On Facebook the other day, I got a friend request from my freshman high school English teacher. But before I saw that, I got a private message from her. She said that whether or not I friended her, she wanted to reach out to me, asking if I remembered her. Then she proceeded to say some very complimentary things about me as her student. I was surprised to hear from her, and I did remember her all of these many decades later. Then we did a brief catch-up on what we had been doing for all of the years since then. I had a smile the rest of the day as I thought about her kind words.
A few days later, I was relating this story to Wally, and as he was trying to remember his teachers' names, he could tell me where all of their classrooms were. He remembered some teachers and some classmates, but he remembered almost all of the locations of his classes. And that was the first thing that came to his mind.
That surprised me because my first thoughts were about my classmates and my teachers (which, by the way, I can name almost all of my teachers for my 12 years of school before college). I could come up with some locations when I thought about it. Maybe part of these differences between us comes from the fact that he has good spatial skills and I do not. I'm not sure.
I found this school discussion very interesting. It was much like the time when I discovered that Wally didn't see many pictures as he read, but more imagined sounds. He was in high school when he told me this, and that he was very much an auditory learner. This floored me because it seemed impossible to me to read and not see pictures, because that's the way my brain works.
Both of these examples reminded me that you never really know what or how someone is thinking. There are some things we do or perceive that are so innate to us, we don't even think to consider that others could be perceiving things another way. And this is even before we factor in the nurture or experience part of the equation.
So when someone does something that doesn't make sense to me (and there's a lot of that), I try to imagine how they might be thinking differently than the way I do. And sometimes, I'm successful. Sometimes.
Until next time...
