Speaker 1: Hi, I'm your host, doctor Lori, and welcome to Universally Unique.
Speaker 1: Exploring the neurodiverse world of the extraordinary. This podcast foster's
Speaker 1: curiosity and understanding about neurodiversity while empowering individuals with tools
Speaker 1: for acceptance and inclusion in classrooms, the workplace, and communities.
Speaker 1: Featuring shared stories of neurodiverse life experiences, it sheds light
Speaker 1: on navigating a world not designed for diversity. Universally Unique
Speaker 1: starts now. Hi, this is doctor Lori. Welcome to Universally Unique.
Speaker 1: My guest today is doctor Stephen Pearl, and before we
Speaker 1: hear his story of neurodiversity, we are going to take
Speaker 1: three box breaths. I will count for us. We'll breathe
Speaker 1: in for four, hold for four, breathe out for four,
Speaker 1: hold for four, and then do the next breath. So
Speaker 1: breathe in two three four, hold two three four, breathe
Speaker 1: out two three four, hold two three four. Breathe in
Speaker 1: two three four, hold two three four, breathe out two
Speaker 1: three four, hold two three four, breathe in two three four,
Speaker 1: hold two three four, breathe out two three four, hold
Speaker 1: two three four aside to let it out, all right,
Speaker 1: So doctor Pearl. Thank you for joining me today. Is
Speaker 1: it okay if I call you Steven?
Speaker 2: Absolutely okay.
Speaker 1: So if you would sort of tell us your journey
Speaker 1: that you've been on with learning more about your own neurodiversity.
Speaker 1: I know this has been a long learning process. It's
Speaker 1: been going on for a while.
Speaker 2: So actually I have this vivid recollection at age six,
Speaker 2: I guess in first grade. I know where I was seated.
Speaker 2: I can see the whole room with my dad reading
Speaker 2: a book, and I don't remember what the book said,
Speaker 2: but I'll make it up. It's my typical made up
Speaker 2: part of the story is that it said I'm reading
Speaker 2: the Big Red Dog. And my father looks at me
Speaker 2: with like, you know, sort of astonishment and says what
Speaker 2: And I said the Big Red Dog? And he asked
Speaker 2: me again and I said the Big Red Dog. And
Speaker 2: then he points to where the word red would be
Speaker 2: and there's no red, and he says, where do you
Speaker 2: see red? And I start crying because it was their daddy.
Speaker 2: I know that they wanted to hold me back a year,
Speaker 2: but my dad was trained as an educator and one
Speaker 2: of his classmates was the school principal, so he got
Speaker 2: him to push me along and my dad changed jobs
Speaker 2: a lot, so this was in a suburb of Buffalo,
Speaker 2: then moved to Toronto, moved back to another Buffalo suburb,
Speaker 2: and then the second half of fifth grade we moved
Speaker 2: to Wellesley, mass And for people who do not know,
Speaker 2: Wellesley is a rather well to do suburb of Boston,
Speaker 2: my dad had declared bankruptcy, so I'm not a child
Speaker 2: of wealth, and that's how we ended up. I don't know,
Speaker 2: that's how we ended up in Wellesley from bankruptcy and
Speaker 2: nice recovery. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well and you know,
Speaker 2: Wellesley was for me just a watershed from everything, you know,
Speaker 2: like every part of life in so many different ways.
Speaker 2: And prior to Wellesley, I would say that the only
Speaker 2: thing I excel that in school was science. Everything else
Speaker 2: I did okay. But in my fifth grade teacher was
Speaker 2: somebody who wouldn't let you phone it in. You know.
Speaker 2: She was what we used to describe as a battle axe.
Speaker 2: One of my classmates had her mom had her for
Speaker 2: fifth grade also, yeah, and so she really push me
Speaker 2: on math. By sixth grade, I did self paced math.
Speaker 2: I did the entire math book by myself before I
Speaker 2: had joined the rest of the class for something a
Speaker 2: different book. But in seventh grade I went through a
Speaker 2: whole battery of tests with an educational psychologist which was
Speaker 2: based on the recommendations from my fifth and sixth grade teacher.
Speaker 2: So in middle school and they put me in eighth
Speaker 2: grade instead of taking social studies, I had a special
Speaker 2: ed class. And if this was today, it would never
Speaker 2: happen because I read and did math above my grade level.
