In 1958 My wife and I started Arkansas Industrial Electronics Co.. This gave me a legitimate reason for me to do what I love best in the world, solving problems that other people have given up on, getting to twist lots of wires, and just plain old fixing things. (Note: When people ask what I do for a living, with tongue-in-cheek I cryptically reply "I twist wires for a living" and it is the absolute truth!)

In the early eighties I became alarmed that the University of Arkansas was graduating engineers who had never had a screwdriver in their hand. I believe that being practical and engineering were one and the same and in my opinion, calling these guys engineers was a travesty. I contacted a few of the professors at the University and asked about adding some practical laboratory experiences. In a patronizing way they explained to me that this was a theoretical engineering school, whose curriculum was dictated by a national accreditation board. Also, they, the professors, didn't need any practical experience to teach the subjects, so why should the students need any, in order to graduate. Grrr.

Realizing that there was little time in college for extracurricular Lab work, Mary and I started a Science and Engineering B.S.A. Explorer Post for high school students in the basement of our home town university. Eventually we called our program Project Lab and moved out of the B.S.A. environment.

I had never thought of myself as a teacher (still don't), and I was amazed when I discovered that I was having as much fun working with these extraordinary youths as I ever had twisting wires. Over a period of years I became a advocate for searching out and enriching engineering talent wherever we could find it, and a tireless student of how best to achieve that goal. Last year I wrote an article about what "our kids" taught us, while they were having fun teaching themselves in Project Lab's non-threatening, very practical environment. The article concerns imagination, creativity, curiosity and learning.

About three years ago one of our Project Lab adult advisors (mentors) had a three year old son who was declared to have ADD. I had heard of ADD but did not have a good idea of what it meant. I only knew, that in my opinion, his son was perfect in every way. I went out that day and bought 'Driven To Distraction' by Dr. Hallowell.

Over the years we had come to the stark realization that the youth that were successful in Project Lab were somehow different from their peer group. In an effort to understand just what was going on and to aid in fine tuning our program, we studied such diverse subjects as anagrams, birth order, Johnson O'Conners aptitude testing, Meyers-Briggs personality types, right brain/left brain (I think this is a no brainer) and much, much more in a search for discovering some offshoot of psychology that would, help us characterize those youth that were being successful in our program (only four out of every ten members stayed with us for the full four years of high school). I was very curious as to why the empirical methods we had developed through trial and error seemed to work so well for the successful kids, and wanted to see if we could find the key that would make it possible to improve our methods even more.

Over the years we worked up a crude list of commonalties that seemed to spell out the differences between the youths that were successful in our program and the ones that weren't. The list didn't make much sense, was disjointed and seemed somewhat uncomplimentary to some of the most wonderful people I had ever had the pleasure of working with. I could have been knocked over with a feather when I found the same list, with even many more identifying characteristics in Dr. Hallowell's book. I had finally found the lead that we had been looking for and horrors upon horrors, the professionals who were pursuing the subject were not only calling "my kids" names but were trying to change them into the kind of kids that we had long ago given up as technically clueless. I couldn't believe it then, and I still don't. It has taken me three years to poke around with my new insight and each day gets more exciting. Because Thom Hartmann's explanation fits "my kids" perfectly, I have adopted his concept of the genetic hunter as a totally valid concept. For "my kids", the concept is seamless and one that I have become proud to identify with.

In an attempt to get feedback from science teachers as to whether we were on the right track or not, we set up a booth at the last National Science Teachers Convention. As the teachers came by the booth we asked them a few simple questions in an attempt to determine whether they were genetic hunters or farmers and asked what they thought of the idea. I have never seen such negativism towards a new idea. Our survey uncovered an interesting trend that indicates about ninety five percent of the chemistry and physics teachers were genetic farmers and ninety five percent of the biology teachers were genetic hunters. Only a few of the teachers were curious enough to pursue the subject far enough to get an idea of where we were coming from. (We really had a ball with those that did). In our local area we have conducted a limited search for teachers with genetic hunter characteristics. We had hoped that in bringing them together some synergy could be generated by their acting as a group. So far we have identified about eight teachers. Unfortunately, the project has completely stalled for reasons that I believe are related to purely hunter traits. (A few of the teachers seems to have a strong dislike of the close relationship between the genetic hunter concept and ADD. They apparently cannot stand the idea that they, in any way have any ADD characteristics and are reluctant to be part of a group that is so labeled).

I have not had much experience with youth that have had the extreme symptoms that I read about in text on ADD. I was somewhat surprised to find that a small percentage of our Project Lab youth had been identified as having ADD and even more surprised to learn that a few of those had been on prescribed drugs. We met in the evenings and apparently most of the drugs effects had worn off by the time I worked with them. Until we discovered the creative/ADD link it never occurred for me to ask them, and they never thought to mention it. Most of our early Project Lab kids were decent students and were definitely headed towards college.

A few months after discovering the ADD link several factors coincided which considerably changed our lives. The first was when the local university added automatic gates on their parking lots and charged one hundred and fifty dollars for a card to get in. This meant that our kids had to park about a quarter mile away and walk the distance with both their tool box and their project under their arms, through a wooded area which was pretty messy when it rained. As this was a no-credit course and they were all volunteers, they voted with their feet and our attendance dropped precipitously. About the same time the state of Arkansas opened a Math and Science residential high school in a town about sixty miles down the road. The lure of having a whole school of science students to work with was too great and we moved our volunteer Project Lab efforts to that school. We were there for about two years (often three days a week for about five to eight hours at a time). I was very disappointed in the overall success of our program. The young adults that joined our program were more than just outstanding, but out of three hundred students in the school, we had less than ten who were even remotely interested and only three that really made our efforts worth the time invested. It turns out that the school was populated with what I call over achievers whose sole interest was in getting good grades. They were not in the least interested in learning anything just for the fun of it. I have written a lengthy summary of what I thought about the school. While we were there we had a lot of fun tinkering with the genetic farmer/hunter concept. All of these kids were gifted and talented and most of them definitely belonged to the hunter group. Our small group very obviously had strongest hunter characteristics in the school. I often wondered if our core group's hunter characteristics was one of the main factors that kept the other youths at bay.

