Thomas Armstrong
I am the author of 20 books, including my latest book Childless. This is my debut novel. It's about a childless child psychologist who tries to foil a government plot to identify childhood as a medical disorder and then to eliminate it from the human genome in America. It's available at: https://amzn.to/3dBP0IY.
My other books include: The Myth of the ADHD Child, The Power of Neurodiversity, 7 Kinds of Smart, Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom, and The Power of the Adolescent Brain. I've also written for Family Circle, Ladies Home Journal, and the AMA Journal of Ethics.
I see myself as a reader as much as, or even more than, a writer. Some of the books which I've enjoyed recently include Joseph and His Sons by Thomas Mann, The Story of the Stone/Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin, the complete Arabian Nights (3 volumes), translated by Malcolm C. Lyons, The Studs Lonigan Trilogy by James T. Farrell, and From Here to Eternity by James Jones.
Beyond literature and writing, my hobbies and pursuits include improvising on the piano, doing mindfulness meditation, watching great movies on The Criterion Channel, doing yoga, and cooking Mediterranean cuisine.
My next project will be a historical novel about a Buddhist monk who gets kicked out of his sangha in 9th century (C.E.) Bactria (Central Asia), and then gets picked up by a Viking longship in the Caspian Sea and spirited away to Iceland. It's going to be called Buddhamitra's Saga. I've loved both the nature and the culture in Iceland, including those great medieval sagas. I decided that this novel belongs in a new genre that I'd call screwball historical narrative (it's a hysterical narrative).
Married for twenty-five years, and now divorced, I live in a cute Victorian style home on a hill in Sonoma County, California with my dog Daisy.
“I believe that all genial classrooms share at least five characteristics that guide their instruction regardless of content or grade level. These characteristics are (1) freedom to choose, (2) open-ended exploration, (3) freedom from judgment, (4) honoring every student's experience, and (5) belief in every student's genius.”
“A person walking into a genial classroom knows almost at once that it is a place dedicated to the celebration of learning and young minds; a cognitive greenhouse, so to speak, that honors and celebrates the capacities of each and every student. In a genial classroom, there are frequent outbursts of energy representing students' exuberance in discovering something new, in making novel connections, in confronting and overcoming challenges, in being surprised or delighted, intrigued or mystified, and indignant or outspoken about the ideas and materials being presented.”
“Children and adolescents, being relatively new to life, are naturally creative because they haven't been brainwashed, so to speak, by the conventional attitudes of society. Consequently, students are always coming up with novel images, words, and actions that my delight, enlighten, or inspire adults....Creativity has not been the subject of intense focus, extensive research, or high levels of funding in American education.”
“The word creativity is closely linked to the word genius, since both words have the root meaning 'to give birth.' Essentially, creativity designates the capacity to give birth to new ways of looking at things, the ability to make novel connections between disparate things, and the knack for seeing things that might be missed by the typical way of viewing life.”
“We want to assist [students] in finding their inner genius and support them in guiding it into pathways that can lead to personal fulfillment and to the benefit of those around them.”
“From the standpoint of education, genius means essentially 'giving birth to the joy in learning.' I'd like to suggest that this is the central task of all educators. It is the genius of the student that is the driving force behind all learning. Before educators take on any of the other important issues in learning, they must first have a thorough understanding of what lies at the core of each student's intrinsic motivation to learn, and that motivation originates in each student's genius.”