It was the first day of school. I was fresh out of my teacher training program and not a single class had prepared me for what I was about to see and do.

The school was a junior high, a middle school of about 2,000 seventh, eighth and ninth graders. It was in the middle of a Los Angeles ghetto section and the school seemed more like a prison. There were security guards with obvious weapons attached to their bodies and all I knew for sure was that the male students were much taller and bigger than I was. Nobody had mentioned this fact during my teacher education classes.

I had applied for this job because I loved kids and wanted to teach them how to read. I had been told that most of the students were reading several years below grade level and progress was very slow. The principal gave me a job during my interview (I'm sure she was desperate) and promptly assigned me five reading classes of 30 students each. This meant that I would see 150 students a day who were reading around the second, third and fourth grade level even though they were in junior high school. And, oh yes. Most of my students belonged to three major street gangs - 18th Street, Bloods and Crypts.

If ever there was a place where all the odds were stacked against these students learning anything -- this was it. In fact, I immediately began to doubt everything about myself and whatever abilities I might have thought I had. How could I ever teach anyone anything - let alone reading? Everyone seemed to have an endless list of reasons why these kids were not reading. They had a bad home life, they lived in the streets, they spoke another language, their parents did not care, and the rival gangs would kill them if they so much as walked on the wrong turf.

On that first day, the placement testing began in the Reading Department. The policy was to test all students and place them into classes of the same ability levels. I tested them for days, until all of us were exhausted.

On the final testing day, I watched one young man whose name was Angel, simply fill in bubbles randomly on the scoring sheet, without even reading the questions. He looked like the kind of person who had given up on school years ago. And from what I was told, school had certainly given up on him. I wondered how many Angels I had missed in the days before that. At the end of the period, I asked him to stay a minute after the other kids had left.

Angel glared down at me, all six feet, two inches of him. He was nearly a foot taller than I was and very angry looking. All the other teachers had told me to never smile during the first month or the kids would think I was soft. I looked up at Angel - and I smiled. (I forgot my first lesson!)

"You look really smart to me (I was sure he thought I was mentally 'out to lunch') and I noticed that you just marked any answers on the sheet without reading the questions.  I promise not to tell any of your friends if you stay after school and take this test again. I am sure you could be in any reading group you choose if you spend a few minutes retaking the test. Here, I'll just throw this one away and no one will ever know.

Angel stared at me and turned as if he were going to leave. But then, he turned around and said he'd come back after school, but made it very clear that none of his friends were to know.

I did not know if I had made a mistake (what if Angel could not read at all?) and I was uneasy all day. But, no matter what, I felt that Angel deserved a second chance. School was clearly a place where he was lost and I wanted to help change that for him. I knew if I could reach him in some special way and provide another chance to show what he did know, that he might actually want to be here everyday. At lunch, I asked some of the other teachers about him and was not surprised to learn that he had been in nothing but trouble since coming to the junior high.

Angel did show up after school and I gave him the test again. This time, he did read the questions and filled in all the bubbles. I scored his test on the scantron machine while he waited and then told him excitedly that he made a perfect score. He gave me the strangest look, mostly disbelief, and we went through the answers one by one to prove to him that he'd made 100%. I told him that he would be in my highest reading group and asked if he would help me with the rest of the class. In a very few words, he agreed and left.

What I did not say to Angel was that my highest group was achieving around the 4th grade level. I knew that Angel needed to learn to believe in himself and develop the confidence in his ability to succeed throughout the coming years if we were to keep him in school and hopefully guide him in a more positive direction. Angel was like so many other students in the school who not only were never tested to determine whether they had the visual skills needed to be able to read, but had been passed on from grade to grade because there seemed to be no other options. Helping him to become a leader in school might make the difference between success and failure for him.

I soon learned that Angel was one of the leaders in the 18th Street Gang. However, he also turned out to be the guardian angel I would need during my first year at the junior high. He kept me going (and unharmed) more than once and taught me more about kids and life than any book ever could have. He inspired me to continue when times got very rough and helped me form a foundation for what teaching truly means.