Speaker 2: But what my fifth and sixth grade grade teachers identified
Speaker 2: was that my verbal skills were dramatically outstripping anything that
Speaker 2: I did writing, and so I had a special ed class.
Speaker 2: It was an experimental program from HW. So you know,
Speaker 2: I often say to people, I probably have the longest
Speaker 2: diagnosis of learning disabilities of anyone they'll meet, because that
Speaker 2: was done in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: Wow, And it was very specifzific one in the area
Speaker 1: of writing, because you're reading and your math were above
Speaker 1: grade level.
Speaker 2: Well it was it was all sort of learning disabilities,
Speaker 2: you know at that point in time that they just.
Speaker 1: Jumbled it all together. But in this current day and age,
Speaker 1: they would identify it as a learning disability in the
Speaker 1: area of writing or what they would describe as dysgraphia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, no reading, and there was hearing and also
Speaker 2: fine motor control. Oh okay, I remember the sort of
Speaker 2: class activity that, in hindsight I say was the one
Speaker 2: that deal would find motor control was using a very flat,
Speaker 2: brightly colored mosaics what my kids in school when they
Speaker 2: were in elementary school, the teachers called math manipulatives, okay,
Speaker 2: And we would make these huge mosaics on you know,
Speaker 2: a six foot diameter table. So if you push a
Speaker 2: little bit hard because they're mostly triangles or yeah, what's
Speaker 2: what's the shape when it's two triangles on top, you know,
Speaker 2: one on top of the other, and and and you
Speaker 2: would move, you know, if you screwed it up while
Speaker 2: you had all these other people who worked on it also,
Speaker 2: so you had to fit and fit it all together again.
Speaker 2: And there are also activities they did that were specific
Speaker 2: to hearing. Mm hmm, although I you know, there's a
Speaker 2: lot of what I think they identified at hearing was
Speaker 2: just the difference of having a Buffalo accent, the Toronto
Speaker 2: accent to Wellesley you know, Massachusetts accent. But you know,
Speaker 2: my wife would say, I still have hearing difficulties, but
Speaker 2: that's I.
Speaker 1: Think Yeah, that's that's what our wife say, right, right exactly.
Speaker 1: I don't think he it's not so much that he's
Speaker 1: not hearing, it's that he's.
Speaker 2: Not listening, right, And you know, and and and I'd
Speaker 2: say from my own standpoint, you know, I realized that
Speaker 2: I don't have very linear thinking. So throughout high school
Speaker 2: when I had to write papers, my mother would type
Speaker 2: them for me, and i'd write them out longhand and
Speaker 2: it'd be the kind of thing that, you know, I'd
Speaker 2: get two or three pages into it, and then I
Speaker 2: would write a whole new paragraph that I put a
Speaker 2: big carrot down the side, write a letter A, and
Speaker 2: then go back and write a little A. And she
Speaker 2: would insert that in there. And I know the thing
Speaker 2: that fixed that and made me from someone who didn't write,
Speaker 2: I mean, he took a class in college and creative writing.
Speaker 2: What took me from a non writer to a writer
Speaker 2: was a computer because the nonlinear thinking was irrelevant. I
Speaker 2: stream of consciousness, put it all there and then jumble
Speaker 2: it back around afterwards. It's also a computer screen seemed
Speaker 2: to work better with the way I can read.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think for many students, folks have figured out
Speaker 1: that giving them a keyboard and a computer changed everything.
Speaker 1: And then for some other students that actually is not
Speaker 1: the right way to go, and looking at everybody from
Speaker 1: an individual perspective is really really critical. Some kids do
Speaker 1: better if you if you actually dictate, you know, into
Speaker 1: some kind of you know, program that that'll accept the
Speaker 1: audio part and then go back and figure out I
Speaker 1: just talked at it, and now let me figure out
Speaker 1: how to rearrange it.
Speaker 2: And and the audio is an interesting thing because when
Speaker 2: I was in chiropractic college, and you know, an enormous
Speaker 2: volume of material to read, and I would tape record
Speaker 2: my classes, and so I was. I was in school
Speaker 2: in Texas from seventy nine to eighty three, and I
Speaker 2: bought this very early tape cassette tape player that would
Speaker 2: play back things at a faster speed. I can listen faster,
Speaker 2: but it didn't make the pitch go high. It you know,
Speaker 2: chopped out little pieces and squished it together.
