Seeing What's Really There

Tennis shoes clapping against asphalt. Voices chanting, "Cinderella, dressed in yellow..." 

Any rope-skipper who made it as far as "kissed a fellow" or even the word "yellow" was out of my league.  If there was a kid on each side of me, holding the ends of the jumprope, I could make it two-three-four skips before I missed.  If I was holding the rope myself, I didn't get as far as "Cinderella".   I never skipped to a count of 1, not in all my years of being a kid -- not even in college, when I stumbled, quite literally, through a class in teaching elementary PE. 

How was it that even younger kids could could coordinate the arm motions and the jumping?  I wondered. As for me, I could think about what my arms were doing or what my legs were doing, but I could not think about both at the same time.  (Aim.  Jump.  Pause.  Bring rope back and over.  Aim...) 

It wasn't until my thirties that I could articulate something: I'd been trying to do a task with my conscious mind that most people were doing with a primitive semi-conscious part of their brains. 

And so it is, I believe, with many struggling students.  If a part of the brain doesn't work correctly, other parts will take over -- but they may never perform the task as seamlessly, or as well.  

It can be hard to look at a child and see what's really there, and not what must be or should be.  How well I remember!  At twelve, I went -- against my will -- to a summer program for gifted students. My mother filled out all the parts of the application that I refused to fill out, including my own self-evaluation of skills.  She marked that I was above average in physical education. (At that point, we had been warring for years over 'things I could, do but wouldn't'.) 

Hard as it is, it's important to build a bridge to the place the child is, and not the one where it seems surely s/he must be. 

Flashback to an even earlier time: first grade.  Vaguely, I remember my mother saying that we would eat at the Wayside Inn that evening, and I could practice climbing the steps there.  Yes, she had laughed it off when the school suggested there might actually be a problem: After all, I was only five.  After all, we didn't live in a house with stairs.  Still, Mother waited while I practiced climbing three- and four- step staircases -- slowly, diligently attempting to place just one foot on each step.