After two years of one-hundred and twenty miles of travel each trip, we were kind of worn out and decided to find something closer to home. For some time I had been fascinated by the thought that some of these strong hunter characteristics were to be found in the "bad" kids. (After all, I was around their age when I got crosswise with public schools and I was curious if I could use these kids to help me figure out what went wrong so many years ago). Our home town has an alternative school for junior high students that get thrown out of their regular school. I told their principal that we were interested in seeing if his youths were able to learn technical things when presented using the techniques we had learned through experience. He gave us a large school room and set aside some time in the schedule. We built tables and found lots of things to take apart and supplies to build things from. The program only ran four months, but we had school officials coming by to see how in the world we ever got Mary or Johnny or whoever to work so consistently for over two hours at a time. All we could say was that "we found out what they wanted to do and then got out of their way, they did the rest by themselves". The officials would invariably shake their heads and mumble something about "I have never seen them sit still for over five minutes at a time". It was in this school of "dumb" kids that could not keep up and/or caused trouble all of the time that I made a pivotal discovery that I now accept as the gospel. A) The kids I worked with were every bit as smart as the ones that we had worked with at the Math and Science high school!!!! B) From that experience and subsequent investigations, I have come to believe that any kid who has learned to run and talk, has all of the brains necessary to intellectually do anything they want to in life. c) The problems they are experiencing are almost wholly caused by the adults in their lives, who, through word or deed, damage them to the point that they feel un-empowered to deal with life. They withdraw or rebel. D) By my definition, every kid that we worked with was a strong genetic hunter and for the most part, their keepers (it was a sort of jail) were strong genetic farmers. The friction between the two groups was palpable. It was a rough, course group of kids like none we had ever before experienced, but we learned to enjoy each other and I certainly came to appreciate how far these kids had to come to meet us half way. They were all busy at some hands-on science project that they had chosen from a pool of projects. They were working at such things as making printed circuit boards or motors, hooking parts together to see what they would do, learning how to use meters and oscilloscopes, learning about Morse code, running our beginner experiments on AC and DC circuits, and of course thoroughly enjoying taking things apart. None of them had ever done any of these things before and initially had no idea how to get started. The hardest part was to get them to initiate their own action. They were all accustomed to waiting to be told exactly what to do, how to do it and when to do it which is totally backwards to our Project Lab philosophy.

Without a doubt the most fun we have had was during our latest adventure which took place in a private elementary school. For some time we had been told that we needed to get youth started at an earlier age but for one reason or another we never got around to it. After a short conversation with the headmaster of this school we were invited to come and try our ideas out on some of his kids. I had enjoyed the high school bunch because they had some life experiences that I could draw parallels from and most of them had completed some form of science course before we got them. They certainly had had algebra and usually had pretty good math skills. All of which help in hands-on project building. What would we do with second graders? I never should have worried. We took our high school program to these youngsters almost intact and they loved it. In fact I think that they did better work than almost any student to date. Their enthusiasm was much greater, they caught on much faster, and their intellectual learning rate was as good as any teenager I have ever worked with. I was startled at how easily they learned complex electric circuit concepts and the use of all manor of tools. I was pleased to see that at this age there was little difference between the girls and the boys. They did so well that if I believed in such things, I would say that all of these kids were engineers in a prior life. Our biggest problem was that these kids had not developed good interpersonal skills and they often had squabbles over who was going to get to use what tool first or who was going to take a particular piece of equipment apart. This kind of argument was almost music when compared to the high school students arguing over who was going to HAVE to take something apart. We were fortunate to have had the opportunity to initially work with a much larger group than we ended up with. By some magical formulae that we have noticed before, the genetic hunter kids gravitated towards our program and the genetic farmers went away. After a few weeks, there was little question who would be in our permanent group. After working with these hunter kids, I am even more convinced that a different school system is necessary for them to reach their full potential. They will never be completely successful in the farmer schools as they are now operated. Note: The most outstanding boy in our program was failing the second grade and driving his teachers crazy. He was taking Ritalin at the beginning of school and at noon in an effort to keep him under control. by three o'clock (about the time of our arrival) we were told that most of the drug would have worn off and that we would not be able to do any thing with him. SURPRISE: He did better work than everyone except an unusually special young lady who was neck and neck with him. He stayed on task (a term I have come to despise) for hours on end, looking up only to ask questions and make succinct observations. The school officials could not believe it was the same kid. I am hard pressed to describe the emotions that I had when after each session, on his way out, he would hug me and in his own fashion, say how much fun he had had. That is what education should be, and how a kid should feel about it. Why is his school having to drug him just to get him to sit still?

Well, maybe that will explain how I have gotten so bent out of shape about what is happening to "my kids". The real question is; can I really see something that seems to be invisible to almost every one else? I certainly feel uncomfortable in this position. It makes me want to go somewhere and hide, but that's not the usual way that I react to tough problems. My nature is to dig in and keep plowing forward with all of my impulsiveness working overtime. However, I am meeting with such a solid wall of resistance from all of the experts, including a relative who is specializing in the field (he won't even return my calls) that I wonder just how much good I am doing or will be able to do as a single voice that has no degrees or expert status to wave about and open doors. The only thing of which I am certain is that it will be very hard to go back to just twisting wires after my soul has been touched by the lives of such remarkable people as "my kids"!