Cure for Learning Disabilities

A bold claim? Perhaps, but what if it is true? Various learning disabilities in children are easily cured. It doesn't take drugs or behavioral therapy, it just takes safety.


Think for a minute about a time when you were scared or uncertain. Maybe you felt physically threatened. Perhaps it was a more emotional fear. Whatever the circumstances, it is probably safe to say that all people have experienced fear. When you are afraid, is it harder to focus and attend to minute details? Do you feel the fight or flight syndrome begin and you take up an "on guard" position?

The sympathetic nervous system is a network of neurons that kicks into action when danger or threat is perceived. This is the scientific backing for the fight or flight response. When the sympathetic nervous system activates, it prepares your body to deal with the issue at hand, either shove a spear in the lion's face or run away from it (good luck on either proposition). Your body shuts down some activities, like digestion, and reroutes the internal resources to other functions, like moving your major muscle systems.

The whole purpose is to get you to a safer environment. Once resolution of the dangerous situation is accomplished, the parasympathetic nervous system takes control and returns your body to normal. Prolonged time in the sympathetically aroused state can lead to health problems. Is it far-fetched to believe that prolonged states of fight or flight mode could lead to diminished cognitive abilities?

Maybe you have already thought about this, but I haven't. I know there are a lot of kids out there facing uncertainty at home on a regular basis. One or both parents are neglectful or missing altogether. Or maybe they are present, but abusive. Economic troubles in the home lead to malnourishment and stress. Outside of the home there can be peer troubles. All of these variables can combine to make for threatening environment for a child. With their bodies at a constant state of fight or flight arousal, how can they focus on school work?

If this is the case with some children, then perhaps working providing safer environments ought to be the number one priority, leaving drugs out of the equation all together. Through TV and other media children are exposed to many worries and issues that may be more than they are capable of handling at a young age. With less than stellar parenting situations they don't have access to help in dealing with the information they are taking in. Children need time to be children. They don't need to know about the topics that so many Disney Channel and Nickleodeon programs are portraying. Parents need to be fully involved with the information their children are consuming, and offering explanation and assistance where necessary.

I think that if parents will get more involved with their children and provide a safe environment for their children, then the children will behave better and be able to learn better. They say you shouldn't corner a wild animal. If you have ever seen a frightened animal you know there isn't much hope of teaching it about the components of a sentence. This is a loose comparison, to provide a graphic image for your mind; I don't think children are like animals, not any more than I think there is an animal degree to all humans. The point is that as a society we need to be less willing to jump on the quick-fix express (such as pharmaceuticals) and more willing to make a concerted effort to help the people around us, especially our children and family members.

The Whimsical Revolution on Amazon's Kindle

I've done it! After a spontaneous search of the Internet to find out how to create an e-book to sell for the Kindle, I have published my blog to Kindle. In one sense I have failed miserably, as my intent when my search began was not to publish anything, especially not my blog. Then on the other hand, it is a complete success because I did something productive. Whether or not anyone will pay the $1.99 per month to have this blog mysteriously loaded onto their Kindle is up in the air, but this action about money, no sir, it was a sleep-deprived, impulse sale.

People always talk about impulse buys, so why not impulse sales? I'm sure it happens more than people are aware of. Why do impulse buys occur? It happens because someone is bored or depressed or manic and they have lost some of their impulse control. It happens to me all the time.

A week or so ago I had a phone conversation with someone about a job that I had been hoping for (have I ever mentioned that I count my chickens before they hatch, and keep all of the eggs in one basket, you know, for safe keeping... have I mentioned that?) and it turned out I didn't meet the expected education/experience requirements. It wasn't a major surprise that I wasn't the one for the job, that's the story of my post-college, job-applying life of the last 12 months. Really, not a big deal, but I was at the grocery store later that afternoon for a legitimate purchasing reason and walked out with approximately $9.00 worth of candy (meaning I spent $9.00 on candy, if I were to place value on the amount of candy I got it would be far less). It was an impulse buy directly related to my emotions of the day. It is easy to see how it could have been a sale that was made, that is, if I had anything worth selling and a venue to sell it through.

Well, I guess I do have a product worth selling, and when I happened to stumble on a venue through which to sell it, and my impulse control was wonky based on my job-induced boredom, the time was right to impulse-sell. Have you noticed how many times I am using hyphens? I noticed it. And if you head on over to the Amazon Kindle store, you will see my very own blog for subscription.

