In my most recent post of this series, Education’s Big Lie, Part III: Visual Thinkers in the Spotlight, I highlighted three visual thinkers for whom words were not their initial line of attack when they tackled problems. Their minds focused immediately on images. Each of these individuals had very different reasons than the others for the use of images in their thought processes.
Leonardo da Vinci was an artist and inventor. He saw things. When facing a new problem, he would imagine a machine and a process that he envisioned solving this problem. The next thing he would do was to draw sketches of the machines and the processes that he saw in his mind. Although the pictures were quite vivid in his mind, he still had to put pen or chalk to paper to get a firmer grasp on the solution. Many of his sketches contain very few words. The words were secondary to Leonardo.
Albert Einstein was a scientist and mathematician, and a twentieth-century Renaissance man. He was a humanitarian, philosopher, and serious pianist and violinist. Einstein approached problems via his highly developed and practiced intuition. He had a feeling for problems and their proper solutions. He had insights into the physical world that no one else could envision. After satisfying himself that the mathematics and physics of a given solution worked, Einstein would turn to the task of finding words to describe his discovery “when he found the time.”
Temple Grandin is a scientist and outspoken advocate for animal welfare and accommodations for challenged children and adults. She came to those positions naturally since she grew up as a severely autistic child. She knows firsthand the challenges such children and adults face. Oliver Sacks, the world renown neurologist wrote in the forward of Grandin’s book Thinking in Pictures that her first book Emergence: Labeled Autistic was “unprecedented because there had never before been an inside narrative of autism.” Sacks is also the acclaimed author of the bestseller Awakenings, which is an autobiographic novel of a fictional, American physician, Dr. Macolm Slayer’s use of L-dopa in a ward of catatonic patients who awaken after years in a vegetative state. This novel was used as the basis for the 1993 film of the same name starring Robin Williams. An encounter with the automatically opening door at a store led Grandin during her adolescent years to the conclusion that she thought in terms of pictures instead of words. She claimed that this ability helped her in redesigning and making the cattle chutes of slaughterhouses more humane. She came up with her design by transversing the chutes at the eye level of cattle, seeing what they saw and felt. Calmer cattle at the time of their slaughter was better for the cattle and people. More relaxed cattle produced more tender beef for consumers.
Sports announcers, music, food, fashion, art and film critics make their living using words to describe, praise and criticize performances, films and other works of art. However, a critique is not the same as experiencing the film or the work of art with one’s own eyes and ears. Even the artists themselves may have difficulty in using words to fully describe their works of art. We speak and write about the genius and talent that Michelangelo displayed in his painting of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. However, no words will take one’s breath away like the actual experience of seeing it does.
In the field of culinary arts, I find it ironic that I must use words to make my point. How many of you have heard the expression: “The proof is in the pudding!”? Chefs can use words to describe their creations. Culinary critics use words to praise or pan culinary dishes. However, the real test of the worth of a dish is in its visual appeal, aroma, consistency, and taste. When we eat, we use the whole cadre our senses of sight, smell, touch, temperature, and taste. One of the finer points by which we judge a creme brulee is the crunch, or sound the caramelized sugar topping makes when we break it with our spoon. A second judging criterium is the texture of the custard under the caramelized sugar topping. The popularity of cooking contests on television like Iron Chef America, Chopped, Beat Bobby Flay, and Worst Cooks in America and many others have spawned similar contests in a myriad of different settings. The phenomenon has spread even to the U.S. armed services.
On athletic playing fields, the ingenuity of individuals cannot be fully realized through verbal descriptions of their feats. The images of one example immediately come to my mind. Unfortunately, I didn’t witness this play. I have to rely on the memory and storytelling ability of my Babe Ruth League coach The scene is from Jackie Robinson’s early days playing second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Jackie was known for his hitting and his speed and bravado on the basepaths. However, Jackie also used his speed to great advantage playing defense in the field. On one particular play, a batter hit a ground ball up through the middle of the infield. Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese both broke for the ball. With Jackie’s superior speed he was able to dive for the ball and flag it down in the outfield grass. However, there was no time to get up, turn his body and throw the batter out at first base. Seemingly without thinking, Jackie flipped the ball out of his glove to the approaching shortstop Pee Wee Reese, who caught it in his bare hand and threw it to first base to get the batter out. Although I am pleased with this verbal description of the play, it doesn’t really do justice to the play. It was unheard of when it first occurred. Later it became a standard weapon in the arsenal of defensive plays for middle infielders. When I played shortstop in Babe Ruth League, our coach would have us practice this play several times each week for the one time in our careers when it might be appropriate to use it.
