Past as Future

[outlier_lynn]

When I was in 4th grade in a St. Mark's Lutheran School in Sunnyvale, California, I had enormous problems spelling the word sandwich. Sometimes it would be "sanwich" other times it would be "sandwitch" and still other times it would be "sanwhich."

Mr. Ohlmann, our teacher, had a few policies about spelling. A misspelled word would be on the next spelling test. Misspell a word, write it out 20 times. As the weeks passed, "sandwich" appeared an increasing number of times on each test. He had a few policies about how children should be treated, too. He was a bully who believed in public ridicule and public punishment.

I have collapsed all the "sandwich" memories into one really awful moment in my young life. I was traumatized by that incident and a few others at that school. I am quite sure that I threw the breaks on my future for at least 15 years because of it. I had an authority figure at school and one at home telling and anyone who would listen that I was stupid and a failure.

Nothing like "knowing" that I could not succeed to limit the choices I saw for myself.

When I am thinking of something new in my life -- like a career change -- all the reasons why I shouldn't get examined. I like to ask the question "Who told me and why do I believe them?" Mr. Ohlmann ran my life for many, many years. I shouldn't have believed anything from him that dealt with relating to people.

ObChildren: Children increase the importance of anything we say or do to them. Anyone who thinks they "need" to spank their child to get a point across is making a grave mistake.

ObSex: Spanking is for adult play. :)

Love,
Love and Light

Comments

[scixual.livejournal.com]

The "true" origins of "sammy" huh?

Out of curiosity, was your hearing at all impaired as a child?

That sort of chronic spelling error often comes form not being able to "hear" the sound quite right during certain developmental stages.

[crazed-lynn.livejournal.com]

My hearing sensitive is and always has been your frie^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H fine. But I am reasonably convinced that the processing software was written by Mircrosoft. I have to be very, very intentional in my listening to get it. And I have to hear something many times before I can pattern match.

I think it's one reason I don't use people's names as part of my mental sorting and storing. I ahve noticed that with many vowel sounds in English, that I can't figure out what vowel I'm hearing. So I don't know if a word should end with ible or able, ant or ent, and soforth. And the database for how words are spelled is failing.
[interrupted for a meatspace conversation with the person I'm replying to. Live is soooo weird!]

Jan Hansen was the source of "Sammy" but I think it stuck to me from that distant trauma.

Re:

[scixual.livejournal.com]

In my linguistics class, we learned that sometimes a head cold at a VERY young age affects the pattern-recognition software later -- there's a crucial period when a baby has to hear language clearly.

*shrug* You've learned the workaround by now, regardless of cause.

[machineplay.livejournal.com]

Ah, I had one of those. I'm still not over it. Mr. Bezotozny was quite insane, we discovered later (he had an eventually fatal brain tumour), and we were all right to be terrified of him. There was a special program that the put intelligent kids through in grades 6,7,8 where I grew up and all the teachers were quite horrendous; ranging from the violent, like Bezotozny, to the molesting, like Sandler and Genge. Bezotozny was the one who shredded all my writing and stood me up so that the class would have a good look at "someone who will never be good for anything". It was a stunning travesty and it's one of the few things that I haven't quite managed to reconcile in my head in terms of healing childhood wounds.

[calialleykat.livejournal.com]

{{{{{warmhugs}}}}}} In my case it wasnt a teacher it was my stepfather. I have a real rapport with animals and for as long as I can remember I wanted to be a Vet(the animal doc not the combat variety). Im certainly smart enough, but i had some trouble with math and since Im dyslexic, with spelling as well. stepfather told me repetedly he wasnt suprised I was having trouble with math case"Its been proven girls are bad at math" which i had drilled into my head so long and hard that I came to believe it and since I was told much of vet training is math and science, i gave up my dream. Later I went through nursing school, which is the EXACT same thing on a lesser scale and had little difficulty at att with either the math or the chemistry. Graduated 3rd in my class, 3.95GPA, cum laude.