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How fortunate I was to have parents who were avid readers, lovers of music and the arts, disciplinarians, and folks who relished a good laugh. They taught me to respect others, implanted a thirst for knowledge, made sure I developed a strong work ethic and sense of responsibility, and perhaps most important, shared their love of life and laughter.

A funny thing happened to me on the way to a Ph.D. I read an article about an Israeli psychologist that changed the way I thought about testing and teaching students. In the 1980‘s Dr. Reuven Feuerstein conducted seminars in the United States at Vanderbilt and the University of California at Riverside. Whenever possible, I was in attendance. My hero, it turned out, looked just like a Jewish Colonel Sanders, a lovable Santa figure who was deadly serious about “cognitive modifiability."

Dr. Feuerstein’s work is based on the theory that, “Intelligence is not fixed, but rather modifiable.” He researched, proved, and taught that a person’s IQ, their cognitive skills, their brain power, their set of smarts could change. We might all be born with a fixed “IQ ceiling”, but we typically use only a small portion of our intellectual capabilities. We can learn to be smarter!

In the late 1940‘s, Dr. Feuerstein, a holocaust survivor, helped establish schools in the new state of Israel for children coming from concentration camps. Following the discipline of any competent school psychologist, he administered IQ and achievement tests to determine each child’s cognitive and academic levels. Their IQ scores fell in a seemingly hopeless category, the class of the uneducable.

Feuerstein knew about life in a concentration camp. Daily doses of humiliation, starvation, cruelty, and lack of choice about anything and everything. He knew these children weren’t all hopelessly retarded. The IQ tests didn’t take into consideration the horrific experiences they lived through. He devised a way to test “potential” for learning. His new method unveiled a child’s capabilities, their ability to acquire new skills. Over the years, that led to creating materials for teaching thinking skills.

I came home from each seminar on fire with new methods for testing and teaching our students experiencing learning problems. Well-meaning teachers, counselors, and parents tended to lump kids into categories and to lower expectations for limited thinkers. Those educators were about to be knocked off their perch and fed a plate of crow. I became a Feuerstein disciple, a firm believer thinking skills were teachable.

Feuerstein's work guided me on a fascinating road of discovery, research, and heartwarming human success. This space will serve as a blog, updated every few months with continuing information about Dr. Feuerstein’s work, thoughts on parenting, lessons I learned from students, my kids, and grandkids, along with humorous stories from teachers and parents. Ramblings of a retired school psychologist.