Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Reading the Words vs. Recalling the Image

Two weeks into school, and my son (7th) has had five zeros - all for work he'd completed the day before but couldn't find to turn it in once he was back in class. With the assistance of his teachers helping him look, they were able to point out the assignments exactly where they were supposed to be in his folder for that class. He's been given credit for them, but this was the continuing nightmare we had last year, and I'm dreading to see it start already.

In passing, I asked my husband (who has a lot of the same 2e issues as well as being PG) if he was like that. He said yes. I asked him how he couldn't find a paper that he'd just done the day before. He explained that it is because he tends to look for the "image" of the way the paper looked when it was finished rather than reading the words on the paper to see whether it is what he is looking for.

ARGGGGHHHHH

If any of you have dealt with this, what processes/steps/accommodations/etc. worked? I just can hardly face another year of constantly interceding so that he gets credit for work that he failed to turn in even when it was right in his folder where it belonged.

I can sooo relate to this (as the mom lol!) - this used to happen all the time with my ds12. Now I can't wait until he gets home to ask him about seeing the image - he's totally a visual spatial kid.

The solution for us was email - he turns in his assignments via email - that way he can send them the minute he's done and there's no paper to lose.

polarbear

LOL omgosh that's ME! No solutions... sorry... other than to say that my prefrontal cortex (?) came up with compensating strategies (like remembering a picture of where things are, not just pictures of the things) ;p

Thank you for this thread. I'm going to have this trouble with my visual-spatial DS8 (once I stop helicopter parenting him!)

I'm still sort of plagued... my house is cluttered because I suffer from the "out of sight, out of mind" syndrome so I need visual reminders. On the plus side: I'm a really talented photographer (my horn = toot toot) ;p

And I can relate as the kid. Within the last month or so I was asked to get ketchup out of the refrigerator, and I must have looked right past it a dozen times before I finally found it. I never eat ketchup. It was a new brand (new to me, at least), stored upside down, and she'd peeled the label off of it. You'd only have to glance at it to know it could only be ketchup, but since it didn't look at all like the image I was hunting for, it went ignored completely. My brain didn't even register its existence.

If I don't have any image of what I'm looking for, it's even worse. I'll ask her for details, and since she's the only non-visual person in the house, her descriptions are woefully inadequate. If I ask her where to find a new product she'd bought, I'll get, "It's in the cabinet." Okay, that eliminates less than a third of the total storage space in my kitchen. If I ask my daughter, I'll get, "It's in the pantry, second shelf, behind the popcorn, in a green bag."

Anyway, when your son is dealing with this, I find that the coping mechanism is this: stop. Searching for something with this visual mode can be very quick and efficient, but he has to recognize when it isn't working, and do something else. He has to then switch modes of thinking and become very methodical, organizing his search in a pattern so that every option gets looked at closely, eliminating every option until he's found the right one.

So if he's looking for a paper, an appropriate method would be to take every sheet out of his folder, look at each one-by-one, flipping them over onto the desk until he locates the right one. And if he misses it... do it again.

I still do it ... no solutions here either ... I tend to find things that way a lot faster than if I had to actually read what's on the paper! lol

Can you tape a string to the assignment and put a tab on the end of the string that says "Pull here for class credit"?

Another me too. My system for pieces of paper that may need not to be lost is roughly:

- Know where a given thing might or might not legitimately be left (not necessarily just one place, but "it'll be in my rucksack, or on the dining table, or on my desk at work") to limit the search space.

- Use the visual recognition technique as the first way to find something - it's fast, and it usually works.

- But if it fails, don't just keep doing it! If something should (or may) be in a given pile, and I need to know for sure whether it is or not, I go through the pile one item at a time not just checking for whether the item is what I'm looking for, but actually identifying what each item *is*. (Usually I also do some throwing out of things that don't in fact need to be kept/general housekeeping on the pile as I go through in these circs.) This way, if I get to the end of the pile and haven't found what I was looking for it definitely isn't there (and I've lessened the pile's chaos a little on the way).

Totally fascinating thread! I have always thought of myself as highly visual (and am definitely absent-minded), but I never had the "great disappearing homework" issue. My DH and DS make me crazy, however, with their inept ability to find things right in front of their noses. I can only imagine how this will play out for my ds in school.

Polarbear...I am totally going to use your emailing suggestion with my ADD teen clients - brilliant.