In the performing arts, one can describe theatrical scenes like the chandelier scene in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. However, a verbal description is not the same experience that one gets when one is actually sitting in an orchestra seat of a live performance. The verbal description does not raise the goosebumps on one’s arms that appear when a magical-like spotlight illuminates the chandelier hanging over your head, just before it begins a rapid descent to crash on the stage, or hearing the eerie organ music and haunting off-stage voice of the mysterious phantom singing:
You will curse the day you did not do All that the Phantom asked of you!
GO!
In the introductory post of this series on Education’s Big Lie, I criticized Education for buying into the philosophical position that “One size fits all.” In researching this series I came across an article, the title of which I thought was right on! The article I Think in Pictures, You Teach in Words: The GIfted Visual Spacial Learner was written by Lesley Sword and published by Talent Development Resources. Lesley Sword is the Director of Gifted & Creative Services Australia, a consultant who specializes in the psychology of the gifted and has worked with gifted people of all ages. Sword’s article dealt witha portion of the problem I see in education. That portion is the problem of serving the gifted students. Two other problems with education are it underserves the disadvantaged and underprepared students, and how it ignores the students in the middle. In Part V and VI of this series, I will speak to how education ignores or underserves the gifted students. In later posts, I will deal with the other problematic areas.
Throughout history, some of the greatest minds, artists, scientists, and inventors of humanity have been visual thinkers. Some of them realized this and talked openly about their thinking style. In the case of others, we must deduce their primary thinking patterns from the evidence that they left behind concerning their thought processes. In the presentation of my case, I would like to call three witnesses.
My first witness is Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci. Leonardo was born in 1452 and died in 1519. Even though only 15 of his paintings have survived, for centuries Leonardo has been considered one of the greatest painters who ever lived. He was also a superior sculptor, mathematician, engineer, scientist, botanist, anatomist, and musician. He has been labeled the archetypical Renaissance man.
Since we can’t ask Leonardo any questions in person and he never spoke directly about his thinking processes, we must rely on his personal notes that have been preserved in codices for his testimony. The following example is a page from one such codex.
Leonardo’s codices are dominated by sketches with writing intermittently spaced throughout the work. This seems to indicate that Leonardo’s creative process began with visual images of his paintings and inventions. I have no further questions of this witness.
For my next witness, I would like to call Albert Einstein. Einstein was born in 1879 and died in 1955. He was a world famous physicist known for his work on relativity theory and quantum physics. He was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. Time Magazine named him the Person of the Century on December 31, 1999. In the introduction to their article, they described Einstein as “… the embodiment of pure intellect, the bumbling professor with the German accent, a comic cliche in a thousand films. Instantly recognizable, like Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Albert Einstein’s shaggy-haired visage was as familiar to ordinary people as to the matrons who fluttered about him in salons from Berlin to Hollywood. Yet he was unfathomably profound — the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed.”
Einstein may be best known for his famous equation: E = mc2. This equation indicates that mass and energy are two sides of the same coin. They are directly related to each other via a natural constant which is the speed of light squared.
Since Einstein is dead, we are no longer able to ask him about his thought processes. However, many times during his lifetime, he was asked what was the secret to his genius. The answer that I found most enlightening came from a private conversation with an unnamed friend. Alice Calaprice later included snippets from this conversation in her book, The Expanded Quotable Einstein. Consider the following example: “All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. I believe in intuition and inspiration…. At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason…Imagination is more important than knowledge”
The most direct answer to whether Einstein was a visual or verbal thinker came from the professor himself. His answer to this question was referenced in Abraham Pais’ book Subtle is the Lord: The Life and the Science of Albert Einstein. At a physics conference in 1922, Einstein told the audience that he used images to solve his problems, and only later he sometimes found the words to explain those solutions. I believe this indicates that Einstein was primarily a visual thinker.
