On being an unexpected kinesthetic learner

(Crossposted today at We Are Like Your Child)

I start to rediscover that I’m a kinesthetic learner, and it’s odd. It’s so contrary to everything I’ve ever been told about myself, and it feels so good.

When we started learning about multiple intelligences theories, kids who were described as kinesthetic—as learning most naturally through movement or action—were dancers, naturally talented athletes, the class clowns, physical actors, the kids who could never sit still. Kids who were always in trouble for not being able to stay in their seats, likely to pick up a diagnosis of ADHD somewhere along the way. High-energy, daring, uninhibited, and loud.

And I was very quiet, very still, very inhibited. I was always in trouble in PE for not knowing what in the world I was doing or being totally unable to keep up with the rest of the class. I was badly coordinated and nowhere near fast enough for any team sport. I never placed in any event in Field Day. I failed out of gymnastics.

Kinesthetic learners were generally thought not to do well in school because of their need for activity and movement. I sat quietly in class and got all A’s. I had a photographic memory. Teachers were always scolding, “You can’t expect to only study the night before and do well on this test!” But I could. I got into the gifted class and kept my hands rolled up in my sleeves.

But all the while, I just ached to be taught how to do things. I clawed my skin off from having not enough to do with my hands. And I could feel the terrifying void that existed between the fact that I knew about a lot of things, but I didn’t know how to do almost anything. The scrutiny of other people was literally paralyzing. I resented more than anything as a kid when we’d be told that we were going to learn how to do a really cool thing, but then what we actually got was obviously a fake, dumbed-down version, of making gingerbread houses or uncovering fossils. People told me a lot about how I was never going to make it in the real world, but nobody seemed to want to teach me anything real.

But writing is movement, too, and I was better at that than most people. So is beading. So is loading electrophoresis gels.

As a child, making tuna salad or cutting up fruit for myself, people try to take knives away from me, sure that I’m going to cut myself, but I never do. (They do.) I never fall on steep hills or icy sidewalks when adults are sure I will. I never sprain an ankle toe-walking.

I could feel that if I could know a thing in my body, in my joints, in my bones, in how it behaved in my hands…anything I could make a physical habit out of, was a thing I’d always be able to do, that I could never really lose or forget, the way I’ve forgotten calculus almost entirely from disuse, and chemistry, and how I’ve lost my photographic memory to other cognitive demands. (That one makes me mad.)

I start stealing opportunities to do that. Time without a well-meaning adult hovering over my shoulder was time to steal fire.

We have typing class in 9th grade, and once I start learning, my fingers twitch constantly, ghost-typing out any sequences of overheard words against my thigh. I had no idea what was wrong with me, why I couldn’t stop.

I was in high school, and may’ve been listening to a lecture from my grandfather about the difference between people who work with their minds and people who work with their hands, and thought silently, “If I don’t work with my hands, I’ll go insane.”

My acting teacher tells me to get my hands out of my sleeves. I turn out to be good at acting.

At a new job, I initially panic when I learn that my nightly duties will involve moving pianos by myself. But I quickly get a sense of the individual moods and idiosyncracies of the Hamburg, the New York Steinway, the Fazioli—their resistance and center of gravity. They almost have individual wills, like baby elephants.

I get told at a meetup that I have very loud hands, and it makes me so happy.

I start teaching myself a little ASL to make up for the apocryphal childhood gesture language I was trained out of, that I have no conscious memory of, and it feels like breathing air instead of doing complicated sorcery.

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