Only God knows how many Angels we lose every day (our student drop-out rates are staggering) and how many Angels never get the chance to succeed in the one place that we insist they go to day after day. We have scored them and ranked them and maybe even scared them - and all of us have lost. Millions of their testing scores are lower every year and our prison population continues to grow. In a system which requires mastery of written tests, our students must be given the skills they need to master these tests or the progress we say we want will be greatly hindered.

None of us has made the grade when our children fail. Could it be that our fundamental teaching, learning and testing process needs to change? Maybe we've been looking at the wrong standards - those of student measurements, instead of how we teach and how we measure our own ability to open the gifted child in each of our students. If our system chooses not to change, we must at the very least show all our students "how to learn" and teach them strategies to successfully take all of our required tests.

Angel gave me a second chance to truly evaluate what teaching and learning is all about. I began to have many questions about a system which sorts and categorizes children based on numbers. Angel was not a number rotating through the revolving door of school and he helped me look beyond the 'test results' and into the heart of who a child really is. He truly inspired me to help every child discover new ways to master what is asked of them in school because that would help them understand that their grades are not who they really are.

I thank you forever, Angel, wherever you might be ... for teaching me about the souls of the kids who school and society have given up on. You taught me that when given a second chance, every child can succeed. Angel did succeed and in the two years he attended the junior high, he raised his reading grade level by nearly four years.

This book is for all the gifted Angels, disguised as "at risk, learning disabled, attention deficit disordered, dyslexic, below grade level, not up to potential" or for any other reason just not making the grade in our schools. There are so many ways to help you radiate 'success' and I pray we do whatever it takes to reach you.

Second chances for our children and second chances for teachers and parents to help every child succeed in our schools. On these pages you will find a new model of learning and a fresh start for the millions of students who happen to learn very differently from how they are tested in school.

The children in our schools have an extraordinary capacity to learn in many different styles. They may learn through their visual sense by seeing, their auditory sense by hearing or their physical sense using a hands on approach. Yet, when it comes to assessing that learning, most schools limit their testing format to just one of those styles.

The traditional, written tests that most schools give to measure student progress, cater to students with strong visual learning traits. Students who learn and think best in pictures form the associations needed to quickly and accurately retrieve information for their written tests. These students have a natural learning strength which matches the school's highly visual learning and testing environment. They easily make images from the words they hear and read, they are usually neat and organized, they take notes well and their mental images rapidly trigger the words they need during a written test.

Students who prefer to learn in a more visual style tend to have higher grades and test scores that reflect the match between their learning and testing style.

There are, however, millions of students who prefer to learn in other styles, such as auditory or kinesthetic. For these students a mis-match occurs between how they learn, store and retrieve information and the way in which they are required to output what they have learned - on written tests. These written tests may take the form of multiple choice, short answer, essay or standardized, and the learning and memory processes required to answer the questions are quite similar.

Students who have stored the material they have learned in styles which are not aligned with the type of test they are taking often find they either cannot translate what they know into written form or retrieve the information quickly enough to form their answers.

When they attempt to use an auditory or kinesthetic modality to retrieve and write down information for these tests, they are often frustrated and hindered in their efforts due to the mis-match involved.

This mis-match will not allow them to easily 'show what they know' and heavily contributes to their lower grades and declining test scores nationwide.

My son, J.P., is a wonderful example of a person who prefers to learn in a single style and who often struggles to convert his knowledge into writing. He is a true kinesthetic learner and seems to love his tactile sense over all others. He needs to move around nearly all the time, doesn't naturally make the pictures in his mind to 'see' what organization looks like and his crumpled papers generally reflect that he has touched and made contact with the material on them.

When allowed to demonstrate his understanding of new material in a hands-on form, he performs quite well. One year he built an excellent model showing how the plates of the earth shift during an earthquake. He placed two paper 'plates' on top of his amplifier and played a low base sound on his electric guitar. The plates separated due to the vibration and it easily demonstrated how the plates move during an earthquake. Although he got an A on his demonstration, he could not find the correct words to describe the process and answer questions on it for the written test. He received an overall grade of C on the test, even though his teacher was certain he 'knew' the information.