Slightly tangent but related (maybe?): I am an artist, and one interesting fact I studied is that part of the reason most people draw so poorly is that they draw what they THINK something should look like, not what it actually looks like (for example, a foreshortened object will appear vastly different such that you must draw it as if it was something foreign).

Anyway... wondering if this visual discrepancy skill can be taught? My ds adores I Spy books...but he still can't find his soccer shoes in his closet. I always chalked this up to learned helplessness ...maybe that's not all that it is.

I Spy books require that other mode of searching I mentioned before. If he still can't find his soccer shoes, it's because he's still using the first mode.

Dude - I'm going to talk with him this weekend about your technique. Great suggestion.

Polarbear - yes, emailing is a lifesaver, what is the problem for us is all of the non-typed projects like worksheets, packets, permission slips, etc.

JonLaw - yeah, and at least that time- consuming activity would also imprint the paper in his mind a bit better.

Excellent responses - nice to on wow at least he isn't the only one. His teachers act like they've never seen a kid like him before.

And I'm left wondering now what I'm missing out on since I actually read labels and words to find the right paper.

I used to fill my books with so many little bookmarks they spines had trouble coping. I often doodled as I read, and the doodles ended up on the bookmarks, and I could find stuff by looking for the doodle I'd marked it with. A non-doodler might have a better picture marker to look for if he got a set of little stickers, picked an image per class, and stuck, for eg. the watermellons on all his math stuff, the cantaloupes on all his science stuff, etc. (Or on a post-it that sticks up a little from the top of the page, and can be removed before handing in... more visible, AND reuseability, so there.) Plain coloued dot stickers might be enough, and seem more masculine.



(Oh sheesh, I'm discussing gender steriotypes and following up on JonLaw. Are we about to talk about coffeepots again? (sorry, that was another thread))


Stickers are my solution to everything.

Luckily, my older son agrees with me.

My baby coffeepot is doing just fine being a plain baby coffeepot without any decorative additions.

I just made the two cups of coffee that it can make and drank them.

I use post-it notes for everything here in law-world.

I love this thread. I don't feel so alone. My husband always wants things "put away" and for me.. out of sight, out of mind. I live by lists. And yeah, those little stick tabs that you can put in books - my books are covered with them. I doodle like crazy, too, to remember certain pages.

My daughter is the same way, and my poor husband is doing his best to be patient with us.

Post-it notes ROCK!

Yup. This is me-me-me. I have almost-eidectic memory, but it's not really verbal. I can't do it at all with auditory information, which I recall in paraphrases.

But I can locate things spatially to an almost savant extent. As in, if I've been to a place (even in a large, unfamiliar city, for example)-- I can find it again. Period. Like a homing pigeon.

I can also recall information by 'filing' it in visual space. That is, to recall something I've read, I look for the location on the page where I remember it being. I never lose things unless someone else moves them.

My helpful and borderline OCD spouse does NOT comprehend this system, and has threatened to purchase a fly vest for me to have my "at-a-glace" organizational system where it doesn't offend him.

My dd is exactly the same way, and always has been. Even as a toddler, she could locate library books that she'd taken into her (cluttered) bedroom. If I were missing something, all I had to do was ask her. She was "The Finder." LOL.

This is, IMO, actually a pretty awesome skill. I don't know, since I've never lived with auditory recall, but the spatial variety is fabulous. I can also read maps and build them in my head from information-- I much, much MUCH prefer Google-Maps to GPS. My spouse is exactly the opposite.

One helpful thing for developing/honing that secondary skill set?

Jigsaw puzzles. They tend to work both skill sets, because you have to both look for what you CAN visualize perfectly (which is what those of us who are naturally like this do so well), and also to look for what you can't. When you cannot create a perfect image of what you need/are searching for in your mind, you must use other information to search using criteria and sort information using that set of criteria. (I need a piece here which has these two colors in this conformation, and does NOT have a tab on this other side.)

I can't really change the fact that visual-spatial is how I process information. But I can be better about using that second skill set if I work at it, and I can become faster at that secondary (non-preferred) mode.

Sudoku and Word-Searches also stretch this set of skills. It's a sorting algorithm, and you have to practice it to gain speed and proficiency. Eventually, you can even gain enough comfort with it to have some automaticity. That took me until my late teens, though.

Interesting. My son has always avoided jigsaw puzzles, and word search was of great difficulty. I may have to start having him help me with a puzzle...