Sure, you are wondering why you’d want to pay two dollars per month to read the very same material you are reading right now for free. Yes, that was the end of that sentence, it might have seemed like a “but” ought to have come up and then I tell you why you do want to, but the truth is, there isn’t any good reason for it. Maybe there is one reason, and that reason would be so that you can take the Whimsical Revolution with you wherever you go. But honestly, there’s the “but,” I don’t think it is necessary. Don’t let me talk you out of it, however. If you want to be able to get this blog updated to your e-reading device every day, please do.

I subscribed for the 14 day free trial. It is really cool to see my blog on my Kindle, but not $1.99 per month cool. It looks good though. It is readable and brings in the last 25 posts for viewing. There is at least one post in that span that includes an embedded video from YouTube, obviously you miss out on that kind of stuff with the Kindle version. Overall, I am pleased with having it on my Kindle, but like I said, I’m not paying for it. I wrote it all! I do like to read my blog, and I often go back and read through old posts, I’m just not going to pay for it.

One final point to mention, I am going to try to be more disciplined in my blog posting habits. If you look at the archive links on the right-hand side you will notice that some months I’m posting more than once per day (okay, only one month, March 2010) and other months I’m posting only a single time (again, only once, July 2011). So now I will be posting on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of each week, at minimum, but probably that will be enough. This means 12 posts per month, give or take, depending on how the days fall within a month. This also means that I will be typing posts well ahead of the time I publish them, in some cases. This might improve the readability of them as I hopefully won’t get so distracted and head off on so many tangents, but no promises.

I hope you enjoy the new regulated scheduling of this blog and continue to read it. Feel free to share it with everyone. If you have a Kindle or other compatible e-reader and would like to have the freedom of reading this blog anywhere at any time, go get a free trial subscription and see how it treats you. I won’t regret it. Yes, that’s what I meant.

I Am a Refined Particle

Three days ago - or two, depending on how you count days - I started a Master's of education program. It is all through the wonder that is the Internet. I will not have to get dressed to go to class, just like that lazy kid high school program I've seen commercials for on TV. The TV I was watching when I was being lazy. I don't know if it is for high school or college, actually. So maybe I just dissed myself. Do the kids say "dissed" anymore? Is that cool to say still? Never mind, it isn't important. Nor is it important to know the commercial I am referring to. Just know that I am doing a graduate program through the Internet, at my leisure. You really don't even have to know that, though, if you don't want to. Having read it you know it, but you don't have to put any effort into remembering it for easy recall later.

Online classes are nice. I have taken a few of them so far. Two, to be precise, which you know I want to be. Precision is my main focus in life, after eating and sleeping. Sleeping! O! There is something I would like to be able to do again someday. I got distracted again, but that's how this blog writing goes. I haven't slept much or well over the last two days, or three, depending on how you count days. The sleep trouble should hopefully be over soon, I have quit my job. The job that was overnight, forcing me into an unnatural life of being nocturnal. What's good for the raccoon is not good for the whimsical revolutionary. How am I ever going to explain the title of this post if I keep letting these paragraphs get away from me?

The main component of the online classes I have participated in has been the discussion board. The professor posts a question or a topic and then each class member is required to reply to the professor's post and then subsequently respond to several other class member posts. It can be a fun process, and you can learn a lot. I've been hitting the discussion board this morning and have run across some really great thoughts shared by my class members. The first discussion question for the week touched on the differences between the undergraduate and graduate experiences. My favorite response so far has been one that detailed learning as a progression of building upon what has already been learned.

In studying memory in my cognitive psychology class I learned that we are better able to remember and recall information that we are able to tack on to something else that is present in our memory. Anchoring, that's the way I wanted to say it, but "tack on" was all that came to mind. I think an example of this could be how everyone says certain animals taste like chicken. Someone eats rattlesnake for the first time and they say it tastes like chicken. It may or may not taste that way, I don't know, I've never had it, and my perception of chicken taste may be different than yours (I believe I am a super-taster, perhaps I'll write a post about that next), now I can't even control sentences, let alone paragraphs; this sentence is finished. I was attempting to suggest that by saying something tastes like chicken, they are creating an anchor point for this new taste. It will be easier to recall the taste of rattlesnake because they already know what chicken tastes like, and if the snake is similar, then... Never mind, the example is a magnificent failure! Splendid!