While his memory of what was learned was stored in one location of his brain, J.P. was not able to gain access to it and convert it into words for the written test. For all practical purposes, he had only a 'physical sense' of the information and had not linked it to the pictures and associations to trigger the 'words' he needed to pass the written test.

When a child uses single input pathways, such as bodily-kinesthetic, to learn and store new information, the child may not be able to convert his or her physical, experiential knowledge into writing during traditional testing. It is not a function of not knowing the information but not knowing how to access and translate the information to be able to write it down.

While J.P. was allowed to use his learning preference to demonstrate his knowledge of the shifting earthquake plates, he did not acquire or store the same knowledge using other, more visual brain pathways that would have allowed him to earn a better grade on his written test which contained multiple choice, short answer and essay type questions.

J.P.'s experience is an example of a conflict between how students learn and how they are tested. This conflict also creates a serious dilemma for teachers.

For many years, teachers have been trained in a theory known as Multiple Intelligence (MI) teaching. The theory of multiple intelligences was developed in the early 1980's by Dr. Howard Gardner who expanded upon the original and groundbreaking work of Dr. J.P. Guilford's which is known as the Structure of Intellect (SOI) model.

MI teaching and its proponents advocate identifying and teaching to a child's learning strengths. Teachers are taught to design different types of lesson plans for 8 or more types of intelligences and allow students assignment options tailored to their preferred learning strength. Problems arise for both teachers and students when, in spite of being trained to teach to many intelligences, most districts still require single modality, written and standardized tests to be the primary measurement for student progress. And today, teachers are being held accountable for those test results.

For all practical purposes, multiple intelligence teaching and single modality testing places both students and teachers in a significant quandry. Teaching to a child's strengths can actually limit a child's access to other learning style techniques and even create lower grades when students must take written tests to measure their progress. If a child's preferred learning strength does not correspond directly with the testing method of choice, that child may suffer needlessly with low grades and low self-esteem.

To complicate matters, neither school districts nor employers have (nor likely will) create tests suited to their students' or employees preferred learning styles.

Fortunately, there is much new brain research available than when the model of teaching to a child's strengths first emerged. By understanding more of the how the brain works, the model of multiple intelligence teaching can be expanded upon so that students can learn how to obtain better grades as well as higher test results.

Learning vs. Testing was written to dissolve the dilemma that both teachers and students face and solve the mis-match between learning and testing styles. It will give you unique and practical strategies to help students learn "how to learn" and more closely match the way in which they will be assessed.

This book is intended to help raise student grades and test scores in reading, spelling, math facts, vocabulary and other subject areas. The strategies can be used throughout the curriculum and will transform your teaching as well how your students learn.

You will find that it bridges the gap between how many students learn and how they are tested. These strategies are meant to give new found hope to struggling students who want to raise their grades as well as teachers who want to raise test scores to meet higher standards, the answers they have been looking for.

The strategies you will find in this book are solidly based on over 25 years of research, practice and experience with students of all ages. The information combines the best available scientific information from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, medicine, psychiatry, optometry, environmental medicine and several instructional models.

The methods in this book form a program I call A.C.E.S., Accelerating Children's Excellence in School. The strategies offered here are designed to bring out the best in very student and show them new ways of accelerating their success.

During the past 12 years, teachers attending my teacher education classes or taking my courses on video, have applied these strategies in their own classrooms and documented their students' pre and post test progress. Using these techniques, they have successfully raised the grades of over 95% of their students.

As long as grades remain the yardstick by which teachers and children are measured, I believe our students deserve to receive the knowledge and strategies they need to achieve excellent marks. Devoting just a brief course at the beginning of each school year on "how to learn and how to test" methods would result in students learning skills they need to continue to learn for a lifetime.

The remaining sections continue with specific "how to" strategies for every child.