Neuromyths

Like many of my classmates I struggled with some of the neuromyths that we read in class due in part to some things I've learned in the past and some of my experiences. 

Years ago my wife and I were foster parents for a young boy named Anthony. During our training to be his foster parents we were told that children develop "learning templates" through out their lives and that foster children, due to the nature of having unsteady home lives, generally miss out on developing this "templates" at the same pace and at the same times as other children who may have stable home lives. Due to their delayed template forming, generally foster kiddos had difficulties dealing with things that other children their same age might not have difficulty with. This was the way it was explained to us. I'm sure there's also alot of "emotion" involved in their memory making as well, but 

When I read in Sousa that "if tantrums almost always get the child satisfaction when the window is open, then that is the method the child will likely use with the window tapers off" (p. 28). Instead of discussing it as "templates," Sousa discusses "learning windows." But doesn't the idea of "learning windows" fly in the face of the neuromyth that you bring up in your comment above? 

Like many I'm struggling with the nuances of some of the neuromyths vs what we are learning about the brain and memory making. I look forward to figuring it out more as we go. I wonder too how much my brain is a self-reinforcing engine that is having a hard time grasping new information? The backward bicycle (see link below), is really revealing in some ways about this. The narrator of the video, who must be in his thirties, proves that although it takes him weeks and weeks to learn to ride the backward bicycle, his son who is six achieves the feat in just a few days. Obviously the window is not quite as open for learning the backward bicycle when we are in our thirties. Or perhaps the narrator is having to force the window open. 

References

Sousa, D.A. (2016). How the brain learns, (5th Edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.