No mental pictures

Time for another post and I have no idea what I will write. I guess I will see where the keyboard takes me on this one. It was another dark, dreary, and damp winter’s day here. It wasn’t particularly cold for much of the day. There was a certain warmth in the afternoon that was reminiscent of spring storms. We did have a storm and a “lovely” downpour in the late afternoon, just as the Scientist and I went off to the grocery store. Visibility was so poor he pulled into the parking spaces next to the nearby school until it eased a bit.

This morning, the Games Fanatic had a homeschool science class which turned out to be a waste of time. He’s been going since the school year started in February. He was highly anxious going into the class, but initially I felt he would improve over time. We are now six months along and he’s as bad as ever. This is with me sitting next to him throughout the lesson. Classroom learning just doesn’t suit him. The classes for the last three weeks of term (last week, this week and next week) are all hands-on classes and GF was rather freaked about the pressure of it. He ended up missing last week when I couldn’t wake him to go to class. This week we did get there and he got so worked up we ended up leaving. We won’t bother next week since it will be more of the same and it’s a half hour drive to get there. I’m pretty certain we won’t continue with the class next term, partially for these issues. I’ve also been rather dissatisfied that the teacher is adding his religious beliefs to the content of the class from time to time. I don’t feel religion has any place within a science classroom. Ultimately, the fact that Games Fanatic is not getting enough out of the lessons to make them worth the cost is enough for me to say enough of the class.

I find Games Fanatic very difficult to figure out much of the time. While he is a pretty normal thirteen year old in many ways, he has some interesting quirks that affect his and our lives quite a bit. I am embarking after a long break on a journey to try to work out some of the issues. A few years ago we saw one professional after another and came up with very little information  and a lot of stress in the end. We do know he is very highly gifted, he has anxiety and obsessive compulsive issues.

But there are other issues that puzzle me and the biggest one is that he cannot visualise what he is reading. When he is reading a book, he has no mental picture. When he is asked to imagine something in his mind, he cannot do it. Today, the teacher asked him to make a hypothesis and he couldn’t imagine what might happen. And yet, he has a wonderful imagination at other times. The very few bits of narrative writing we got him to do properly when he was still at school were brilliant. His teacher at the time suggested he enter a story competition but that never eventuated. What he had done took many painstaking hours of hard work, far more than one might expect. It’s almost like he has to get deep inside and unlock a door to his imagination. When he comes up with the goods, he does it very well. This was back before it came out that he doesn’t visualise.

I am going to have a bit of a chat to Lego Lover’s psychologist on our visit next week to follow on to a quick query I had at the end of LL’s last one about where we might find assistance. He had a couple comments about it but we need to talk more since he doesn’t really have enough background on where we’ve been and the specifics of the problem.