A New Take on Attention Disorder
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a gift not an illness, argues Lara Honos-Webb, assistant professor in SCU’s counseling psychology department, in her new book, The Gift of ADHD: How to Transform Your Child’s Problems into Strengths (New Harbinger Publications, March 2005, $14.95). Instead of focusing on the problems associated with the condition (including limited attention span and difficulty memorizing facts and figures), Honos-Webb encourages parents to instead look on the bright side. Children with ADHD are creative, intuitive, and imaginative, and when parents recognize and encourage those gifts, the child is better able to cope with the deficits. She also argues that ADHD is overdiagnosed, and that it is easier and less expensive to put a child on Ritalin than it is to work to nurture that child’s gifts.
Honos-Webb says the book came out of her experience teaching at SCU. “I was inspired to write the book by my perception that students with ADHD that I worked closely with seemed to have many gifts to offer that were not being tapped into by standard methods of assessing academic performance,” she explains. “For example, students with this diagnosis often would not do well in my classes on tests, but their insights would often give me cause to think about the material I was teaching in ways I had never thought of before.”
“Differences in the classroom do not mean that a person has a deficit or disorder,” adds Honos-Webb. “Educators need to look for the gifts that are evident and focus on and foster those gifts…If we focus on deficits and disorders, we risk having students live down to those expectations.”
The book has received extensive national media coverage, including articles in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly. For more information on Honos-Webb, including an extensive interview, visit
A Run to the Top
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini ’88 reached No. 1 on the New York Times paperback fiction bestseller list in March and has been on the list for more than 30 weeks. In an interview in the winter 2003 issue of SCM, Hosseini said that one of the best parts of his book tours has been hearing from SCU classmates. Hosseini’s brothers, Walid ’89 and Daoud ’95, are also graduates, as is a cousin, Mariam Hosseini ’00. For more information, visit www.kiterunner.com.
On Cumberland
When we go to the island, I’m a native salvaging ingots and iron bells from the wreck, kid Caliban in poncho and sandals.
We might have set driftwood and weeds into a quick mosaic, or buried my brother up to his eyes
in the sand, starfish hardening into their own caskets at his feet so that he could be born again
from mud and sawgrass.
Coastline battered by memory — the steel baron’s fire-ruined manor was our refuge from a storm even the wild horses couldn’t weather.
The first sailors hurricaned on this risen Atlantis covered native women in moss woven into a delicate mail for decency’s sake, bartered deerskin for mirrors which warriors wore like medals or garlands around their necks.
Imagine only seeing yourself in the dark pupils of your mother as she tethers your hair in ragged linen, then the hammered tin confusion of a separate self.
From Cottonlandia, by Rebecca Black, who won the 2004 Juniper Prize for Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Press. Black is a lecturer in English at SCU.