Speaker 1: Oh so it didn't sound like Mini Mouse.
Speaker 2: Right exactly, which you know, if you do this with
Speaker 2: YouTube or any different reels, you can go and change
Speaker 2: the playback speed and it doesn't make it sound like
Speaker 2: like Minni. And Mickey was oh, snoopy. I thought, I
Speaker 2: thought I had, I thought a mouse on it.
Speaker 1: I needed that tape recorder when I was taking a
Speaker 1: gross anatomy because I very faithfully and religiously taped every
Speaker 1: single lecture but never listened to them again because they
Speaker 1: took two hours and I did like, I couldn't figure
Speaker 1: out how to where the time was. I didn't do
Speaker 1: well in that class. But that's that's somewhat I am
Speaker 1: now a special educator and not what I had originally
Speaker 1: started out to be that needed to pass gross anatomy.
Speaker 1: But so I think, though you're your nonlinear thinking, though
Speaker 1: has taken you in a variety of different directions, and
Speaker 1: it has opened you up to a variety of different
Speaker 1: I don't know if I want to call them subsets
Speaker 1: or different aspects of your chiro chiropractic career. Would that
Speaker 1: be correct?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I practiced the New York from eighty
Speaker 2: three till ninety one, and in the last couple of years,
Speaker 2: I sort of, you know, I started reading actually a
Speaker 2: lot more scientific literature and the things that I was
Speaker 2: seeing with patients. I started asking the question, let's you know,
Speaker 2: investigate this from a you know, a research standpoint, and
Speaker 2: I started jumbling in my head about doing that, and
Speaker 2: then the opportunity came along when the University of Bridgeport
Speaker 2: started their chiropractic program in nineteen ninety one, and I
Speaker 2: sold my practice and was the first faculty member hired then.
Speaker 2: And then during during the time period that I was
Speaker 2: at you b the nonlinearity comes into the fact that
Speaker 2: my original research was all biomechanics related, and then I
Speaker 2: don't know, I'd have a conversation with someone and we'd
Speaker 2: think up an idea, and then we'd go that way,
Speaker 2: and then I'd have a conversation with somebody else and
Speaker 2: we'd go this way. And so I have a pretty
Speaker 2: diverse set of published papers. And the weirdest one is
Speaker 2: that my right now most cited paper is about AI.
Speaker 1: Oh, okay, fairly recent.
Speaker 2: Two years ago, and it's my previously most cited paper
Speaker 2: was one I did with some colleagues on factors affecting
Speaker 2: Masters athletes, and that one, you know, was was way
Speaker 2: up there and in less than and that was thirty
Speaker 2: years ago, and this AI one in two years is
Speaker 2: blown past that. For a number of citations, I mean
Speaker 2: every day I get some notification almost every day, I
Speaker 2: get a notification that was cited by another journal.
Speaker 1: So give me a little bit of a give me
Speaker 1: the abstract on this on this AI paper, is it
Speaker 1: focusing on how you would use AI and your practice
Speaker 1: or what is it?
Speaker 2: Was? It was really about can AI write scholarly papers?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: Okay? And we you know, we discussed that issue and
Speaker 2: discuss the issue, you know, which is pretty old tech
Speaker 2: at this point in time, about how to determine whether
Speaker 2: something was written by AI. But I guess it's foundational
Speaker 2: to a lot of people that we were the first
Speaker 2: ones asking this question. And then what we also did
Speaker 2: was we had an AI I think it was chech
Speaker 2: Gpt write the paper and then see could we identify,
Speaker 2: you know, because we had already written it, but then
Speaker 2: see if it wrote the paper and could we identify
Speaker 2: or did it come up with something similar to what
Speaker 2: we did.
