Your comment about looking up pronunciation reminded me that I always have to look up pronunciation of words that I've only seen in books. The interesting thing is that (unless I internalized the spelling of the word wrong, which does often happen) I usually get the overall pronunciation right and the syllable stress completely wrong, like, I would say probably quite a bit more than 50% of the time. (I realize there are patterns with syllable stress, but I didn't internalize them when it would have made a difference, and now it isn't worth it.)
Ah, I forgot about Maybeth and the boxes! (I still have yet to get to Seventeen. I'd like to write up Runner before I get to Sons or Seventeen, so I don't fall too far behind :) ) I'm coming around to your opinion that it's probably something like dyslexia; that makes sense with this new data. The musical notes I would say is not a conclusive data point (again because I think musical memory works differently), but recipes and boxes and color… yeah, that's starting to add up.
Because I was doing them in the right order, but because I had to laboriously think through each step (and I still don't know how anyone else can do it any other way)
Oh, hold on, I want to know more about this thinking through it. So my thought here is that you look at piano keys and see a visual pattern. If I told you to press a sequence of keys (say, the beginning seven notes to Twinkle), you would basically map the first key I told you to the corresponding visual key, and then go back and figure out what the second key was, and map that… yeah, I can see how that would be laborious and time-consuming. I think this is not so different from what I do, with the large caveat that as I said before that I dont' think in terms of a sequence of keys but in terms of a phrase of notes -- but the map for me is pretty much completely automatic. (The automaticity comes because of a whole bunch of training, of course; but also in large part because, I think, of a pronounced feedback process between my ear and hand; this feedback process is what seems to be missing for you.) What if each key was labeled by a number, would that make it easier? Like if I could tell you 11 55 66 5 (and each key had a number sticker so you could just look at the keys and see where you were supposed to push). This is actually not that different from things I've seen to teach kids (colors instead of numbers are often used for pre-literate kids).
Of course this still doesn't at all answer your rhythm question -- I didn't even think about rhythm when I was trying to hack your music playing, huh — which probably says something about me. Possibly just that my major training is in violin — it's widely known in the music world that string players tend to be relatively crap at rhythm compared to other instrumentalists. (The reason for this is that string players have to place the fingers quite precisely to get the right pitch, so we tend to be hyper-focused on pitch and dismiss rhythm as that thing that you do after you get the pitch right.) But also I've noticed that my daughter has very good pitch and rather poor rhythm compared to other kids. I mean, at this point she's had some relatively intensive training on rhythm, so now she's now on or above the level I'd expect from a typical kid her age, but she definitely does not come by it naturally. (Whereas I don't ever remember not understanding rhythm fairly intuitively, but it's possible I don't understand it naturally myself — I too had intensive music training starting very young.)
Anyway, I wonder — and yeah, this is just a thought experiment at this point, since this is sounding less and less fun to actually do in real life (although if I ever was in the same place as you and a piano I might just try the sticker thing just to see, ha) — if one could set up a light, or something, to signal you when the key press was supposed to occur — well, okay, I don't wonder that part so much, I'm pretty sure it could be done though would probably be kind of painful — what I do wonder is whether repeated practice doing this would rewire your brain so that you would be able to match it up. I wonder this precisely because when I started rhythm work with my daughter, she appeared to have a great deal of trouble with it — like, it seemed like she had trouble hearing when she was doing it right or wrong, and would blithely play something e.g. not matched with the metronome at all and not appear to notice. She was able, however, to coordinate with clapping at the same time as I did (rhythm clapping is another widely used pedagogical trick that I remember doing when I was a kid), and with practice she's gotten better at even metronome rhythm work (though she still hates it).
Re Seventeen: I don't really understand why Voigt even bothers bringing in Cisco for a non-redemption arc, except maybe that she thought it would be interesting to see the flip side of it? (I don't find it interesting, which is why I question it. I'm kind of a sucker for redemption arc, though.)
