I was thinking this morning about my tears last night and reminded myself that I know Jack will be fine in the long run. In fact, he'll be more than fine. He is very smart and has an incredible ability to learn through observations. He'll be able to use this, I'm sure, to fulfill many dreams and aspirations he may have.
I, of course, am Jack's mother. Watching your child struggle - even when they continue to be positive about the world and their possibilities in it - is hard. Hard beyond explanation.
I have urgency in my concern for one reason and one reason only. I never want Jack to loose his positive attitude. He literally gets excited to tackle reading and writing. He understands he works differently and it hasn't gotten the best of it. And I will continue to encourage him, support him, find him the right place to learn, and find him the best help - all to protect his outlook and keep him safe.
Yet, keeping him safe doesn't mean sheltering him. It means providing him with a home environment and learning environment where he can experience achievements and gain the self-assurance he needs to deal with what can be a very cruel world... and then letting him go into the world armed to survive, armed to thrive!
Besides a mother, I am also a little girl who knows what it can be like.
When my friend first gave me the book, Upside Down Brilliance: The Visual Spatial Learner by Linda Silvermon. It came with a message from his wife. She said, Don't be surprised if as you read this book you find yourself crying hysterically because you finally understand yourself... and you think about what your life could have been like if someone had this book to read when you were a child.
I thought how silly. Why would I cry? People often get too emotional over things they have no control over. No me, I'm logical.
I cried. Although not hysterically, I did cry pretty darn hard. I can actually bring tears to my eyes just thinking about it today. Just thinking about the possibilities I missed by living in a world that wasn't made for me... or more specifically, a school system that wasn't ready yet for children like me.
There are two illustrations in the book that demonstrate the differences between an visual-spatial learner and how a auditory-sequential learner would think through getting their kids ready for school. When Dave saw it he said, Oh my god, is that how you think?, and he then stated, It all makes sense now.
I felt happily vindicated.
And I'm not the only one. Obviously my friend's wife felt that way, and so did another friend who read the book. So did the many people quoted in the book. Visual-spatial learners unite! ...a bit of a problem since we somewhat hopelessly disorganized. Linda who wrote the book and has been on the forefront of research involving visual-spatial learning is a disciplined, auditory-sequential learner. Go figure.
Visual-spatial learner are out of place in our traditional school system. We aren't lazy. We aren't dumb. We're just misunderstood and far too often, teachers aren't able to reach us. We can't learn by rote memorization. We hate repetition and drills. We don't learn in steps.
Surprisingly, we're one third of the population.
Jack is a visual spatial learner too. Mixed with his auditory disorder, he would surely fail in a school that would not provide accommodations to help him learn using mainly his strengths as a visual-spatial child.
[Interested in learning more about this type of learning style? Unfortunately, Linda's book is out of print. At this moment, there are two new books on sale on Amazon for $150.00 each. Quite steep if you ask me. You can usually find the book in the library - at least in Denver where she lives and has her research clinic. If not, there are some books by a women named Alexandra Shires Golon who has worked with Linda. There are also tons of articles and papers available on the internet. A good starting point is The Visual-Spatial Resource or just google it.]
On top of how we learn, I'm beginning to realize Jack and I share some common struggles. While I was never diagnosed with a learning disability, my mother told me when I was in first grade, I stopped reading one day. Just stopped completely. She said I went from reading a book every day to refusing to read.
Like Jack, I also had to go to someone to learn to talk correctly.
I struggled with spelling and writing.
I couldn't remember history facts.
I couldn't keep up with classroom discussions.
In high school, I never actually read any Classics. I went to a fancy prep school, we had many assigned. I would start but it was so laborious I'd quit. Cliff notes were my best friend.
I spent my school years figuring out how to pass each class.
In college, I remember not being able to read out loud and when I did I sounded like a child learning to read for the first time. During accounting class in college, the teacher would ask me a question. I'd answer. She'd tell me I was wrong and show us the right answer. I'd get so frustrated because that was the answer I had in my head. I had no idea what I said.
I woke up in the middle of the night panicked for years... thinking I had to take one more class to graduate. I'd have to walk into the other room and actually look at my diploma before I could go back to sleep.
Even as I type this entry, I have to keep going back to read over what I write and correct it. When I translate my thoughts to words, I type the wrong tense, the wrong vowel, a word out of order, the wrong word... and so on. I rely heavily on spell checker. Even with some words I type almost everyday, I still just try to get close enough so I can be offered up some choices from Microsoft. These are words I never could learn... not in 45 years... no matter how hard I try.
For example, I rarely use the word fascinated, because in the Microsoft dictionary it doesn't come up when you type fastenated. For the life of me, I can't remember enough of the letters in the middle to type it close enough. [This word processor is using FireFox's dictionary. Fascinated comes up when you type fastenated! FireFox is heaven to me... because I love that word.]
If you want to laugh, I'll let you in on a little secret. Whenever I see visual-spatial... the word I hear in my head is... visual-spat-ti-cal. When I first started telling Dave about visual-spat-ti-cal learners, he said he was a bit confused. Then he saw the book and said, that's spatial, not spat-ti-cal! We both laughed.I was actually wondering what spat-ti-cal meant. To me, spatial is spacial?!
So as I help and support Jack, I remember what it was like growing up and feeling out of place. What it was like to feel dumb, incompetent, or lazy because I couldn't do what others appeared to do so easily.What it was like to one day realize you had incredible strengths and you don't have to be defined by your weaknesses. That one day was way to late in my life.
So the tears in my eyes are as a mom... and as the young girl who always struggled to survive. I'll always wonder what she would of been like - what she would have achieved - if she had felt safe and was able to thrive.I don't want Jack to have that kind of wonder.
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PS - I started this whole blogging thing to overcome my fear of writing - of sitting at a computer with so many ideas in my head and not being able to get a sentence on paper. So even when one of these posts takes me forever to write, I am writing none-the-less. Earlier today, Jack asked me how I learned to 'do that,' aka keyboarding. I can't wait for him to learn!