Speaker 1: So well, that's interesting and I think currently within education,
Speaker 1: I know, my husband came back yesterday and said something
Speaker 1: about kids are handing in work that was completely done
Speaker 1: by AI. They don't even have enough I don't know, desire, knowledge,
Speaker 1: understanding or whatever that you should at least try to
Speaker 1: make it sound like a yours. But I think that's,
Speaker 1: you know, becoming a really big issue. It's it's an
Speaker 1: awful out Like the Internet, in my opinion is it's
Speaker 1: incredibly useful in so many ways and also incredibly detrimental.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I agree. Well, you know that's so. I
Speaker 2: think it's fifteen years ago or so. I was teaching
Speaker 2: a ergonomics class that you be, and fully half of
Speaker 2: my class took their research project, which was to redesign
Speaker 2: something in an ergonomic way. They had to do four
Speaker 2: different things. They took them from the web, and the
Speaker 2: dumbest part, I mean, if you're gonna cheat, be a
Speaker 2: little bit smart about this. Most of them took it
Speaker 2: from a website I shared with them to give them
Speaker 2: examples of how to do it.
Speaker 1: You would think that I graduate students would be a
Speaker 1: little more savvy than that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I actually just recently read an interesting implementation
Speaker 2: in AI and education, which was to tell the students
Speaker 2: to have an AI write the assignment and then verify
Speaker 2: what the AI said.
Speaker 1: No, that's it. I like that idea because then it
Speaker 1: helps them see It was useful in one way, but
Speaker 1: it also created some other problems over here or when
Speaker 1: the teacher gets basically the same paper like from five
Speaker 1: different students. You know, then you start to go, oh,
Speaker 1: you either all worked on this together or you all
Speaker 1: talk to the same AI person and they wrote it
Speaker 1: for you.
Speaker 2: Well, I think part of it is getting them to
Speaker 2: figure out that the AI is hallucinating or that it's
Speaker 2: not using we'll say, well verified sources to begin with.
Speaker 2: It might not be hallucinating, but it's it's chosen sources
Speaker 2: that it shouldn't trust. And in fact, that idea of
Speaker 2: looking at sources that shouldn't trust is what actually prompted
Speaker 2: the whole idea about the paper we wrote because I
Speaker 2: I asked AI a question that I knew the answer to,
Speaker 2: posted it to a Facebook group for chiropractors and the
Speaker 2: answer I came up with was inconsistent with what the
Speaker 2: best scientific evidence is at this point in time. And
Speaker 2: one of the editors of British uh British medical journal
Speaker 2: Sports Medicine was in the group and said, hey, we
Speaker 2: should write a paper about AI. That's how that happened.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well it's I mean, it's like the more advanced
Speaker 1: version of Wikipedia when students were using that as they're
Speaker 1: like your primary source. Now that that might that might
Speaker 1: be a place to gather some information and move on, right,
Speaker 1: you find some find some buzzwords, and and move on.
Speaker 1: So tell me a little bit more about your educational
Speaker 1: experiences or maybe just life in general. Is there anyone
Speaker 1: who you would say was kind of your champion, your
Speaker 1: cheerleader while you were working through some of the process
Speaker 1: that you went through to figure out how you operate best.
Speaker 2: In the world. Me, it was, and you know, literally
Speaker 2: after after that middle school class, and I should say
Speaker 2: in that class, you know, well say I'm pretty high functioning.
Speaker 2: There were people in that class in eighth grade and
Speaker 2: in ninth grade who were incapable of actually reading, and
Speaker 2: you had to have a certain minimum IQ score to
Speaker 2: get into this, so that you know that that was
Speaker 2: their their check to make sure this was not an
Speaker 2: intelligence issue. After that, you know, I don't think any
Speaker 2: of that information transferred to because I didn't go to
Speaker 2: high school in Wellesley. We moved to Northern Jersey. I
Speaker 2: don't know whether that went with my records or whether
Speaker 2: they cared at all. I mean, I remember my freshman
Speaker 2: year in math, the the teacher gave me a B
Speaker 2: in the first quarter even though I scored one hundred
Speaker 2: on every test because you didn't do the homework. I
Speaker 2: didn't do any of the homework ever, and I mean
Speaker 2: it was just too easy. And she, for whatever reason
Speaker 2: left after the first quarter, and the guy who replaced
Speaker 2: her was like, you get a hundred, I don't care
Speaker 2: whether you do the homework or not. Palm. That was
Speaker 2: me having to deal with it myself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a that's a common teacher thing where they
Speaker 1: just really insist that homework is so valuable and it
Speaker 1: is depending on what kids to do, but sometimes you
Speaker 1: ask them to do stuff that has no value, and
Speaker 1: then you get caught in that cycle of if you
Speaker 1: don't bring your homework in, I'm lowering your grade even
Speaker 1: though you understand the material.