So, learning as a progression? Yes, first you learn letters, then you put them into words, then you group words and have sentences, then the sentences never end and you build paragraphs that run away from you in distracted garbles of thoughts, and then you click "publish post" and sit back to admire the wonder that is Ajax's Whimsical Revolution. It is a series of anchors, or foundations, and then chains or steps or walls or however you want to go with the analogy. Line by line, idea by idea. It is a good way to proceed. And that was my favorite thought posted by a classmate.

Now for my contribution to the discussion board. Not (solely) to brag about my brilliance, but to relay my thoughts about a topic, which is why I started a blog in the first place. As a quick aside, is it unprofessional to mention your own blog in your blog? I do it often, and I seem to be doing it even more often-er in this particular post. There it is again! Just wondering.

In my comparison between the undergraduate and graduate experiences I compared formal education to a filtration process. In a filter system there are often several barriers. The purpose of these barriers is to stop the flow of something that is mixed with something else. Whether it is contaminants in air or bacteria in water, there are usually multiple stages for the item to pass through where different unwanted particulates are halted. It might be the case that there are three screens as part of the filter. The first blocks large objects from passing, the second blocks smaller objects, and the third blocks or kills the microscopic objects. Take a water filter, for instance. There might be a filter to block pebbles, but it lets sand through. Then there is a filter that blocks sand, but lets microorganisms through. Finally there is a filter that blasts the microorganisms with some form of energy that kills them, allowing their dead organism bodies to float through into your drinking water.

I guess you probably could have figured out the filtration process on your own, you didn't need me to explain it so fully, but what's done is done. I compared education to a filter to highlight the difference between undergrad and grad students. In elementary school everyone is there. It's a big party and everyone learns. Attendance is just the way it is. High school is pretty much the same, only you can get out of it a little more depending on how attentive or burned out your teachers are. But everyone is there, again. Then you move on to the university. At the undergraduate level there are still a lot of people there, many of whom want to be there to learn, but some who are there for other reasons. There is a filter in place between high school and college, it is called financial security. Okay, that's not what I want to get into, the filter I was suggesting in my discussion board post was that of interest and desire to learn.

College filters out some of the people who aren't interested in learning, making college a better environment to foster learning. When you move on to a graduate program, this filter occurs again and hopefully makes the learning environment even better. That was the point I was trying to make. Because of the different levels of school, hopefully the ones who show up to grad programs are the ones who want to learn, and it is that desire that makes a person a student. But you don't need formal class structure to have that desire, and you don't need an accredited diploma after your studies to make you educated. The desire that drives some people through the filtration system of school to become a refined particle in a specific area of study is a desire that can manifest itself in any person capable of thinking. This means you. I encourage learning in every instance of life. Learn and think and challenge ideas and see what is good. As a revolutionary, whimsical or not, I must note that education always precedes the uprising. Get educated and rise up. The end.

(Coming soon: what is a super-taster, and why do I think I am one?)

Sleeping with the Pillows

You are most likely familiar with the Italian-American gangster stereotype. Perhaps you have seen any number of television programs or Hollywood movies depicting the mobber archetype. Having this familiarity allows me to present you with a comparison without needing further background information provided. I think that is nice because it makes it easier to tell a story. Here is my story.

A few days ago I woke up from sleeping all day, which isn't lazy of me because I work all night. Anyhow, I was telling my wife that I think I was still in heavy sleep debt. You see, if you don't sleep the appropriate amount of time for your body each night, you end up owing your body sleep. You go into debt the same as if you don't pay your bills. The debt adds up and can do some real damage to your health. It is important not to go into sleep debt.

What does this have to do with mobsters? Nothing. As I was depicting my lack of sleep in these terms I pictured the Sandman as a mobster whom I was indebted to. I owed him some sleep and I hadn't paid up. I thought it was funny, to picture the Sandman in a Fedora coming after me to break my knees because I hadn't gotten enough sleep. Apparently this is one of those things that is less funny several days later.

Also, I am realizing that I don't really have a story, and my explanation of how I didn't need to give background information in order to make the comparison I wanted to make in the story that wasn't much of a story became highly anticlimactic. And then there is that last sentence that is out of control! The point is, you don't want to cheat the Sandman; he knows where you live and he has the power to make you sleep. Which aspect of the imaginary character works to overturn my allusion even more.

