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It also may prove how effective Dr. Lynda Thompson's modified and computerized biofeedback technique can be in helping underachieving, easily distracted, often hyperactive students turn their learning lives around.

"Now I can do the grunt work," Sam told Thompson, a psychologist, after he'd completed the recommended 40 hours of what amounts to brain training work at Thompson's ADD Centre.
 

Grunt work is what the rest of us might call homework, or study assignments, in which the student must focus and concentrate to learn. And with heightened competition for entrance into independent schools, good universities and cutting-edge programs of study, students have to bear down and work hard just to get access to the place where they can learn how to get what they want out of their lives.

There's a need, then, for schools that elevate and motivate as well as educate.

There's a need for places like Thompson's two ADD Centres - one in Mississauga, Ontario, the other in Toronto - as well as the Chisholm Academy, a special needs school, in Oakville, Ontario, and both Oxford Learning Centres owned and operated by Stephen Lewis of Toronto, who has been involved in education for years and is a former chair of the Children's Aid Society Foundation.

There are nearly 50 Oxford Learning Centres across Canada, but when the first one was opened 15 years ago in London, Ontario, by Dr. Nick Whitehead, whose research showed him children could be taught to learn once their strengths and weaknesses were pinpointed, it was to offer remedial work for students with learning disabilities or with Attention Deficit Disorders.

"Then we realized these programs could help kids at any level," Lewis says.

These days, half of the students at his centres in Thornhill, Ontario, and Toronto are there for enrichment programs, the other half for remedial work. Every summer, students sign on for summer classes specifically to work up their math and/or study skills so they can sit private-school entry examinations in the fall - and come out with the winners.

"Public schools are often one grade behind the independent schools, at minimum, especially in the younger grades," Lewis says. Especially when it comes to math. "We' re not privy to the actual testing materials, of course, but a lot of kids going into Grade 7 haven't done any testing before. They're under a lot of pressure. We can see them through mock exams and show them they have the skills," he says.

At Oxford Learning Centres, children are assessed according to their learning styles - the way they process information, be it visually or through auditory channels. They are also tested to determine their attention and concentration skills, vocabulary, problem-solving ability, critical thinking and abstract thinking.

Learning time management and organizational skills are also crucial, Lewis says, because there's often a bigger workload in private schools, which can overwhelm students.

"For two hours a week, we can provide an additional educational layer for children," he says.

Another remedial reading clinic that began in a teacher's basement in 1970 has also grown into something much more. The Chisholm Academy is actually several schools in one now - for 200 students it's after-school tutorials, for others it's individualized high-school credits and now it's also a full-time private high school for students needing smaller classes and individualized programs.

According to Dr. Howard Bernstein, a clinical and educational psychologist who is the owner and director of Chisholm Academy, 12 private schools operate in Oakville, a lakeside community just west of Toronto.

"This is an upwardly mobile culture where education is a priority," he says.

And that's why he believes Chisholm's custom-written study program, based on an extensive psychological assessment of each student, is so popular.

"We do more assessments than the whole of the Halton Region school board," he says. The school believes in pinpointing a learning problem, then solving it with remedial work - "as opposed to pounding it into a student," Bernstein adds.

All of Lynda Thompson's students have learning disabilities - at least they do when they first come to one of her ADD Centres. What she and her husband, Michael, a retired medical doctor, teach the students is how to learn by monitoring their brainwaves while they are being coached or tutored.

The brainwaves are transposed onto a computer, which gives audio and visual feedback. For younger students, it seems like a game. When a child is concentrating or focusing - and therefore learning -the computer screen might show a fish moving through a maze. When the child's attention wanders, the fish gets stuck.

"It really is exercising the brain, that is the best analogy," says Lynda Thompson. Also effective is her likening it to learning to ride a bicycle - which just about anybody can train himself or herself to do and which, of course, is a skill nobody ever forgets.

"You can't teach a person to concentrate, otherwise I wouldn't have to monitor their brainwaves," she says. "They have to try it and then get the reinforcement when they're getting it right and then their brains learn."

There's now 25 years of research on this neurofeedback technique, much of it done by Dr. Joel Lubar of Tennessee. In Canada, the University of Alberta in Edmonton has led the way. Thompson opened her Mississauga centre in '93 and her students range in age from 4 to 63.

She says many of them are bright and very creative underachievers who pay attention to things they're interested in, but tune out teachers, can't settle down to complete homework and generally come across as lazy and unmotivated.

"Even when parents have paid big bucks for a private school because they want their children to have smaller classes and more attention, the teachers usually say the children have trouble paying attention," Thompson says.

The brainwaves of these children aren't abnormal, but immature. The good news is that the biofeedback training gives the brainwaves a nudge in the direction in which they should have been going. Even better news is that the results hold, Thompson says, and many hyperactive or ADD children, like Sam, can and do go on to successful careers at universities. And beyond.

Sports coaches are often among the first to notice a change in the child, Thompson says, because being able to pay attention is crucial in sports, especially team sports. But the families aren't far behind.

"One grandparent said he always intended to pay for his grandson's university, but if he didn't buy him the training, he was never going to make it," Thompson says. "And a father said that this was a bargain. "Just think of what his first car crash would have cost me if I hadn't sent him here," he said."