Speaker 2: And then harder homework, well that would be true too,
Speaker 2: And so you know, through high school, you know, it
Speaker 2: was I'm going to skate. To a large degree, it
Speaker 2: was all a non issue for me from that point on.
Speaker 2: You know, it was an issue, but I just worked
Speaker 2: my way around it. And so you know, nobody helped
Speaker 2: me doing any of it at any point in time.
Speaker 1: So you know, I think maybe perhaps a couple of
Speaker 1: things happened as you moved from Massachusetts to New Jersey.
Speaker 1: Sometimes school districts don't want to know that you were
Speaker 1: getting special education services because they need to pay for those,
Speaker 1: although you were kind of on the cusp of that
Speaker 1: legal action. And other times I think records get lost
Speaker 1: or don't get passed along as efficiently as they need to.
Speaker 1: And then maybe even by the time somebody figured out that,
Speaker 1: you know, your paperwork showed up six months later, it
Speaker 1: became on it was unnecessary, you know. I guess there's
Speaker 1: a piece of me though that's a little bit saddened
Speaker 1: by the fact that there wasn't anybody who was sort
Speaker 1: of cheering you on or champion you in any way.
Speaker 1: Was there anyone as you got further along in your
Speaker 1: education or was college and chiropractic school somewhat similar in
Speaker 1: that regard is that you just figured stuff out for yourself.
Speaker 2: I just figured that stuff out for myself. I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, I went to I went from high school
Speaker 2: to Rental or Polytechnic Institute, and I'll say at RPI
Speaker 2: did not do that well, did actually pretty poorly, And
Speaker 2: it sort of was the easier the class, the worst
Speaker 2: the grade, and then a whole bunch of different things
Speaker 2: happened in my last semester. When my grades came, I
Speaker 2: was really thinking I was going to do. The best
Speaker 2: i'd done that year was a three to five and
Speaker 2: I got a zero point nine. I mean, I had
Speaker 2: a ninety eight average going into one final. I got
Speaker 2: a D in that class. I had a ninety two
Speaker 2: average going into a final of another course. I got
Speaker 2: a D. In that course. I was doing a self
Speaker 2: pace research project, and I thought I did not you know,
Speaker 2: you know, students don't know what the hell's going on
Speaker 2: in academia. And I thought, well, I'm working really hard.
Speaker 2: I'm working with my advisor, but we didn't produce anything yet,
Speaker 2: so I got it incomplete. I thought I was going
Speaker 2: to get an A because of what I was doing.
Speaker 2: And I have to say that that was one of
Speaker 2: the best semesters in college I ever had. And not
Speaker 2: that I was, you know, on drugs all the time
Speaker 2: and having fun. It's not to say it wasn't either,
Speaker 2: but I'd learned more in that semester through the semester,
Speaker 2: during the semester than I learned in any other semester
Speaker 2: ever in college. I think until I got into grad
Speaker 2: school and the other thing was. From a personal standpoint,
Speaker 2: it taught me that failure isn't the worst thing in life.
Speaker 2: You know. In the end, my parents still of me,
Speaker 2: life still went on. I had already transferred to Sunni Buffalo,
Speaker 2: so the you know, the grades were irrelevant. I'd already
Speaker 2: gotten into suiting Buffalo. And but in Buffalo, I thought,
Speaker 2: you know, the change, change the major and change of
Speaker 2: things would change things. And in fact, once again, if
Speaker 2: the class was easy, I did poor in the class.
Speaker 2: And I didn't really fix myself from a standpoint of
Speaker 2: as how do I study and how do I do that?
Speaker 2: Until I got into Chiropractic College, and you know, and
Speaker 2: and there I finally felt like a fish in water.
Speaker 2: From an educational standpoint, well, I.
