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Mingh Whitfield's picture

All About Me

I'm Mingh Whitfield.  I teach Pre-K/K at Lansdowne Friends School.  To see a picture of my school, go to http://www.lansdownefriendsschool.org/photo_album/LFSPhotoAlbum/images/01_group.jpg

I graduated from Community College of Philadelphia and Saint Joseph's University.  So, I have degrees in early childhood education and liberal arts-concentrating in english, theology, and history.

I am also a wife and mother.  My daughter is eight and my son is two.

This is my second experience at a Bryn Mawr College Institute.  This is what I looked like last year at Science and a Sense of Place: 

 

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Comments

Deborah Hazen's picture

Way to Go!

Hey Mingh,

Looks like you are having another great experience at BMC. I can't wait to see what new insights into the working brain you discover.

So, a dear friend of mine just completed a summer camp assignment for kids with health problems. She came out of the experience with a rather interesting notion. She tells me that she no longer believes that ADHD is real--rather that it is a label for behavior that adults find to be inconvenient to their current purpose and a direct result of kids not having an opportunity to burn energy through play. She came up with this interesting basketball analogy. It goes like this. You dribble a basketball and it both bounces back to your hand and makes a sound (think energy here too). You can't bounce a basketball and expect the energy to bring it back to your hand without a noise---likewise, you cannot expect a child to sit quietly in a classroom, directing all of their energy only into their pencil. So, what do you think? Does she have something here? Are you learning anything at BMC that would speak to whether or not ADHD is for real and if it is---is it a malady or the product of a "normally" functioning brain placed in a very "abnormal" environment?

Deb