Make it stop make it stop

[ciroccoj]

Every time I let Justin near the piano I am reminded of why we don't do this any more. I want to beat my head against the wall. He has no sense of rhythm whatsoever, no sense of pitch, almost no ability to play more than three bars at a time of even the simplest music. Three years he's been slogging at this, and has almost nothing whatsoever to show for it. Like French; three years of trying to memorize vocabulary, and he does not know the difference between "homme" and "femme."

I think he would do OK in regular school, despite being slow to read, because he's very bright and articulate and very good at math. But then I think of the sheer amount of rote memorization required in regular school - not to mention real life - and I have no idea how he's going to cope. I've got him on another waiting list to see a psychologist, as the previous one's best diagnosis and advice (after $1300 worth of testing) was "his long-term memory is incredibly poor; you'll just have to repeat material."

OMG make it stop. He's trying so, so, so hard, and it's just simply foreign to him.

Comments

[linaelyn.livejournal.com]

Chris probably knows way more about this than I do, but it seems to me that the long-term memory thing is one of those "later-developing" things, which most children have around age 8-10, but some kids don't develop until 12, and a few kids - especially boys - develop much later in their teens.

It's frustrating to have any aspect of one's kids development fall so far outside the bell curve (in either direction, honestly) but it's the beauty of humanity that we're not all the same, and although I live on the other side of the continent form you, I can assure you that Justin will be a marvelous and contributing member of society as an adult.

Really really.

[ladystarstruck.livejournal.com]

Just maybe as a chef who invents recipes on the fly, and not as a concert pianist!

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the much-needed giggle :D :D :D

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

I sort of... repeated this to myself a few whole bunch of times. Thank you.

[umbo.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

[dubiousprospects.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Does he remember math?

I'm completely tune deaf; doesn't keep me from liking music, but I can't remember it at all. (I'm really bad at French, too, come to think, and was worse as a child :) Doesn't mean I can't remember other things.

"Long term memory" isn't a single thing, it's related to synapse formation in short term. And you might just have a kid who is going to be a physicist.

(also, supplement the pluperfect out of D, C, and complex fatty acids. Not everybody absorbs those equivalently well, and it makes a huge difference for brain function over time. Takes months to show results, but none of those can hurt, either.)