Black Math – The White Stripes from Yahoo! Music – sample

Don’t you think that I’m bound to react now?
Well, my fingers are definitely turning to black now
Yeah, well maybe I’ll put my love on ice
Teach myself, maybe that’ll be nice
Yeah

My books are sitting at the top of the stack now
The longer words are really breaking my back now
Maybe I’ll learn to understand
Drawing a square with a pencil in hand, yeah

Ah,ah,ah,ah,ah
Ah,ah,ah,ah,ah

Mathematically turning the page
Unequivocally showing my age
I’m practically center stage
Undeniably earning your wage
Well maybe I’ll put my love on ice
And teach myself, maybe that’ll be nice, yeah

Listen master, can you answer a question?
Is it the fingers, or the brain
that you’re teaching A lesson?
I can’t tell you how proud I am
I’m writing down things that I don’t understand
Well, maybe I’ll put my love on ice
And teach myself, maybe that’ll be nice

Yeah,yeah,yeah

Black Math by The White Stripes is one of my favorites – the guitar is amazing. Did you know that Jack White has been ranked #17 on Rolling Stone’s ’The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.’ 

The great thing about many song lyrics is how open they are to interpretation. Some see in the lyrics a reference to black math and free masonry. Still others see difficulties with learning the guitar. And Jack White did have to develop his own guitar playing style due to some problems. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_White

‘White plays his barre and power chords with a different technique than most musicians. Instead of using his ring finger to fret the higher notes, Jack uses his pinky. This is because of a car accident in which his left index finger was injured and also the fact that his brothers (also musicians) would never teach him the proper way to do so.’

Of course, I’d like to see it as a spatially gifted youth having problems with the auditory sequential way of teaching - especially math, which isn’t at all suited to being taught that way. And, well, because I had so many crushes on teachers when I was in school, I’d like to think that’s what he means when he says he needs to put his love on ice.  Stop idealizing the teacher and teach himself. But that’s my interpretation.

Just found this amazing essay Spatially gifted, verbally inconvenienced by David F. Lohman, which helps me feel a bit better about my mild cluttering problem. But I was thinking, wouldn’t the visual spatial be sequentially inconvenienced as well … and what a great way to put it.  

But maybe the problem is not so much with our learning styles as it is with our educational system. I agree with Jack White, what happens in schools is not learning so much, it’s regurgitation. And even that comes second to what really matters in public schools, teaching the kids to conform and follow the rules.   

Things don’t improve much in college and university, except perhaps in liberal arts. And it’s especially in fields like education, science, and medicine that independent thinking seems frowned on and questions discouraged. I’ve had some professors who flatter you into thinking you’re superior to the common man, the everyday Joe, by very virtue of your being in their class. But you had better not challenge their assertions. You’re being indoctrinated. They call it education.

The Visual-Spatial Learner in School, by Betty Maxwell: http://www.deleonpub.com/pdf/AppendixA.pdf

Checklist by Linda Silverman, from her book “Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner”: http://www.deleonpub.com/pdf/VSL-Quiz.pdf

Love the ending, where it says (Hint: Start with the last chapter.) Finally, someone who understands. 

I’m thinking of buying a copy not only for myself, but for the staff at my daughter’s school as well. But I’m afraid people at her school are going to take it the wrong way. They’re so quick to judge. Just want the people at her school to better understand different learning styles. 

I need to do much more reading from different sources, but I get the impression that there’s at least 2 types of visual learner. In my case, asthma in childhood and frequent ear infections.  Not to mention changing my handedness in childhood because I was afraid to be left-handed and stand out. Think in my case, it’s acquired. Had to rely more on visual thinking and learning.

In my daughter’s case, I think it’s inherited. She and her father can both see objects in their mind’s eye in 3D and from different perspectives. When they call visual-spatial learning ’upside-down brilliance’, or dyslexia a ‘gift’, I believe that’s what they’re referring to.

Here is that checklist: 

Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner 

Please complete the following quiz to find out more about your learning style. 

1.  Do you think mainly in pictures instead of in words?
 
2.  Do you know things without being able to explain how or why?
 
3.  Do you solve problems in unusual ways?
 
4.  Do you have a vivid imagination?
 
5.  Do you remember what you see and forget what you hear?
 
6.  Are you terrible at spelling?
 
7.  Can you visualize objects from different perspectives?
 
8.  Are you organizationally impaired?
 
9.  Do you often lose track of time?
 
10.  Would you rather read a map than follow verbal directions?
 
11.  Do you remember how to get to places you visited only once?
 
12.  Is your handwriting slow and difficult for others to read?
 
13.  Can you feel what others are feeling?
 
14.  Are you musically, artistically, or mechanically inclined?
 
15.  Do you know more than others think you know?
 
16.  Do you hate speaking in front of a group?
 
17.  Did you feel smarter as you got older?
 
18.  Are you addicted to your computer?
 

If you answered yes to 10 of the above questions, you are very likely to be a visual-spatial learner.  