Speaker 1: Would suspect too. By the time you get to a
Speaker 1: graduate degree, you've narrowed the focus down to something that
Speaker 1: you know that you're very interested in. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: mean the good news bad news about undergraduate programs is
Speaker 1: they ask you to take a variety of courses because
Speaker 1: sometimes you don't really know what you're going to do,
Speaker 1: or they're thinking that we're creating well rounded citizen sense,
Speaker 1: which we may or may not be doing. So then
Speaker 1: you know, here you are and you know English literature
Speaker 1: or whatever, and you don't necessarily like it, but you
Speaker 1: really like you know, I don't know a math class
Speaker 1: or a science class or a psychology class, but you
Speaker 1: have to take you know, you have to sort of
Speaker 1: things off the whole buffet and not order just the
Speaker 1: stuff you want off the menu, which I think is
Speaker 1: is good and bad. You know. I think it helps
Speaker 1: students figure out maybe where they want to be or
Speaker 1: what they want to do, especially if they have no idea.
Speaker 1: And other times I think we're wasting people's time because
Speaker 1: they already know where they're going and we should probably
Speaker 1: just get there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then and then I'd say, you know, when
Speaker 2: I was practicing, I did a lot of volunteer work,
Speaker 2: both in my profession and profession related but not in
Speaker 2: the profession. I was involved in track and field in
Speaker 2: New York, and I was involved in say professional organizations
Speaker 2: within sports medicine, and both of those were like tremendously demanding,
Speaker 2: lots of things that go on. And my wife is
Speaker 2: a list writer. The list don't work for me because
Speaker 2: I don't get everything off the list, and then I
Speaker 2: have to rewrite the list. And I got the I
Speaker 2: got a very early software that handled up keeping checklists
Speaker 2: of things and and that worked for my brain. And
Speaker 2: you know, and then from that one, I got a
Speaker 2: Palm Pilot and then you know, work my way to
Speaker 2: you know, I still use one piece of software called
Speaker 2: Omnifocus to manage tasks. But you know, my colleagues in
Speaker 2: both of those organizations were always amazed by you know,
Speaker 2: I'd say I'd call you in two weeks and two
Speaker 2: weeks to the day, I'd call them. You know, I'd
Speaker 2: say I'd have something done at a particular date, and
Speaker 2: I always did. And you know, they go, Yo, you're
Speaker 2: so organized, and you're so like like, you know, like this,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, no, I'm a dits. I'm a complete dits.
Speaker 2: But I created the system around myself. Fortunately I stumbled
Speaker 2: upon it that was able to deal with, you know,
Speaker 2: my my ditziness and control it from that standpoint.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which the good news is is there there are
Speaker 1: lots of pieces of software and apps in a variety
Speaker 1: of things now that that help folks sort of stay
Speaker 1: on stay on task, or you know, remember things that
Speaker 1: they know they're they're going to easily forget as soon
Speaker 1: as they walk away from that particular situation. I'm going
Speaker 1: to I think I might know the answer to this.
Speaker 1: But I mean, your your educational brand, your work brain,
Speaker 1: it seems to be going all the all the time,
Speaker 1: even though you have. Did you officially retire those of
Speaker 1: the words that one would use or did you just
Speaker 1: decide you're not working there anymore?
Speaker 2: I don't work at you, b.
Speaker 1: That's how I just That's how I would describe it too,
Speaker 1: But I wasn't sure whether you're using that word retire.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I usually say I'm retired. But before
Speaker 2: I got on this, I was doing some proof that
Speaker 2: it's on a textbook from writing yeah.
Speaker 1: And still, yeah, you're still actively engaged within within your profession.
Speaker 1: But what do you what do you do for relaxation
Speaker 1: and how does that help you sort of unwind.
Speaker 2: The Yeah, I say, you know, my brain's going a
Speaker 2: mile in a minute. And the things that work to
Speaker 2: not skiing, sailing, haven't sailed in a while, cooking, and
Speaker 2: when I cook, the brain doesn't go all over the place. Photography,
Speaker 2: give me, give me a camera. And I remember once
Speaker 2: we were on vacation in Ireland and it was really
Speaker 2: cold outside but I walked out without a jacket and
Speaker 2: I spent two hour shooting pictures. It didn't matter because
Speaker 2: I had a camera in my hand, and then the
Speaker 2: other one is traveling. Yeah, well it wasn't that cold,
Speaker 2: you know, it was chilly.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, But I think, though, what you just said
Speaker 1: though about going out with the camera is very much
Speaker 1: like some of the other things you described throughout your
Speaker 1: educational and professional career, is that when you see something
Speaker 1: you're interested in, you kind of you zoom in on that,
Speaker 1: and all the other stuff sort of goes to the
Speaker 1: the fuzzy spaces in the background and maybe comes back
Speaker 1: in when needed, or maybe it doesn't bring back in
Speaker 1: at all.