Cisco seems uninterested in redemption; he knows damn well who Dicey is, when he asks her all those questions about her siblings and her grandmother and her...huh. Her mother. He never even asks about her father. I think I had missed that because of the societal expectation that mothers take care of their children, fathers are optional (Solitary Blue, says otherwise). But both Jeff and Mina ask “Where are their parents?”
Oh. OH. I had totally missed that (same societal expectations blinding me here). WHOA. Does he ever say anything about fathers?
However, before that, he makes it pretty clear he thinks he should be paid for the work he's doing, and Dicey agrees, and yet she never tells him. His theft at the end was unjustified and totally in character, but she didn't know that he was going to steal from her or that he was the father who abandoned her, so I can only judge her actions by the knowledge she had at the time. It's consistent with the way she takes Jeff for granted, and keeps telling herself she'll call him and doesn't. She does a lot of not reaching out in this book.
Yeesh. Dicey is definitely (has always been) rather poor at communication. I'm thinking here of the parallel view in Dicey's Song and Come a Stranger and how it's really, really easy to read her rebuffs of Mina's friendship overtures as racism (which it of course isn't, but how is Mina supposed to know). It's… really a good thing that she is marrying Jeff, who is better than average at communication (except when it impinges on his issues).
It's interesting to compare her to Bullet — Bullet is poor at communication, but in his case it's not because he isn't thinking about it, he just doesn't care… well — in the first half of the book, he isn't thinking about it because he doesn't care, but near the end of the book he is thinking about it and he still doesn't communicate effectively because he doesn't see the point in it (e.g., in telling everyone else that Tommy's been set up).
“And Sammy didn’t take money, he took food. And Sammy didn’t take it from someone who’d helped us. Even you can see the difference.” And Cisco, of course, takes money from someone who'd helped him.
OH. Ouch. And, huh, interesting that it's James who did that in Homecoming — James has always been the one of them that had the most fluid moral sense, which he shares with Cisco (only James, of course, has his family and a core of morality to back him up).
It seems like there are a bunch of parallels between Seventeen and Homecoming, maybe? I wonder if anything is going to be different for me going in because I've read Homecoming now…
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Date: 2017-08-10 03:59 am (UTC)Ah, I forgot about Maybeth and the boxes! (I still have yet to get to Seventeen. I'd like to write up Runner before I get to Sons or Seventeen, so I don't fall too far behind :) ) I'm coming around to your opinion that it's probably something like dyslexia; that makes sense with this new data. The musical notes I would say is not a conclusive data point (again because I think musical memory works differently), but recipes and boxes and color… yeah, that's starting to add up.
Because I was doing them in the right order, but because I had to laboriously think through each step (and I still don't know how anyone else can do it any other way)
Oh, hold on, I want to know more about this thinking through it. So my thought here is that you look at piano keys and see a visual pattern. If I told you to press a sequence of keys (say, the beginning seven notes to Twinkle), you would basically map the first key I told you to the corresponding visual key, and then go back and figure out what the second key was, and map that… yeah, I can see how that would be laborious and time-consuming. I think this is not so different from what I do, with the large caveat that as I said before that I dont' think in terms of a sequence of keys but in terms of a phrase of notes -- but the map for me is pretty much completely automatic. (The automaticity comes because of a whole bunch of training, of course; but also in large part because, I think, of a pronounced feedback process between my ear and hand; this feedback process is what seems to be missing for you.) What if each key was labeled by a number, would that make it easier? Like if I could tell you 11 55 66 5 (and each key had a number sticker so you could just look at the keys and see where you were supposed to push). This is actually not that different from things I've seen to teach kids (colors instead of numbers are often used for pre-literate kids).