This book was written for you!

(Hint: Start with the last chapter.)

From Silverman, L. K. (2002).Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner. Denver: DeLeon Publishing.

http://www.nswagtc.org.au/ozgifted/conferences/SwordVisualSpatial.html

Traditional teaching techniques are designed for auditory sequential learners. Concepts are introduced in a step-by-step fashion, practiced with drill and repetition, assessed under timed conditions, and then reviewed. This process is ideal for sequential learners whose learning progresses in a step-by-step manner from easy to difficult material. For visual spatial learners, concepts are rapidly understood when they are presented within a context and related to other concepts. Once spatial learners create a mental picture of a concept and see how the information fits with what they already know, their learning is permanent. Repetition is completely unnecessary and irrelevant to their learning style.

However, without easily observable connecting ties, the information cannot take hold anywhere in the brain–it is like learning in a vacuum, and seems to the student like pointless exercises in futility. Teachers often misinterpret the student’s difficulties with the instructional strategies as inability to learn the concepts and assume that the student needs more drill to grasp the material. Rote memorization and drill are actually damaging for visual-spatial learners, since they emphasise the students’ weaknesses instead of their strengths. (Silverman 1994)

Gets me emotional. I don’t see myself as a visual spatial learner ( maybe visual, not spatial so much), but I do have real trouble with auditory sequential processing, and the above I can really relate to. There were times in public school when I was so frustrated with the sequential step-by-step manner of teaching that I would skip chapters and read ahead just so I could get to its point. Sure, I might have struggled a bit with the advanced material, but once I understood it, and only then, would the rest of it make any sense to me. Top-down learning I used to call it. I’m a top-down learner.

Mein hubby is even worse. He can’t spell well enough to save his life (although he has no trouble reading), and he keeps complaining about the engineers’ lack of foresight where he works. Why can’t they see it like he does? – he carps. He sees it all in his head, all the images frame by frame, like in a movie. He can see the mistakes the engineers are headed for in their designs. Why can’t other people see it too? Why can’t they think ahead?

I tell him there are other people who can see it too and have his problems - and they’re called dys… duh… uh … visual thinkers.  That’s right. Visual thinkers – like the four dead-end kids profiled in FORTUNE Magazines’ May 2002 issue. http://www.edyslexia.com/fortune.pdf

Some have even written books about it - Upside-Down Brilliance and Gift of Dyslexia . Only it doesn’t feel like a gift when you or your child is struggling with it in a public education system that prizes uniformity and conformity above all else, and sees dyslexia as nothing more than a learning ‘DISABILITY’ instead of a learning difference that needs to be addressed.

I’m determined to get this thing nailed, to understand how to tutor someone who’s a visual spatial learner. I’m also determined to recover my mobility. 

Are you curious about its author’s childhood? Here is an excerpt from an interview with Tim Adams for the Observer, Nov 2006 -

TA: When you look back on childhood now, does it seem like another life?

RP: It was a strange life. You saw my IQ? [170 aged 9] I didn’t learn about that until I was 32. I just thought I was kind of a bad kid; I didn’t relate to people at all. I was kind of a sissy at first, in a playground situation, and the kid who is scared is the one the bullies go after. I used to get beat up pretty badly. When I was five I was put up a couple of years and everyone was seven or eight and much bigger than I was. And the teacher made me write with my right hand, though I was left handed, to stop me smudging the page. I started to stammer. Fortunately the University of Minnesota, where my father taught, had one of the top psychology departments in the world. Someone there told him that the speech centres of the brain are all on one side, and if you are forced to use the wrong hand to do things it throws all that out. By then it had created a stammer so bad I could hardly get a word out. This professor went to the school and presented this to the teacher, and I was allowed to use my left hand and my stammer disappeared in a month.

I really like this quote by Robert Pirsig, Lila – ‘An inquiry into morals’ New York (Bantam Books) 1991. Love the way he describes the behavior of particles in quantum physics. For more quotes: http://www.ldb.org/pirsig.htm

The only difference between causation and the value is that the word “cause” implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of “value” is one of preference. In classical science it was supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and that “cause” is the more appropriate word to describe it. But in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles “prefer” to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences.

http://www.commonties.com/blog/2006/09/13/i-was-a-rebel/

“You know what I learned from that … to be very tough … and to do what you know is right … and to not give in to any authority that is blind and stupid. So I was a rebel from a young age.”

