To teachers and educators:
Some of my credentials: Bachelor of Fine Arts, National Honor Society, National Society of Collegiate Scholars, Golden Key International Honor Society, Magna Cum Laude for High School, Grand Prize Winner for 5th grade Science Fair.
My education for elementary school consisted of 10 vocabulary words for a test, 3 chapters to study for a test, making speeches in front of the class, book reports, practice writing, lots of classwork, homework and tests. We had art, music, physical education, social studies, English, math, and science. Health was a brief topic too. Junior high also had tons or work to do and tests.
With the exception of math, I studied for all the tests in Elementary and Junior High except for one which I was given nothing to study. For math doing the homework was most of the time good enough to prepare for the test. Sometimes I would have to memorize something though. I studied for every speech too, and gave my speeches.
Anyway, 10 vocabulary words per test was entirely too much to memorize when given the words on Monday and the test on Friday. If I had been given 5 words to study for those 4 days that would have been hard enough, but my educators made it an impossible task. I somehow miraculously got 7 right on the test, but only about three words stuck with me. I really only had the ability to memorize one thing pet day, and if I memorized too much on one day, I was sometimes left with knowing nothing after the test was over with. Sometimes I’ve been able to remember the first thing that I studied for the test though.
As for speeches, I forgot them as soon as I was done with the speech with the exception of part of a sentence that I difficultly recalled during a speech after speaking it. I forgot books after the test was over with too, and I read many books in high school. We had science experiments too, where we wrote everything about the process and our conclusion. I forgot what the experiment was and everything about it the second I left the room in high school because I couldn’t recall it walking down the hall, which I tried to do many times. Basically, for being in a higher education school system, I didn’t learn much compared to what I did and was tested on.
In high school we had tests for midterms and finals which were a total waste of my time, effort, and energy, even though I passed them with an A or a B. I was given a sheet of a ton of questions. I was to answer those questions and study those answers for the test. I knew the answers to 1, 2, or 0 of those questions when I was given them. Mainly I knew nothing, found all the answers within a short time period, and studied them. For at least one test, I studied for over 10 hours for the test, and knew nothing about the information that I had studied less than 3 days after the test.
Also, I began trying to study for 3 hours per test in elementary school after a teacher told me that I needed to study more, since I did poorly on a test after only more than 2 hours and 40 minutes of studying.
Sometimes I learned from doing a craft, and I have a good memory for continuous stories on television or video. My brain is meant for problem solving, not memorizing text. I accel at projects and writing papers, but I don’t remember what I write either. I have a great temporary memory that I can learn quickly for.
When I was a kid I had a problem-solving brain, not a memorizing one, but the educators were in denial. They also thought that it was possible to read out loud and understand what you are reading at the exact same time on your first try which is impossible. I didn’t get to the point in my life where I could do that until sometime after high school was over with. I sang in the choir for years, many times getting the note, timing, pronunciation, and loudness right but not the meaning while I was singing it.
I was not good at listening either, which they thought was easy. I started out only easily listening to those whose voice I was familiar with. I was told I needed to practice my listening skills by watching TV, and the first time I had the television turned on, it was incredibly difficult to listen to. It took my whole brain to focus on listening. It was so difficult that I could only do it for a few seconds, unless I somehow got interested in the partial sentences that I heard and was willing to endure the difficulty of listening for a bit longer. I started out listening in for about two times per episode that I wasn’t interested in. It is possible that I listened to two sentences that way. Once I thought that I had finally got good at listening to TV, it turned out I was only good at listening to that one TV program. I went back to having a difficult time listening for each new show that I watched for a while, as I wasn’t used to the voices yet. At least that makes sense to me.
I had another problem listening to the teacher because I had put extra pressure on my self to listen to her. I couldn't listen when I wanted to because of that and figured as I was sitting there that I had simply forgotten how to listen. I then would try to match up a letter sound with what I was hearing to zone in to listening if the sounds matched up. I finally was able to remember how it felt like listening to the TV and noticed that the extra pressure put on my self to listen to the teacher was the only difference between the two. Thus, I concluded that I needed to relax to listen which was a difficult thing to do, since I cared about listing. I had to not care in order to listen, or relax somehow. I don’t remember how long it took for me to be able to listen at will. By the fourth grade, I could do that, but the problem came back to me in a high school classroom one day when I wanted to listen. I wasn’t able to listen for the rest of the class, but maybe it was just for about 4 minutes.
I had other problems listening in fifth grade because I started to remember things when the teacher spoke, and she reminded me of something or somethings. Then I'd realize at some point that I was thinking about those things instead of listening.
I also couldn't listen to too much information at once without stopping to think about it if I wanted to retain any of it sometimes because I know what it feels like to loose all the information when I take on too much at once. In conclusion, listening was anything but easy like the teacher claimed.
As for listening to music, I liked to dance since I was two years old. Listening to the notes, rhythm, and beat was always no problem. I would learn any repetitive main choruses that they repeated over and over again since they were the same sounds and predictable. I rarely would listen to the verses. It’s the English language I had a problem listening to(interpreting), not sounds in general. You have to know enough about a language in order to interpret the language, but it was like turning on a switch in my brain by focusing. I’ve always been more in tune to the sound, notes, loudness, and emotion of a person’s voice when I was not listening to them, but I was paying attention to them.
When I was deep in thought about something, I wasn’t paying attention to what was around me. That’s been a problem too, so it’s amazing what I’ve accomplished considering all of that.
However, despite all of my educational accomplishments, I still do not have a job where I can make a living. I know I can’t do anything that requires a ton of memorizing unless it has to do with watching TV that I’ve been interested in, computer programs that I’ve practiced enough, martial arts, art, or video games. Although, there's a lot that I forget about video games that I haven't played in a while.
While I didn't need the teacher to help me solve any of my listening problems, it would have been nice if the teacher hadn't ever pressured me to listen. If I had learned one thing per day, I would know a lot more than I do now. I hope this has been enlightening to any educators who have thought that listening or memorizing had to be easy for kids, since that is not the case at all for a person like me.
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