I’ve noticed that my Perfect Non-Reader, when she attempts to catch a ball, by instinct brings her hand up and out toward the ball, rather than moving her hand with the ball as it comes to her. This is one reason why such attempts so rarely succeed. Another reason is that her body and head generally flinch away from the ball, and then she also closes her eyes fairly often as well. Not really very good at catch, my Perfect Non-Reader, but she reads well and does arithmetic like a champion.
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I tried to explain about moving your hand with the ball as it comes to you. I may have been successful at imparting the concept. I was certainly unsuccessful at improving her rate of success.
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I don’t think I ever had a real problem catching a ball that was thrown right to me. I have horrible depth perception, though, so a ball thrown on an arc from any distance is a mystery to me. I was a terrible outfielder in Little League, and am still a terrible outfielder when I make the rare attempt. I have soft(ish) hands, but I have trouble getting to the ball. And I’m slow and have a lousy arm.
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My arm isn’t quite as lousy as it was when I was a kid, though, largely because when I was in high school I finally figured out follow-through<\/I>. Mostly as applied to bowling, but I was able to see how it worked more generally, which improved my throwing, batting, and pool playing as well. I’m not sure how I managed to get to sixteen or so without getting follow-through, but then, I expected myself to be lousy at sports, so I attributed my lousiness at sports to my asthma, nearsightedness and, I’m afraid, my verbal and mathematical ability (as if it was a trade-off, and people who were good at sports had<\/I> to be slow-witted, which was observably untrue—some people are slow and some are quick, some are bright and others dim, some are big and others small, and some people are quick and bright and<\/I> big, and some people are slow and dim and small, and even the slow, dim small ones have a spark of the Divine fire, but try telling that to me when I was ten years old, if you want to waste your time travel). And to be sure a good deal of my lousiness at sports was due to my asthma, nearsightedness and meager size, but some was due to my not learning how best to use what height, eyesight and wind I had.
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I don’t think much of the theory of multiple intelligences as cognitive science, but it does seem to be a good source of vocabulary for talking about people being different, one to another. Whether kinesthetic intelligence is an actual thing or not, I imagine it’s clear when I say I am kinesthetically stupid; my body does not, on the whole, do exactly what I want it to. I can’t draw a straight line, for instance, nor kick a ball with any real aim, nor navigate through a room without bumping into the furniture three or four times out of ten. But just because I read quickly and easily, I don’t think it takes any great wit to be able to read, and just because other people are dextrous and strong doesn’t mean I can’t catch a ball that’s thrown at me. And, in fact, in my teenage years, I learned to juggle, spending hours and hours and hours throwing a ball from one hand to the other until it usually went where I wanted it to.
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I don’t care if my Perfect Non-Reader learns to juggle. I would like her to overcome her kinesthetic stupidity to the extent of being able to catch and throw, and sometimes hit a ball with a bat. Mostly, I don’t want her to believe, as I did, that her kinesthetic handicap prevents her from reaching that level, because it doesn’t, unless she lets it.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger drops the ball.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11081"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18316,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11081\/revisions\/18316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}