What he describes is far worse than what I went through, but I can relate. It was about 40 years ago when I made myself switch to using my right hand to write, to conform, to fit in with the others in my first grade class. It’s been so long, I don’t recall if there were any negative comments being made that led me to make the switch. My first grade teacher – Miss Rooney – wasn’t exactly a sweetheart. She may have noticed me writing with my left hand, and she may have commented that only the smart students, the good students wrote with their right hand. She may have even suggested that there was something wrong about being left-handed.

I do know that I struggled with it for a while, naturally preferring to use my left hand. It also made me angry. Using my right hand did not feel natural, and it’s human to feel resistance to doing anything that doesn’t feel natural.  

It also gave me my first taste of non-conformity when at first I decided I was going to be left-handed no matter what anyone thought. My father supported me. He told me some famous people were left-handed, people like Rockefeller, and not to listen to the stupid opinions of others. But I caved in, not because of any pressure or abuse, but because I undervalued myself. I didn’t have enough confidence in myself to be who I was. I began to believe that maybe it would make me smarter, or perform better in class if I made myself switch to using my right hand. At any case, it would make me conform to the satisfaction of my teacher and maybe help me fit in better with the rest of the students.

Think I might have sold myself out. Murray Kaufman describes how he went through a period of stuttering when he was forced to use his right hand. I myself stuttered on and off during my childhood. To this day, I don’t express myself well verbally. Think I’m slighted more because of it, underestimated and do get cut off and spoken over quite a bit. Even by those who tell me they are my friends. Maybe I should have chosen to remain left-handed. 

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about left-handedness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_handed

NYTimes.com - May 9, 2004 – NEURODIVERSITY FOREVER – The Disability Movement Turns to Brains – By AMY HARMON  - (my favourite excerpts)

“What all of our efforts in neuroscience are demonstrating is that you have many peculiar ways of arranging a human brain and there are all sorts of varieties of creative, successful human beings,” Dr. Damasio said. “For a while it is going to be a rather relentless process as there are more and more discoveries of people that have something that could be called a defect and yet have immense talents in one way or another.”For example, when adults with A.D.D. look at the word “yellow” written in blue and are asked what the color is and then what the word is, they use an entirely different part of the brain than a normal adult. And when people with Asperger’s look at faces, they use a part of the brain typically engaged when looking at objects.Dr. Damasio and others compare the shifting awareness about brain function to the broader conception of intelligence that has evolved over the last two decades, driven in part by the theory of Howard Gardner, a Harvard education professor, that children who don’t excel in “traditional” intelligence – the manipulation of words and numbers – may shine in other areas such as spatial reasoning or human relations….. For patients, being given a name and a biological basis for their difficulties represents a shift from a “moral diagnosis” that centers on shame, to a medical one, said Dr. Ratey, who is the author of “Shadow Syndromes,” which argues that virtually all people have brain differences they need to be aware of to help guide them through life.

But the most humane approach, some experts argue, may lie in redefining the expanding set of syndromes as differences rather than diagnoses.

“We’re doing a service on the one hand by describing many more of these conditions and inviting people to understand themselves better,” said Dr. Edward Hallowell, a leading authority on A.D.D. “But when we pathologize it we scare them and make them not want to have any part of it. I think of these as traits, not disorders.”

Knowing you are a mild depressive, for instance, could induce you to exercise often. A bipolar person could adapt their lives to fit their mood swings, or treat them with drugs if that works better. And a neurologically tolerant society would try to accommodate as well as understand behavior that remained aberrant.

Topics to come, in no particular order:

• Global warming and the environment – We’ve all got to do something. It’s getting serious.
• Poverty and hunger. Bono and One.org – the campaign to make poverty history.
• Health and medicine - Have you heard of the book – ‘Anatomy of an Illness’ – The Phenomenal Bestseller on Illness Overcome and the Triumph of the Human Spirit.
• Psychiatry – There really are some good psychiatrists out there. And it can’t be easy being good when you have the kind of absolute power only a psychiatrist can wield.
• Psychiatric labels – Aren’t there far too many in the DSM IV-TR – over 300 now, including jet lag?? The DSM has its detractors, including Caplan Paula J., author of Bias in Psychiatric Diagnosis. Here is a book description, found on Amazon:   
  

  “Bias in Psychiatric Diagnosis” is the first book about how gender, race, social class, age, physical disability, and sexual orientation affect the classification of human beings into psychiatric categories. This is a hot topic addressed to the public’s right to know, especially because the negative consequences of psychiatric diagnosis range from loss of custody of a child to denial of health insurance and employment to removal of one’s right to make decisions about one’s legal affairs.

• Autism – Anyone who thinks autism spectrum disorders are not being over-diagnosed has got their head in the sand.
• Public education
• Dyslexic quirks of the visually strong.