Chapter 4

MAPS . . . Showing Where Others Can Go before Being Told

imageThe class laughed out loud, and many couldn’t stop for several minutes. The depiction of “squirrel!” from the movie Up was more than it seemed many of them could bear, and yet it was also frighteningly accurate.

Cybil began to think about her son Ben and his short attention span. She wondered if he, too, suffered from “squirrel moments.” One minute he was talking about saving animals, another minute he was watching the cartoons, and the next he would be showing his dad the cool leaf he found on the ground at school. It was hard to keep track of his pinball-machine-like brain.

If what the trainer was saying was accurate, Cybil had a little Entertainer on her hands. She wondered if his teacher had this type of information. A few days earlier, Ben’s teacher called and suggested that Ben be tested for ADD and that he possibly needed medication. Cybil’s first thought was that this was a difficult teacher who wanted to medicate her son because she didn’t know how to teach him. She realized now that she hadn’t had any issues when Ben was in the first grade because that teacher had seemingly been a Commander, like Cybil, and they had easily seen eye to eye. This teacher was not cut from that cloth. Until today, their differences had led Cybil to believe the teacher was difficult.

It was becoming clear to her that Commander ...

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