Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The Relief of being Understood

DS12, beginning 8th grade this year, had to write a couple of paragraphs describing how he learns best. He'd never given it any thought before. It was easy for him to identify with Linguistic learners but he discovered this about Visual Spatial Learners:

"The visual spatial learner thrives on complexity, yet struggles with easy material; loves difficult puzzles, but hates drill and repetition; is great at geometry and physics, but poor at phonics and spelling. She has keen visual memory, but poor auditory memory; is creative and imaginative, but inattentive in class; is a systems thinker, all the while disorganized, forgets the details. He excels in math analysis, but is poor at calculation; has high reading comprehension, but low word recognition; has an excellent sense of humor, and performs poorly on timed tests." by Linda Kreger Silverman

Upon finding this he said, "Finally. Someone who understands how I feel about math."

As a V-S who instinctively gets phonics these descriptions annoy me. Spelling is V-S!

It's VS & instinctive only if it is instinctively VS... Meaning, schools shower kids with bottom up phonics, but without some epiphany of the organization and structure and logic of language the system level organizational mind is left in the dust.

Spelling has phonological, orthographic, and morphological aspects to it. The phonological aspect is the main aspect of spelling for which VS learners would be predicted to be relatively weak. The orthographic dimension is affected by phonological awareness, but mainly has to do with mapping-to-automaticity (paired associations) of phonemes and graphemes. It also has a visual-symbolic component, because of the graphemes (not so much the literal visual image, but the symbol, as research finds that successful orthographic mapping is font independent). Morphology has visual dimensions to it, and more importantly for high-concept learners, meaning and context (based on word roots/etymology, grammar).

The interaction of these aspects of reading/spelling is why you may find individuals who can decode accurately at a very high level, but have poor fluency/speed. They have phonics, but have not achieved automaticity in their orthographic mapping. Or individuals with excellent reading comprehension, but labored decoding. They are able to employ morphological skills to capture the meaning of text, but aren't always precisely accurate with decoding. I actually have a student with excellent decoding/encoding and fluency, but weaker grammar/syntax, and limited comprehension.

The reason schools currently push phonics so strongly is that it is the more consistently successful method of reading instruction for the vast majority of people. Surprisingly, it does not require even average cognition to become a fluent reader using high-quality phonological awareness-based reading instruction. Programs like OG & Wilson are so effective because they combine PA with the rules and patterns that systems-minds need, so they teach explicitly to a wider segment of the population.

Yes, that's one of the things that didn't fit for him.

DD and I are both highly V/S people, and both of us are really excellent (and natural) spellers, as well. Completely morphological and grapheme-based, in my case. I can't spell very well using auditory/oral pathways at all-- when I did spelling bees, I used to "write" the word by tracing my index finger on the palm on my hand-- because I "see" the word and know if it is correct based on visual information.

It's not systems based at all.

We're in the inaptly chosen term zone. The quote in the original post is from Linda Silverman who applied "Visual-Spatial learner" to a distinct and common mode of gifted learner she noticed anecdotally in trends from testers at her center. I've looked a decent amount and haven't seen her label actually associated with say high PRI paired with low VCI.

My both my son & are are highly V/S people as well. That description fits me to a T. I can't spell, I'm one of those I spell the same word 3 different ways and I sometimes can't even figure out how to spell a word correctly because I can't even figure out the first few letters. Spell check helps a lot except when it doesn't and when it I just type the wrong word. On the other hand my son doesn't have a problem with spelling. He isn't perfect but it isn't really an issue at all. Seems a bit odd to be included in that list.

I love your posts, aeh!

So my high level of skill with reading is due to orthographic mapping? I 'read' a chunk of words at once, but when writing my internal monolgue is kind of literal phonetic interpretation of what I'm writing, so if I'm reading Wednesday I see the word and hear the correct pronounciation, but if I'm writing Wednesday my brain is saying Wed Nez Day. I never ever mispell, but couldn't do a spelling bee because I have to see the word to spell it. And words changed to an incorrect and unphonetic spelling drive me insane. There's a car, the Sorento, which is NOT prounounced the same as the Italian town.

Is this a brute force processing advantage of IQ over VS traits, or a quirk of some brains?

I'm not sure, Tallulah, but your process sounds remarkably similar to mine. There are just a handful of words that I seemingly cannot spell-- and they are fairly static. I have no ability to LEARN to spell words, apparently. I either can spell them, or I struggle to recall how they look.

Necessary, said, and a few other common words like February are in that category. I can recall crying because a teacher in 3rd grade repeatedly tried to teach me an auditory method to recall how to spell February, and it simply would not stick with me because of how my brain works.


This is why for me, I have just enough working memory in verbal terms for finger-tracing a word to have worked remarkably well up to the state level in spelling as a spelling bee kid.

Oh-- and another interesting thing is that I can hear a word, but not know that it is THAT word in particular, if you understand what I mean-- so the word "segue" in my mind is phonetically not sounding that way. I had no trouble with it in writing, can spell it fine, etc., but until I heard it used in a way that I understood that the person saying that word that way was READING the word "segue"-- well, that was a total epiphany for me, and I'm a bit amused to note that this isn't the first time that I've experienced some quirky laugh-out-loud funny moment of "Ohhhhhhhhhhh... THAT's what that is..." as a result of my brain's V/S quirks. L. Ron Hubbard didn't write Dune, for example. I was confused about that for a long, long time. LOL!