Bits and pieces about bits and pieces of his life and liberty and pursuit of happiness (he can still recite the Declaration of Independence too, all 1,320 words) fall out of his mouth, like vacation slides from our Hawaiian honeymoon trip, out of order on the projector-luau first, my pastel pink going-away costume the endpoint. Toy store commercials mix with Jaws and The Swiss Family Robinson until toys and humans and sharks are interchangeable. Spaghetti westerns merge with Julia Child making spaghetti and meatballs. He yells at screens and skies and dog walkers and phone books and Steinway piano stores. I believe it all because I’m young and aging forward.įorty years later, he jumble-quotes from music scores and books. We don’t have a lot of money and I’m fascinated by his answers and his music.
Didactic vs eidetic memory free#
Conductor of memories and sounds, he umbrellas free music into a symphony, just for me.
We stand on street corners listening to jackhammer percussion and steaming saxophone notes crawling out of manholes with jazz fingers and jazz beats, hums of telephone-wire string quartets. Who has won the Super Bowl most since its inception? What were the point totals and players’ names and coaches’ names? How many other Allen Smiths were in the Little Rock Arkansas phone book in 1985? What are their addresses? Their phone numbers? What are the moves Garry Kasparov used to win at chess, by game, by move? I look at his baby face and wonder if he’s like Jonathan Winters on Mork & Mindy, aging in reverse, destined to become a baby when I’m an old woman. Where were you on October 16, 1942, at 7:00 PM? He says the word in syllables so I can repeat it after him. When we’re dating, he tells me he has an eidetic memory. There’s dried blood on the teeth and he knows which tooth belongs to which kid by the grooves and faded Sharpie dates and DNA he reads with his fingers. They clank to the music his pants make when he shuffles and frictions against metal handrails. Wading through the muck just comes off as tedious.My husband has a pocketful of pocket atlases, baby teeth and baby aspirin. Most of the time I can project where an author is going to go with their writing within the first few pages. While I haven't taught myself anything nearly as impressive as most of the people that have already posted, I've done a lot with cultural studies of one kind or another.Īlthough I've managed to get my impatience with academics under control I would still rather read a research journal article, jump the first three steps on Bloom's Taxonomy, and go right into analysis, synthesis, and evaluation rather than reading a textbook. By the end of third grade I'd read every natural science book in the entire school library (I love animals). I reused to learn to read in first grade, but taught myself to do so in second when I found a book that I actually wanted to read. Because of this I dragged my heels with participation and did as little as possible. I struggled all through grammar, middle, and high school with hating the course material and structure of classes. Since I could talk about this subject all day, I think I'll just check out now before I bore everyone to tears (if I haven't already). I'm sure I'm not alone in this, I'm not claiming to be particularly smart - I just really prefer to learn on my own rather than a structured environment. This didn't always help with exams, but I guarantee that I learned more than most other students (which is why I always had a line up of them wanting me to help them with their essays, etc.) I know that I have gone way beyond your question in this mini-rant, but you have hit a nerve. I used to skim over the boring text book assignments and then go find good, original monographs from the library and read those as well, and then segue into related subjects and start exploring those.
Even when I was in university I often said that I'm still learning on my own, but this just gives me an excuse to do it "respectably". In my own (current) profession, I am completely self-taught (haven't taken a computer course since grade 10). I have an immense appetite for knowledge and am constantly learning all kinds of things in all kinds of ways. My point is that I have always been auto-didactic and truthfully I resent the fact that society seems structured in such a way as to favour unoriginal, conformist, lock-step learning over anything auto-didactic, even if it is creative and original.
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