Learning 'Problems'
I noticed very early in my daughter Julie Anne's life that the best way for her to learn was by experiencing things.
For example, before she turned 10 she struggled to remember which is left and which is right. I tried all sorts of tricks to help her remember. The one which made sense to me, was “I write with my right hand”. Obvious? Not to Julie Anne.
Then we went on a bus tour trip to France. As we came off the ferry in France, I mentioned, casually and without really thinking about it, that we knew we were now in France, because the bus was traveling on the ‘wrong’ side of the road (the right). In the UK, one travels on the left. Julie Anne was quite fascinated with this information, and conversation about it came up frequently throughout the weekend. Returning to the UK on the Monday, she was quick to observe that now we were traveling on the left. I was amused at her interest, but otherwise didn’t think much of it at the time.
Lately I have been reading books about right-brain dominance because it is clear to me that Julie Anne is not learning with conventional methods. For example, she is not able to decipher a word using phonics, and even as a little girl, it was evident in that she could sound out the letters of a word perfectly (‘c-a-t’) but then tell me that it said ‘dog’. It was clear that what she was doing was hazarding a wild guess as to the reading of the word. When she was a little older, she would use the first letter of the word as a clue, but then guess the rest. All my efforts to get her to ‘sound out the word’ failed miserably, and we left off reading for a while. But sadly, she really wanted to learn to read, and with time I saw her confidence begin to falter, as she began to conclude that she must be stupid – after all, other people her age and younger could read.
It appears that right brained people are not auditory, but visual, and that it is therefore extremely difficult for them to read using a pure phonics approach. Reading for right brainers is a visual experience, wrapped up in the ability to recognize a word and interpret its meaning in pictures. I don’t know that much about it yet, but what I have read has been intriguing and though-provoking.
Anyway, I thought to try to share some of this with Julie Anne so that she would have a clearer understanding of what is happening in her brain. I particularly wanted her to know that she was not stupid, just different, and that there are a whole lot of people like her, who are also different, but not stupid or abnormal. In fact, they are the creative people around us, the artists, inventors, writers… the people who add colour to what would otherwise be a rather humdrum existence.
And I was so interested to hear her tell me that she agrees - that she learns experientially and visually. And she backed up her opinion with the example of the tour bus. She said that all her life she had not known which was left and which was right, and would just guess and hope for the best. But after she had physically and visually experienced ‘right’ in the bus traveling along the road in France, and ‘left’ in the bus traveling back again in the UK, she found that she had a framework from which to determine which was left and which was right. She told me that she has not been confused between the two since.
What a precious gift. As I observe the learning adventures of this complicated, highly creative and emotional child, I develop a sense of how to help her master those left-brained skills that determine success and worth in our biased society.
For example, before she turned 10 she struggled to remember which is left and which is right. I tried all sorts of tricks to help her remember. The one which made sense to me, was “I write with my right hand”. Obvious? Not to Julie Anne.
Then we went on a bus tour trip to France. As we came off the ferry in France, I mentioned, casually and without really thinking about it, that we knew we were now in France, because the bus was traveling on the ‘wrong’ side of the road (the right). In the UK, one travels on the left. Julie Anne was quite fascinated with this information, and conversation about it came up frequently throughout the weekend. Returning to the UK on the Monday, she was quick to observe that now we were traveling on the left. I was amused at her interest, but otherwise didn’t think much of it at the time.
Lately I have been reading books about right-brain dominance because it is clear to me that Julie Anne is not learning with conventional methods. For example, she is not able to decipher a word using phonics, and even as a little girl, it was evident in that she could sound out the letters of a word perfectly (‘c-a-t’) but then tell me that it said ‘dog’. It was clear that what she was doing was hazarding a wild guess as to the reading of the word. When she was a little older, she would use the first letter of the word as a clue, but then guess the rest. All my efforts to get her to ‘sound out the word’ failed miserably, and we left off reading for a while. But sadly, she really wanted to learn to read, and with time I saw her confidence begin to falter, as she began to conclude that she must be stupid – after all, other people her age and younger could read.
It appears that right brained people are not auditory, but visual, and that it is therefore extremely difficult for them to read using a pure phonics approach. Reading for right brainers is a visual experience, wrapped up in the ability to recognize a word and interpret its meaning in pictures. I don’t know that much about it yet, but what I have read has been intriguing and though-provoking.
Anyway, I thought to try to share some of this with Julie Anne so that she would have a clearer understanding of what is happening in her brain. I particularly wanted her to know that she was not stupid, just different, and that there are a whole lot of people like her, who are also different, but not stupid or abnormal. In fact, they are the creative people around us, the artists, inventors, writers… the people who add colour to what would otherwise be a rather humdrum existence.
And I was so interested to hear her tell me that she agrees - that she learns experientially and visually. And she backed up her opinion with the example of the tour bus. She said that all her life she had not known which was left and which was right, and would just guess and hope for the best. But after she had physically and visually experienced ‘right’ in the bus traveling along the road in France, and ‘left’ in the bus traveling back again in the UK, she found that she had a framework from which to determine which was left and which was right. She told me that she has not been confused between the two since.
What a precious gift. As I observe the learning adventures of this complicated, highly creative and emotional child, I develop a sense of how to help her master those left-brained skills that determine success and worth in our biased society.