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11/3/11
Kat,
I love your illustration of vanilla ice cream being called 'un-flavorly'. hahaha Yes, and yet, with my 'grade' for each assignment held in the hands of my teacher, you can only imagine how disquieting it is to me to have it implied in every class that others 'get it' when I 'don't'.

I think that it's worthwhile to open the topic of conversation for other LD artists, whether dyscalculic or even dyslexic, who have low abstract reasoning, on whether or not this relates to the type of art they produce. I'm sure that you didn't intend to do this, but saying, "I would be careful about turning your artistic preferences into a disability - I don't think it is a disability." makes me feel defensive. I haven't 'turned anything into a disability'. But I do respect your opinion that you don't think that there is a relationship between not being able to paint abstract art and having low abstract reasoning.

It's true that 'abstract art' or 'conceptual art' are not my preference, but it's one thing to 'look' at it, and a little different to 'make' it. I never minded that other people painted abstract art or conceptual art, but it was never something that I aspired to either. I wouldn't have tried to hurt their feelings for making it, and if there was some part of it that I admired, I would have said so. But now I find that the academic world has set up standards in making art that requires the student to 'progress' toward making conceptual art. Many of the students in my class don't know how to mix colors or how to use perspective in their paintings, yet the teacher gives them 'A's'. One young lady has painted almost the same 'painting' over and over for every assignment, because she can't figure out how to do anything else, and the teacher gave her an A. The young lady is very sweet, and it doesn't even give me pleasure to say this about her. I've gone through a metamorphasis this semester,... at first wondering how it was that I wasn't 'getting the memo',... then feeling picked on,... and now finally, yes, a little angry because I'm paying money for this! And this method of grading my work is causing me to have to quit the only degree that I should have been able to 'do', given that I can't remember names and dates, unusual Spanish verb conjugations, or do algebra. The teacher has an answer for everything though, and 'resistance is futile'. On the last assignment she suggested changes. It took me all week end to do them. (As if I had nothing better to do than re-do an assignment.) When I got my grade, she wrote that it didn't look like I'd given it much thought. <sighs> I'm just dragging myself to that class now. Thanks for your feed-back. - jus'