I’m glad you’re making art!

But… anyway, we were never able to get out of her classes, I’m not sure why, maybe because some of the kids who got out had diagnoses like ADD and we had no diagnoses at that time. The school also couldn’t get rid of her (as we later understood it), because they couldn’t find anyone else to teach language classes, but wanted them to be mandatory for all students. So we were stuck in her classes for four years. During that time, she seemed to be constantly finding ways to covertly humiliate us so that if called on it, she could claim she was just correcting us or something. Anyway, we got the impression from her that you should never even try to use a language at all if you can’t use it absolutely perfectly, and that there is a very specific order you have to learn things in, and should never attempt to use the language in any way that’s “beyond” the current “level” you’re learning it at. We got this big Spanish dictionary early on, and when we were given composition assignments, we would use it to look up words and verb forms we hadn’t been taught in class, if we needed them to say a certain thing. She got really bent out of shape every time we did this, especially with verbs, and told us to never use vocabulary that we hadn’t learned in her lessons. “Don’t use that. You haven’t been taught how to use it properly yet.”

And even if she was nastier than usual in her attitude about it, her whole general approach to teaching languages– that there are “levels,” that you must never try to write or say anything above your current “level,” that you have to learn things in a very specific order, and that absolute technical perfection is more important than actually being able to use a language for real communication– seemed to be a fairly common one. We genuinely felt for years that we didn’t “deserve” to use a language if we couldn’t use it with total perfection, that if we messed up verb conjugations or dropped accent marks we didn’t “deserve” to use it, that we were just making a mockery of ourselves and the language. There were languages we genuinely wanted to study, but we’d get afraid and embarassed every time we even thought of picking up a book about them– we worried that even self-guided study would be an endless series of humiliations, that we’d just come face to face with our “inadequacy” over and over. Because we never did get very good grades in language courses, even when we had better teachers– we were horrible especially at comprehension– and we just took that as an implication that we weren’t good enough to learn other languages.

Even when we were able to get past the idea that it was somehow wrong for us to be interested in learning languages in a way it wasn’t wrong for other people to, and to study them on our own if we could emulate someone close to us, we would still give up in fear and shame if we weren’t “getting it” from the first few lessons, and decide we’d never be good enough at it to bother trying. It actually only occurred to us very recently that since we didn’t learn English in anything resembling a typical manner, it was ridiculous to expect ourselves to learn any other language in a typical manner either, and that we shouldn’t expect ourselves to necessarily get much out of “standard” methods of teaching languages, but instead find ways more compatible with our neurology.

And looking back at what independent study we have done, it seems to bear this out. For example, ten years ago, I studied Japanese a little bit on my own, because a friend of ours was also studying it. I learned hiragana and katakana and then did about five lessons in a self-study book, before I started to feel like I was in over my head. I decided I just wasn’t good enough to deserve to learn it and let it lapse. But I did have various opportunities to be exposed to Japanese, usually in the form of subtitled shows and movies and song lyrics, even when I wasn’t actively studying it, and somehow the patterns our brain picked up from that plus what I actually did learn didn’t just sit unused in our brain for the past ten years; they have somehow been doing things without my realizing it.

One thing I did notice when originally studying, was that I could often predict the initial consonant mutations that occur in some words when they’re combined with other words, which the book didn’t even explicitly cover. I don’t even remember the Japanese name for the consonant mutations any more. And I can still barely construct a basic sentence. But for some reason my guesses about those are usually correct. There was just some kind of underlying pattern to them that our brain automatically took in. And I’ve also noticed that when listening to speech, or songs, in Japanese, I can often hear the exact words people are saying/singing– like, if you asked me to transcribe them I could transcribe a fair bit. I can tell what sounds go together to make words and which words are separate from one another. I just have no idea what 95% of the words mean in context. I think this is actually very similar to the way we learned spoken language at all in the first place, except that we were eventually able to make the leap to connecting those sounds and words to meanings in English.

And all of that was actually somewhat hard for me to talk about, since it falls into the category of patterns of skills and disabilities that people in our past have insisted are impossible. Including the fact that some of the skills that seem to be involved are ones that most people aren’t supposed to have after childhood. (And those also aren’t skills we have all the time, or can do equally well all the time, but which seem to be more available to us when we’re at what most people would consider a “lower functioning level” than our normal one. And the only reason I even feel safe saying that at all is because you described something similar in your “hills and cliffs” post, so we know it happens to other people too.)

So… going back and looking at all of those facts in context makes me realize that, no, our brain does not necessarily suck at learning languages; it just learns them very differently. And most methods of teaching are not geared to accomodate it, so we have to come up with our own ways, and those will probably involve a lot of accidental/inadvertent learning through pattern absorption and picking things up in bits and chunks, piecemeal, all over the place, and often result in us being able to say things that sound meaningful without having any idea what we actually said. And knowing this makes us hope that we can go back and actually study languages we’ve wanted to learn, without being terrified to even look at or listen to a basic lesson. I don’t know if this will ever lead to anything resembling fluency in any of them, but realizing this did cause a major paradigm shift in some ways for us.

This entry resonates with me because I’ve had those mental voices telling me ‘you can’t do this’ several times in my life.

Have now done my first blog entry in this persona, on blocked creativity, at spastigirl.livejournal.com.

If you haven’t read anything of hers, it might be worth a shot.

There is a reason that the Buddhists call comparing oneself to others “the hell-realm.”

That’s what disabled people suffer from, not the disabilities themselves (thinking of autism, CP, etc and some physical disabilities too) but others’ insensitive behavior towards them because of their disabilities.

Nice painting. You know what, perhaps you could do prints if you like….like greeting cards or whatever…..in addition to selling shirts at Autreat, the cards could be a part of the fundraising…..

But there is the reverse artistic snobbery that art which is difficult to understand is somehow superior to obviously art. That art which is “challenging” is better than art which is beautiful. By beautiful I don’t mean traditional. There is a lot of art snobbery around conceptual art. I am thinking here of people like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. Art which seemingly requires little skill can sell for astronomically high prices. But imagination and creativity are essential in art.

I was no good at drawing or painting in art classes at school. I could not, and still cannot, draw perspective. It is amazing to me that distance can be represented on a two-dimensional surface.

Thirteen to fourteen years ago I went on an Art and Spirituality Course where the participants did abstract water colour painting. I enjoyed that very much and since then I have been on similar courses which I have also enjoyed and on which I did abstract paintings.

From about the ages of 12 to 14 I had piano lessons outside of school and learnt to play simple classical pieces. My mother was a good pianist.

I would have that the stereotype of autistic people is that they are good at drawing objects with lines and regular shapes like bridges or skyscrapers or pylons.

Whatsherface: Seemed to make sense to me.