For my third witness, I call Temple Grandin to the stand. She is still very much alive. Grandin has a Ph.D. in animal science from the University of Illinois and is a professor at Colorado State University. She is a very vocal spokesperson for visual thinking, so I am sure that Grandin agrees with this position. After growing up with autism, Grandin became a highly functional and accomplished adult. She is the author of six books, including the national bestsellers Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation. In the publicity blurbs for Thinking in Pictures, Grandin stated, “Rigid academic and social expectations could wind up stifling a mind that while it might struggle to conjugate a verb could one day take us to distant stars.” Temple delivered a February 2010 TED talk entitled The World Needs All Kinds of Minds.
In the first post, Education’s Big Lie, Part I: Introduction , of this series, I began with an example where words failed children. However, we know that words not only fail children. They often fail adults with physical and mental challenges, to which I can well attest. At times, words can also be insufficient for well-functioning adults. In my next post, Education’s Big Lie, Part IV: Human Arenas Where Words Often Play Second Fiddle, I will deal with a number of areas where words can easily be in second or third place to other means of expressions.
As I noted at the end of Education’s Big Lie, Part I: Introduction, I have learned that we can think without words. However, in much of today’s world, particularly those parts of it touching the education enterprise, communicating without words is much more difficult, if not next to impossible. Although as the following giggleBites cartoon illustrates communicating with words can have its own drawbacks.
One thing that the above cartoon brought forcefully to my attention is that the expression “A picture is worth a thousand words” implies “words” are the basis of value. Pictures and ideas are valued in terms of words. Have you ever heard anyone ask how much of a picture does one word equal? In any exchange of objects of value using two different currencies, one of those currencies is considered dominant. The transaction is then conducted in that currency. In education, we tend to try to force the exchange of ideas in the currency of words. We almost never let pictures speak for themselves. We have to “explain them.”
If words are our basis for the exchange of ideas, then we must have a storehouse of words to express our ideas. Aphasia is an insidious deficiency in that it steals one’s words, the basis of exchange, but not the ideas, the real objects of value. Ideas are locked inside one’s head with no easy way to communicate them.
I have managed to deal with my aphasia because of the verbal proficiency that I built up over my 60-year love affair with words. The filing cabinets in my head are filled with words. After the TBI’s, I still had a treasure trove of words in my memory which I found I could access intermittently.
However, even with my experience and confidence with words, many times I felt words were playing “Hide and Seek” with me. Can you imagine how difficult it is for children who don’t have the same experience or comfort with words? The ideas are right there in front of the children, but they can’t find the words to express them. It’s like the “Where’s Waldo Game?” Waldo is hidden in plain sight. Let’s play “Where’s Waldo” with the dead leaf mantis in the following picture.
Having gone through my trials, I can empathize with children who must be completely bewildered when confronted with what must seem like nonsense to them. For the past eight years, it has been a constant, uphill battle for me to attempt to do the things that were second nature to me prior to the TBI’s. Even putting together these simple essays has been an exhausting task. At times, it has been an almost overwhelming chore. I have to visualize my thoughts. I must then translate those pictures into appropriate words and coherent sentences. The images that I intersperse in my posts represent the starting points of where I begin my thinking. Since I am retired, living on a fixed income, my drawing ability leaves much to be desired, I must find public domain or royalty free pictures which mirror the figures that I am seeing in my mind. I must then struggle to translate those images into words.
Where did our classrooms and education go astray? If we want to measure a child’s creativity, imagination, intelligence, curiosity, ingenuity, reasoning, and problem-solving I propose we go back and watch children play. The first picture that comes to my mind is the baby in a medical insurance television advertisement that rolls over from his back to his stomach. The baby then reaches for and grabs a soft, cloth ball. The baby then plays with the ball, feeling it, squeezing it and trying to taste it. The baby has no words to describe what he is doing. No words are spoken about what the baby is doing, but curiosity is clearly visible in the baby’s eyes and actions.
Give a one-year-old child a few crayons and the back of a paper placemat in a restaurant and watch creativity and imagination come to the fore. Give five-year-old children a new toy like a little red wagon and watch them play out interactive stories. Give six-year-old children a set of Legos and watch them build houses and monsters. Give seven-year-old children jigsaw puzzles and watch them develop problem-solving skills. In most of these situations, words are seldom to be found.