Why would the man who goes around making people sleep get mad at you if you aren't sleeping enough? It's like your barber getting mad at you because you haven't been cutting your own hair. So if the Sandman wants me to sleep and I am in sleep debt, meaning I haven't been sleeping enough, then he'd come to my rescue, right? I think I was going about this thing all wrong. If we look at it like the Sandman is giving me something in return for sleep, meaning I pay him back by sleeping, and then I'm not sleeping, I suppose then my logic lines up and we could say I am in sleep debt to him. In which case if he were part of the mob he might break my legs. But then we need to discover what it is that he is giving me that should make me sleep, only I take it and then don't sleep.

I suppose "being awake" is what he gives me. That's really the only cause for sleep that I can think of. If we are awake, at some point we will be asleep. That's just how it works. Maybe the Sandman makes it possible for me to be awake. Maybe he gives me something called "being awake" and I take it from him, but then I don't sleep enough to pay him back for it. If this were the case then I most certainly would be in a condition of default and I would owe him.

I suppose the comparison works after all. All it took was transforming a lovable mythical fellow from a Hans Christian Anderson poem into some form of monster. A monster who wants people to get enough sleep? Well, that doesn't make sense either. What's so bad about being asleep? Nothing. I love it. In fact I ought to be asleep right now. I got off work an hour and a half ago and it is definitely time to sleep.

Some Things You Don't Know...Yet

I'm not saying I know more than you, but in this case I do.

Item Number 1:

Happiness is on sale for $3.50/lb down at the Shaw's grocery store.

Item Number 2:

I found that generic "candy pieces" in store brand trail mix look a lot like M&M's, taste a lot like M&M's, but don't have the thermal functionality of M&M's. What I mean is that they melt in your hand! I was eating trail mix and the blue candy coated chocolate piece melted blue dye onto my hand skin, that is, the skin of my hand. It was alright though, I was wearing blue jeans. But I had an epiphany, the second M in M&M's stands for "mouth," naturally, the first M stands for "melts." Less naturally is the ampersand which stands for "in your," which doesn't make any sense, but you'll have to take that up with M&M/Mars.

That was ambiguous, the item was about what the M's stand for, not the similarity between the generic candy pieces and the brand name candy pieces, that was just gratuity for you for reading my blog.

Item Number 3:

We built this city on rock and roll. Just kidding, this city was built on a swamp, the real item 3 is that Pat Benatar invented the fist bump, although it really didn't become popular until some time in the last decade. I think sports players were using it for some time in the 1990's, but it didn't catch on to mainstream adolescent Americans until more recently. However, if you watch Benatar's "Love is a Battlefield" music video, and queue it up to 4 minutes and 53 seconds you will see that way back in 1983 Pat Benatar used the fist bump to congratulate her dancing gang for defeating the evil night-club-sleaze-ball-cocaine-dealer from Crocodile Dundee II. Mad props to Miss Benatar.

Item Number 4: When the men who weren't wearing pastel colored homespun shirts were defeated in the dance battle on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers I was slightly embarrassed to be a man...a man that doesn't wear pastel shirts and participate in dance battles. Hang on, my logic is flawed. I forgot how this was supposed to go. Never mind it, just stick with the first 3 items and you'll be fine.

Now you know!

But wait, there's more! For a limited time only (I just thought of another thought to share) here is item number 5 of things you don't know yet:

Agatha Christie is a famed murder mystery author. She has been popularized by her plays and novels, many of which have been converted into movies. Two of her popular characters, Miss Marple and Detective Hercule Poirot are immediately recognizable to fans of the BBC. Christie is one of my favorite authors, but I have realized recently that she hasn't written nearly as many books as the publishing company claims she has. They say 80, I say maybe half that. The rest of the books are simply rewrites. This summer I have read 4 Christie titles: The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), Curtain (1975), One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940), and Black Coffee (adapted from a play). Each book features the famed Poirot. Three of these four books feature Poirot working with his friend Hastings. Each of these books features a poisoning. Three of them feature a poisoning at a rural England mansion-estate. Two of them at the same mansion! I don't mean to detract from Christie's story writing, I love her books, but some of them are just the same story. I think there was a paragraph or two copied word for word between The Mysterious Affair... and Black Coffee. Incredulous! Whatever; they are great books to read. Lots of fun. Peace out.