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The universally accepted belief that we are all hardwired for language may be why it took me until I was nearly thirty to understand that I am a visual thinker.
I wonder if I think in metaphors.
“We don’t make it anymore!” This is the price we have paid for removing most hands-on classes from our schools, such as shop, welding, drafting, and auto mechanics. The kids who should have grown up to invent this equipment are often considered poor performers, academically or behaviorally, and are shunted into special education. But many of them are simply visual thinkers who are being screened out because the current curriculum favors verbal, linear thinkers who are good at taking tests. The hands-on classes where some of these “poor students” might have shown great ability are now gone.
It turns out that algebra is a barrier that keeps some students from completing high school or a community college technical degree.
Shame.
I want us collectively, as citizens of the world, to reclaim our ability to create and innovate in a rapidly changing world, recognizing what we gain by harnessing the power of every kind of mind.
People who are primarily verbal thinkers tend to comprehend things in order, which is why they often do well in school, where learning is mostly structured sequentially.
Another MRI explained why I had high levels of anxiety before I started taking antidepressants. My amygdala (emotion center) was three times larger than average.
I wonder what my brain looks like in this area.
Some researchers have hypothesized that the genes that make the brain large are related to the genes that contribute to autism, suggesting a genomic trade-off: higher intelligence at the cost of some social and emotional skills.
This research also suggests that the brain is designed to create images. When the eyes stop providing information, the brain learns how to create images by using the other senses.
Here’s a way to think of it: The object thinker builds the computer. The spatial thinker writes the code.
These days, “neurotypical” has replaced the term “normal.” Neurotypicals are generally described as people whose development happens in predictable ways at predictable times.
“Many People Have a Vivid ‘Mind’s Eye,’ While Others Have None at All,”
My dreams come to me much like the way I think, in vivid movies in color, with few words. They mostly involve some sort of fear or anxiety with balance, like being on a steep roof, driving down a steep hill, or riding a bike. I also have a recurring dream of trying to get to the airport and something makes me late, like a huge crater on I-25 (I have almost never been late to the airport). And like most people, I’ve had the occasional dream where I show up naked or partially naked in a public place.
“This is not a disorder as far as I can see. It’s an intriguing variation in human experience.”
I ought to write this as a line of dialogue in a movie.
Life, Animated.
I want to see it.
If you went to public school in the 1990s or after, you may not remember such programs.
That's sad.
The culmination of these policies arrived in 2001, when the education reform bill known as No Child Left Behind “hit American education like a tsunami,” according to Nikhil Goyal’s critique of the legislation in his book Schools on Trial. Now, not only was the stripping away of hands-on learning a reality, but a new philosophy had supplanted it: teach to the test.
Fuck that!
“Schools with the most limited resources have been most likely to cut back on history, art, music and physical education, simply because they aren’t covered on standardized tests.”
One of the most useless questions you can ask a kid is: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s one of those vague verbal-thinker questions. The more useful question is concrete: “What are you good at?”
Removing hands-on learning from schools is the worst thing to happen to education in recent memory, in my opinion.
Necessary?” landed like a bombshell in the education world. Hacker assailed the insistence on algebra in schools, pointing out that the math taught there was nothing like the math people use at their jobs.
“I fear that they are creating a generation of young students who are learning to hate mathematics.”
Why do many children learn to hate school?”
In 1983, developmental psychologist Howard Gardner published his influential book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences
I've read it.
And yet, we test people in the same way, with IQ and standardized tests. The odds are stacked against anyone whose strengths don’t correspond with the testing methodology, which favors mathematical and linguistic intelligence.
Though Gardner doesn’t recognize visual thinkers (let alone the different kinds of visual thinkers) as a separate category of intelligence, we are in agreement that our educational system fails to recognize different types of intelligence.
“How to educate individuals so that each develops his or her potential to the fullest is still largely a mystery,” he wrote. But, he was certain, “we cannot afford to waste any more minds.”
The bottom line is that kids who can’t do the math are potentially being underestimated, and we are losing the skills they do have, ones we need.
Amen!
I’m convinced that with less emphasis on testing and more on basic math and grammar, students would be far better off when they set out in their careers.
What is the profit in holding back any student with clear aptitude beyond their grade level?
Learning should prepare a student for both life and a career.
The obsession with testing has landed us in very unfortunate places, namely cutting corners, cheating, and failure.
In a piece titled “Do Grades and Tests Predict Adult Accomplishment?”
No. They don't.
There are people in my industry who run successful businesses with only a high school diploma, and whose “real world” skills outstrip those of many people with multiple degrees. People who hire veterinarians and field staff to solve problems out on ranches and feedlots have told me that a solid B+ student often performs better than a straight-A student, and I have observed the same.
My mother always encouraged me to put work over autism. Autism was always secondary in our household, and that mentality set the course for my life.
They are the snowplows and bulldozers. They can’t bear for their child to experience any adversity at all, so they clear a path for them.
I have dealt with managers who protect certain employees.
A big motivation for me was proving to people that I wasn’t stupid.
I’ve seen throughout my life, first as a student and then as a professor, that when a student fails to grasp something, the student is usually blamed. But not everyone learns the same way.
In retrospect, failing algebra may have been one of the best things that ever happened to me.
It all adds up to what I call the failure to launch. By that I mean the failure to identify visual thinkers early on and to encourage their talents and skills toward meaningful work they would naturally be good at.
While some European countries have trained and promoted their clever engineers, we have screened them out.
Once, when the neighborhood kids got together on their bikes to ride to the local Coca-Cola bottling plant, I begged my mother to drive me there. She refused. I’d have to learn to ride my own bike if I wanted to go. I learned! It may seem like tough love, but my mother had an innate sense of how to stretch me without breaking me.
All these experiences encouraged me to figure out how to do things for myself and made me stronger, more resilient. That’s a trait that many kids today are no longer developing.
In her bestseller Grit, Angela Duckworth defines grit as a quality that combines both passion and persistence to achieve a long-term goal.
It’s possible that the most important thing my mother did for me was to not see me primarily as disabled, or herself primarily as the mom of a disabled child.
There needs to be much more emphasis on the things a person is good at. And this starts in childhood.
Imagine how much further a visually inclined child might go if he or she were exposed to making things at a young age—and was encouraged to do so. Yes, there may be a trade-off. Your visual child may not make friends as easily as the verbal kids, but he or she might also invent the conveyor belt that goes to Mars.
Lol!
Different . . . Not Less,
For some adults diagnosed later in life, knowing they are autistic provides long-overdue insight into problems with employment and relationships they have long struggled with.
It’s important to recognize that labels are just that: labels.
A big motivation for me was also proving to people that I wasn’t stupid.