Since our society has dictated that our culture is passed along from generation to generation via the media of books and verbal stories, I realize that language, words, and verbal thinking must eventually come into play in education. However, I do not believe we must necessarily equate the mental characteristics of creativity, imagination, intelligence, curiosity, ingenuity, reasoning, and problem-solving with verbal thinking and verbal proficiency. I would argue that I am not alone in this position.
For more than 200 hundred years, the New York City Harbor was the first port of call for people and goods entering the United States on the east coast. It didn’t matter whether it was a military or civilian ship. It didn’t matter whether it was driven by wind or steam. It didn’t matter whether it was large or small. It headed for New York City first. For almost 1500 years, words have been the first port of call in the generation of ideas.
In a number of areas outside of education, words are not the first port of call for the devotees of certain pursuits. Additionally, there have been a few brave individuals in areas dominated by words that have taken the very courageous step of coming out of the shadows and admitting that they are visual thinkers. In my next post in this series, Education’s Big Lie, Part III: Visual Thinkers in the Spotlight, I highlight a number of these individuals.
“O words, words! Wherefore art thou words?”…” Belonging to a man. O, be some other word! What’s in a word? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet…” paraphrased from Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 33 – 49.
Recently, I have had the feeling that my aphasia is kicking up again. After more than six months of no headaches and the luxury of having ideas and words flowing almost as easily as they did before my TBIs in 2009, I have very recently hit a dry spell. During the past several weeks, I have found myself in numerous situations where I can’t find the word that I am seeking. Draft after draft finds its way into the trash bin of my computer or the wastebasket in my office. What a waste of time and paper! What’s been just as disappointing and disconcerting is that these spells have coincided with an increase in the number of health concerns. I have started having problems with my right knee (the one that is my original knee; not the replacement knee), a recurrence of extended headaches, and an all-out war with increasing fatigue and my new BIPAP. It seems that I am heading back to the place I was immediately before my knee replacement surgery. There has been no decrease in the generation of new ideas. I am just having to fight to find the right words to communicate the ideas that I clearly see in my head. I can’t write or talk without words.
Through thoughtful and helpful conversations with several friends about my recurring difficulties with words, I have isolated two conditions that I believe are my biggest problems. How is someone with a mild case of aphasia suppose to convey his ideas meaningfully when he finds himself fighting against a double edged sword? The first source of difficulty is strictly internal. With a slicing forehand, the first swipe of the sword attempts to destroy my ability to communicate. How am I to communicate when words that I have used my entire life suddenly disappear? I stubbornly search but I can’t find them in the crevices of my mind? If you will look at one of my earliest posts Words Are More Like Cats Than Dogs (December, 2010), I used a metaphor involving dogs and cats to describe how some words were easily recalled like dogs, while others were as stubborn as cats and just would not come to me. In another early post, Gazing into the Abyss; a Deux (November 2011), I described the hard work of searching for words was very similar to the process of digging for coal on one’s hands and knees, in the deep recesses of a mine. However at the end of the shift, I come out of the mine with an empty coal cart.
The second source of difficulty is primarily external. Even when I find a word that seems right to me, I find it no longer means what I thought it did. Thinking back on my target shooting and hunting days, almost all of the time, stationary targets were easier marks to hit. It becomes much more difficult when the words start acting like moving targets. If the first edge of the sword is battling lost words in my head, then the second edge of the sword strikes me on a backhand swing. The words that do pop into my head no longer have the same meanings and connotations as when I first encountered them. I know that this is not a new phenomenon. The meanings of words have evolved for centuries. For example the word senile comes to us from the Latin senex, meaning “old age.” In ancient Rome, the Senate was the group of wise, old men who were the figurehead government of the empire. The Senate, after careful and considerable deliberations, approved or vetoed laws legislated by the Populous Council of citizens of Rome. Thus by the 14th Century, senile was introduced into the English language as an adjective that simply meant “aged” or “mature.” In those terms, “a senile, old man” is actually a redundancy. In today’s English, senile carries the connotation of having lost cognitive ability. In this sense, senility can kick in at any chronological age. As is the case with many things in today’s world, the rate of change of meanings seems to be increasing exponentially. How do you find the right word when its meaning changes almost daily? It’s like throwing darts at a moving target, while you’re moving also. Even though our character below is right on top of the target, he is still having trouble hitting the bull’s eye.
