feel.
Astounded, I realized that when the Parkland shooting occurred, I didn’t put the date together with the shooting at NIU exactly 10 years earlier. How common must these shootings have become for me, despite actively seeking for ways to prevent one in my own classroom, that the same date did not even register. I had not lost a loved one at NIU, but perhaps I just subconsciously decided to let February 14 stay Valentine’s Day?
Most Americans know we have a gun problem in the United States, but are we still looking for solutions? Thankfully, the Parkland students launched the March for Our Lives that many of us participated in, but have universal background checks been passed into law yet? Just last week, a gunman killed five people at a place of business in the city of Aurora, IL. A student from NIU was an intern there, reporting for his first day of work. Is this ever going to stop? When will it ever end? When will we ever learn?
–end–
Ellen Lindeen, syndicated by PeaceVoice,is an Emeritus Professor of English at Waubonsee Community College where she taught Peace Studies & Conflict Resolution and Human Rights & Social Justice.
