BEN’S SPATIAL SURPRISE

BEN’S SPATIAL SURPRISE
When our son Benjamin was born in 1992 with Spina Bifida, we were told by his occupational therapists not to expect much from him in spacial reasoning. Spatial learning, one of the eight forms of learning cited by Howard Gardner, is the talent that empowers designers, physicists, architects and engineers to created their wonders. It is the ability to see things in their relationships with other things. Their explanation was that children with mobility challenges cannot perceive space properly. They don’t “navigate” through it by means of the own bodies. Ben motates with the assistance of a wheelchair, thereby “measuring” the space through wheels not with feet. They went so far as to suggest that we not encourage him into any discipline that would need spatial reasoning, since he would never be adept at it. Much to their surprise recently, when Ben was tested, he scores very high on spatial reasoning. They contended that how could this be since he doesn’t “more through space” on his own. They are quite mistaken. Ben does move through space at a piano keyboard. He goes up and down and divides the space into varying parts: large steps, small steps, skips, adjacent steps, distant steps. In addition he combines “things” such as notes and rhythms and not only divides space but time as well in music. I wonder how many mobility impaired children miss the opportunity to develop in this way by not having a musical instrument with which to “walk”.