IQ results... Can anyone explain this to me?

LoremIpsum
Thu, 07 Apr 2011 04:36:04 +0000

A lot of kids labeled as “learning disabled” are nothing of the sort – they are simply right-brained learners stuck in a left-brained teaching system. I have two sons who are right-brained “visual-spatial” learners, both of whom were tested at a fairly young age to have IQs in excess of 150 and both of whom have had various problems in school at times, while hailed as being incredibly brilliant at other times.

Of the two, my younger son is the more extreme visual-spatial learner, so I will focus on some of his current and former traits. Hallmarks of this type include extreme disorganization when it comes to turning in homework (which has, in fact, frequently been completed); inability to show one’s step-by-step work, especially in math; delayed response when being called upon in class; poor time management; and not being able to take detailed notes while listening to a lecture or watching a video.

Now let’s look at these individual items:

Missing homework: homework largely consists of drill and repetition; these kids don’t learn anything from drill and repetition; they learn by first understanding the big picture, which allows them to know how to store the subsequent details. They learn the material once and it’s there permanently, locked in placed and accessible through a hundred different datapoint connections, across disciplines, in a matrix-like web. But homework assignments aren’t facts to store, so they are retained in working memory as long as deemed necessary (by them!) and then tossed – unfortunately, finishing the work, not turning it in, is usually seen to be the end of the process.


inability to show one’s step-by-step work: they can often look at a problem and immediately see the correct answer, if A, then D – but can’t tell you how they got there because the didn’t follow a path, they made an intuitive leap. As the math gets harder, they may well have intermediate steps to show, but these steps are often not the ones taught; such kids will tackle problems from all sides, sometimes working back to front or from the middle out in both directions.
delayed response when being called upon in class: a lot of these kids think in terms of pictures or diagrams or flowcharts or matrices of interconnected facts. Try and get an answer from them quickly and they’re stuck trying to “translate” their knowledge into a running narrative. It’s not obviously A-B-C-D, C-D-B-A could also be viable, or any of another couple dozen combinations. The simpler and broader the question, the more trouble they have in answering it; yet ask them to explain an obscure connection between A and H and they’ll have your answer first every time, because you’ve essentially drawn the path for them to take.
poor time management: their brains are optimized for managing space – making mental maps, flowcharts, rotating objects mentally to look at the other sides. But time? They nearly always underestimate.
not being able to take detailed notes while listening to a lecture or watching a video: the visual sense always predominates and to “hold” what they hear, they need to focus on it entirely. Yet they don’t need those notes anyway, since they’ll never have to come back and re-read them: what they learn gets stored directly in long-term memory and their “notepad” is in fact internal, their working memory. Note that it’s not memorization, but facts being stored in their appropriate places.


The good news about all this: these kids are often late bloomers who, over time, figure out their own ways to accomplish what the system demands of them. And the more they learn, the faster they can learn, because they have knowledge hooks already in place in that field or a neighboring one or via an unlikely analogy or parallel that others would never even consider (For example, recalling Simpsons parodies has often been a springboard for learning literature). And, by god these kids can learn fast because they don’t have to learn and practice and review to hold knowledge, they only have to be told enough once to understand the relevance of what they just learned.