Comment by brightball

Comment by brightball 2 days ago

Well, it wasn't a threat. He knew exactly what he'd been struggling with from 1st grade on (officially minor ADHD) and we were trying really hard to keep him off of medication. Since the program has finished he's asked to do it again several times (but we haven't because it's expensive). I've thought about teaching him programming by having him build his own clock trainer.

It's hard to explain to random people on the internet but here's the difference we saw.

- Went from doing homework everyday after school until 10pm to always being done by 6pm at the latest.

- Went from forgetting to turn in that same homework and sometimes major assignments frequently to rarely. 7th grade year he had over 20 zero's for assignments that he did and simply kept forgetting to turn in. 8th grade year he forgot two homeworks all year.

- Went from years of extreme disorganization to...still disorganized but a significant improvement.

- Went from uncertainty about whether he was going to be able to keep up with the workload in high school to, for lack of a better way of saying it, a star student. Teacher reports changed. GPA is a 3.7 (he's in 11th grade now). Juggling seasonal sports, Scouts, school, clubs, social life, honors/AP classes with no assistance from us at all.

It's hard for people to understand when you watch the same patterns and struggles for 6 or 7 years and then they just stop being a struggle. That 7th grade year, all that my wife and I did after we got home from work was try to make sure he would get his work done. It consumed our life to the point that, after me trying to convince my wife that this could help (because she was very skeptical too) that it was bad enough that she finally agreed it was worth a shot.

He and I were actually going to fly across the country to stay in Seattle for 7 weeks to have him do the program in person because I didn't think he would be able to pay attention to the virtual. The hotel that we had booked a couple of blocks from the school cancelled our reservation due to renovations and we ended up pivoting to the virtual program at the last minute. He did surprisingly well in the remote class format. The hotel was also close to Microsoft's campus and I got the impression that Microsoft had paid them to renovate to prepare for a lot of people they were going to have in town.

komali2 2 days ago

Well that is interesting and if you had results then that's all that matters for your family of course.

But sorry to clarify I'm still hung up on the "8 handed clock" thing - what does that mean? What information is displayed on the clocks other than hours, minutes, and seconds?

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brightball 2 days ago

I didn’t sit in on it so I can’t say for sure. My son got up to the 2nd version of the 6 handed clock. You have to have perfect accuracy within a certain amount of time to advance to the next tier.
Even with the 6 handed I don’t remember exactly what each was though. I asked Grok and this is what it said.
> In the Arrowsmith Program’s Cognitive Intensive Program (CIP), the primary exercise is the Symbol Relations exercise, commonly known as “Clocks.” This involves reading analog clock faces that progress from 2 hands to up to 8 (or sometimes more) hands. Each hand on the clock represents a separate time (an independent position pointing to a specific hour/minute on the clock face). Participants must interpret the positions of all hands simultaneously, understand the relationships between them (e.g., angles, relative positions, and sequences), and record the times accurately under time pressure. The multiple hands do not represent different concepts symbolically (like hours, minutes, seconds); instead, they increase cognitive load to train the brain’s ability to process and relate multiple pieces of information at once. This strengthens the Symbol Relations cognitive function, which supports logical reasoning, comprehension, seeing connections between ideas, cause-and-effect understanding, and abstract thinking. Progression adds more hands as mastery is achieved, making the task more complex to build capacity in handling interrelated symbols and concepts. The CIP focuses intensively on this exercise to accelerate improvements in reasoning, processing speed, and related skills.

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