Dalton: Pay attention

DALTON, Ga. — High school students sip coffee while dissecting frogs.

It’s not the opening scene of a National Lampoon movie but a snippet from Billie Abney’s anatomy class at Southeast Whitfield High School.

Dr. Abney has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and she gets bored — and so do her students. When that boredom sets in, she often says it’s time for a French vanilla coffee break. Although she prefers hot tea, she keeps coffee brewing in class to give students a jolt to stay interested in the lesson.

Now in her late 50s, Dr. Abney said her ADHD wasn’t diagnosed when she was young. She spent a lot of time in the principal’s office for being too hyperactive or not finishing her work. She still calls herself “scattered but smart.”

“I’m now at that age in my life where things are declining and my mind’s a little more scattered, so I have to use certain techniques to keep myself focused,” she said. “It benefits me because I know when I get bored the students are getting bored.”

In her classes, students use YouTube during their lessons. Sometimes they go outside and draw on the sidewalk. They might shift topics often or bounce quickly between microscopes and textbooks and then back again.

“It’s a different type of more active learning,” Dr. Abney said.

She also creates audio downloads of some of her lessons so students can put the information on their MP3 players and listen when they choose.t

Javier Tactillo, 17, a junior, said Dr. Abney focuses on a student’s strengths, be it auditory, visual or hands-on learning.

Mr. Tactillo said he enjoys the dissections in her class and the texting game where students text vocabulary words to one another on cell phones.

“She’s a very charismatic person,” Javier said. “Everybody likes Ms. Abney.”

A chiropractor for 20 years, Dr. Abney has taught school for three years. She said she’s learned a lot from her fellow Southeast Whitfield teachers and appreciates how principal Alan Long and her other bosses offer some leeway.

“A lot of school systems would not promote and allow teachers to do what we’re doing with these new and innovative techniques,” she said.

One such technique is Skype, an Internet-based video chat program that allows students to converse with Dr. Abney when she’s traveling — and she does travel.

Dr. Abney often assists her sister, Chris Dendy, a world-renowned speaker on ADD and ADHD who lectures across the United States and abroad and has written about half a dozen books on the disorder.

The two women tag-team the presentations — one sister as an expert, the other an expert through self-experience.

The sibling duo recently traveled to a conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, sponsored by the ADHD Support Group of Saudi Arabia in conjunction with The King Faisal Hospital of Riyadh.

“I was a little nervous about Saudi Arabia,” Dr. Abney said. “ But people are the same everywhere, just trying to raise their families in the best way possible. The people of Saudi Arabia are the kindest and most giving people.”

During that visit, Dr. Abney said she “spoke to teachers, physicians, parents of ADHD children, as well as a princess or two.”