Of course this still doesn't at all answer your rhythm question -- I didn't even think about rhythm when I was trying to hack your music playing, huh — which probably says something about me. Possibly just that my major training is in violin — it's widely known in the music world that string players tend to be relatively crap at rhythm compared to other instrumentalists. (The reason for this is that string players have to place the fingers quite precisely to get the right pitch, so we tend to be hyper-focused on pitch and dismiss rhythm as that thing that you do after you get the pitch right.) But also I've noticed that my daughter has very good pitch and rather poor rhythm compared to other kids. I mean, at this point she's had some relatively intensive training on rhythm, so now she's now on or above the level I'd expect from a typical kid her age, but she definitely does not come by it naturally. (Whereas I don't ever remember not understanding rhythm fairly intuitively, but it's possible I don't understand it naturally myself — I too had intensive music training starting very young.)
Anyway, I wonder — and yeah, this is just a thought experiment at this point, since this is sounding less and less fun to actually do in real life (although if I ever was in the same place as you and a piano I might just try the sticker thing just to see, ha) — if one could set up a light, or something, to signal you when the key press was supposed to occur — well, okay, I don't wonder that part so much, I'm pretty sure it could be done though would probably be kind of painful — what I do wonder is whether repeated practice doing this would rewire your brain so that you would be able to match it up. I wonder this precisely because when I started rhythm work with my daughter, she appeared to have a great deal of trouble with it — like, it seemed like she had trouble hearing when she was doing it right or wrong, and would blithely play something e.g. not matched with the metronome at all and not appear to notice. She was able, however, to coordinate with clapping at the same time as I did (rhythm clapping is another widely used pedagogical trick that I remember doing when I was a kid), and with practice she's gotten better at even metronome rhythm work (though she still hates it).
Re Seventeen: I don't really understand why Voigt even bothers bringing in Cisco for a non-redemption arc, except maybe that she thought it would be interesting to see the flip side of it? (I don't find it interesting, which is why I question it. I'm kind of a sucker for redemption arc, though.)
Cisco seems uninterested in redemption; he knows damn well who Dicey is, when he asks her all those questions about her siblings and her grandmother and her...huh. Her mother. He never even asks about her father. I think I had missed that because of the societal expectation that mothers take care of their children, fathers are optional (Solitary Blue, says otherwise). But both Jeff and Mina ask “Where are their parents?”
Oh. OH. I had totally missed that (same societal expectations blinding me here). WHOA. Does he ever say anything about fathers?
However, before that, he makes it pretty clear he thinks he should be paid for the work he's doing, and Dicey agrees, and yet she never tells him. His theft at the end was unjustified and totally in character, but she didn't know that he was going to steal from her or that he was the father who abandoned her, so I can only judge her actions by the knowledge she had at the time. It's consistent with the way she takes Jeff for granted, and keeps telling herself she'll call him and doesn't. She does a lot of not reaching out in this book.
Yeesh. Dicey is definitely (has always been) rather poor at communication. I'm thinking here of the parallel view in Dicey's Song and Come a Stranger and how it's really, really easy to read her rebuffs of Mina's friendship overtures as racism (which it of course isn't, but how is Mina supposed to know). It's… really a good thing that she is marrying Jeff, who is better than average at communication (except when it impinges on his issues).
It's interesting to compare her to Bullet — Bullet is poor at communication, but in his case it's not because he isn't thinking about it, he just doesn't care… well — in the first half of the book, he isn't thinking about it because he doesn't care, but near the end of the book he is thinking about it and he still doesn't communicate effectively because he doesn't see the point in it (e.g., in telling everyone else that Tommy's been set up).
“And Sammy didn’t take money, he took food. And Sammy didn’t take it from someone who’d helped us. Even you can see the difference.” And Cisco, of course, takes money from someone who'd helped him.
OH. Ouch. And, huh, interesting that it's James who did that in Homecoming — James has always been the one of them that had the most fluid moral sense, which he shares with Cisco (only James, of course, has his family and a core of morality to back him up).
It seems like there are a bunch of parallels between Seventeen and Homecoming, maybe? I wonder if anything is going to be different for me going in because I've read Homecoming now…