Fighting this double edged sword is compounding my difficulties in successfully communicating the myriad of ideas that keep flooding into my head. I found myself having to hammer out a message like the famous smithy from the 1840 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “The Village Blacksmith”
Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns what’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.
Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear the bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his might sledge,
With measure beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.
And children coming home from school
Look in the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge,
And hear the bellows roar.
And catch the flaming sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing floor.
He goes on Sunday to the church,
And sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach,
He hears his daughter’s voice,
Singing in the choir,
And it makes his heart rejoice.
It sounds to him like his mother’s voice,
Singing in Paradise!
He needs must think of her once more,
How in the grave she lies;
And with his hard, rough hands he wipes
A tear out of his eyes.
Toilng, — rejoicing, — sorrowing,
Onward in life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned his night’s repose.
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou has taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought.
Many of life’s important lessons are found in these 8 stanzas, 48 lines and 286 words. We find the physical and spiritual aspects of mankind. We find the human feelings of joy, sadness, exhaustion, and love. We find the virtues of hard work, honesty, humbleness, plainness, strength, perseverance, and stability. The blacksmith is a role model to the whole village, but especially the children. In the face of a multitude of competing forces, he balances his commitments to work, family, and community. The blacksmith is the symbolic “every man.” He stands as the iconic craftsman, standing upright before the onslaught of the coming industrial age. In the face of the inevitable, Longfellow wanted to make sure that we did not forget the agricultural age that birthed his current age. The smithy’s forge is a precursor to the steel furnaces of the 20th Century cities, spewing out the sparks of modernization. The community feel of the village stands in stark contrast to the rash of social isolation that is rampant in the sprawling cities that would soon develop. This poem is an American history and sociology lesson that all of us should remember and take to heart.
There are some exciting happenings just around the bend for HEBB. I am reopening some of the previously closed operations of HEBB and rolling out some totally brand new ventures. Please stay tuned to the HEBB website, and my blog By’s Musings. for future updates on these events. You can subscribe to automatically receive those blog updates by giving us your email address in the box on the right side of this page. You have my word that your address will only be used for that purpose. We guarantee your privacy and will never sell or loan your address to someone else. Announcements of the updates will also be posted on Google+ (Bayard “By” Baylis), Twitter (@ByBaylis), and LinkedIn (Bayard Baylis),
If you can’t wait, I will give you some hints; but please don’t keep them to yourselves! Go and tell others. I really want everyone to know about these undertakings. HEBB will soon open its doors to accepting individual and family clients offering Biblical Life Planning counseling, along with individualized help on how to do college: step-by-step guide on how to prepare for college; evaluate colleges; select the right college for you; complete college admissions and financial aid applications; successfully navigate the first-year of college; and make the most of your total college experience. I have also started writing books again, and am open to accepting certain speaking engagements, either in person or via electronic broadcasting.
I have recently started working on another project that I’m tentatively calling The Watershed Collaborative (TWC). It is intended to bring under one umbrella a diverse team of eminently qualified, highly-principled professionals with extensive experience from numerous fields of expertise, and from all segments of the public and private sectors, working collaboratively to help individuals and organizations identify and answer watershed questions. The mission of this proposed consulting alliance is to offer quality, values-based, comprehensive consulting and coaching services to educational institutions, ministries, non-profit organizations, and for-profit enterprises at reasonable prices. The membership of this alliance will consist of only partners who affirm the common goal of providing the highest quality information, advice and other services that are built on the foundation of solid theoretical research, and practical solutions which have been extensively tested in the work arena, uniquely fitted to the clients’ needs.
These are exciting times for me and HEBB. I was never really sure that I would regain any semblance of the capabilities that I used to have. I wasn’t completely confident that I would be able to work again. This has long been a matter of prayer. Over the past three months, it has been wonderful to see God removing many obstacles. However, not by a stretch of anyone’s imagination am I ready to resume a full work schedule. However, much of my thought capabilities have returned, although I am still thinking visually and have to translate the pictures into words to communicate. My endurance is still a question mark. Most afternoons, I find myself in need of a nap to restore my energy. After a short nap, I am ready to go again and can almost jump for joy.