Speaker 2: I mean, I just you know, I described that as
Speaker 2: being a geek, and you know, and whatever it is,
Speaker 2: I geek out on whether it's travel, cooking, photography, you know,
Speaker 2: and and and you know you want to know the
Speaker 2: best tech to use to travel. I'll tell you you
Speaker 2: want to know how to find where the sun is
Speaker 2: going to set. I'll tell you what app I have
Speaker 2: on my phone that tells you where sun rise sunset
Speaker 2: word as any time of the year, because it's you know,
Speaker 2: computers are I learned that computers are a tool to
Speaker 2: help me do the things I want to do. And
Speaker 2: in fact, when I when I was diagnosed with the
Speaker 2: learned disabilities, was the exact same year that we were
Speaker 2: required to learn how to program a computer, in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, They've been a tool that I've used, you know,
Speaker 2: since I was a kid.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I remember my computer class in high school and
Speaker 1: it was like, I don't know basic actually in high school,
Speaker 1: rich or whatever. I never figured that out.
Speaker 2: Oh see, And I'd learned in junior high school in Wellesley,
Speaker 2: And then when I came to high school, they had
Speaker 2: just gotten access to a time shared computer system, and
Speaker 2: I actually taught the entire math department how to program
Speaker 2: a computer. Later on, I took a programming class from
Speaker 2: one of the teachers who'd learned more than I had
Speaker 2: been able to teach him.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I did. You definitely. You always seem
Speaker 1: to have like a real strong set of skills, which
Speaker 1: I think has probably been to your advantage over time
Speaker 1: in a whole variety of situations. The fact that you know,
Speaker 1: you figure things out for yourself, You figure out what's
Speaker 1: going to work, and then you use the skills that
Speaker 1: you have to accomplish, the things that you need to accomplish.
Speaker 2: Well, I think those are things I got from my dad,
Speaker 2: because my dad taught me the word catholic with a
Speaker 2: small tea, I mean salt tea. How do I get that?
Speaker 2: There's dyslexay for it. A small C, you know, means comprehensive,
Speaker 2: and my dad had a comprehensive interest. There was really
Speaker 2: no topic that didn't interest him. And the other thing
Speaker 2: is nothing would beat him. You know, if he needed
Speaker 2: something was broken, you just had to spend more time
Speaker 2: finding out how to fix it. And so you know,
Speaker 2: everyvery you know, you don't give up. It's a sammer.
Speaker 2: I read this paper about the difference between Japanese kids
Speaker 2: and American kids. They give them an unsolvable math problem,
Speaker 2: and American kids stop after I'll say, like, you know,
Speaker 2: thirty seconds, and the Japanese kids will go five minutes
Speaker 2: before they give up on the problem. And so you know,
Speaker 2: I'm in that sense. I guess I'm more.
Speaker 1: Japanese, but I think you're You're more a lot of
Speaker 1: things from all the different places that I know that
Speaker 1: that you've traveled, and I aspect you've picked up all
Speaker 1: sorts of things from all over the place. But we
Speaker 1: are coming to the last few moments of our time together.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate you. You know, you're sharing how how
Speaker 1: you operate in the world. I think that it's it's
Speaker 1: very interesting to sort of hear how you've figured out
Speaker 1: how to operate in the world in a way that
Speaker 1: that is successful. I think, you know, sometimes some folks
Speaker 1: haven't figured that out. And we probably give probably kudos
Speaker 1: to your dad for teaching you to be really persistent,
Speaker 1: because I think if you are a student right now
Speaker 1: in having some of the same experiences that you had,
Speaker 1: you probably would have you probably would have thrown your
Speaker 1: hands up if he had not sort of taught you
Speaker 1: to just keep keep going figure it out. You'll figure
Speaker 1: it out, or you're watching him do those things.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, you know one thing I've said when I've
Speaker 2: had students who've had accommodations because because of learning disabilities
Speaker 2: or whatever it was, and I'd say, look, you know,
Speaker 2: if you think I'm accomplished, I'm you. Yeah, so if
Speaker 2: I could do it, you can do it, and you
Speaker 2: just have to figure it out. I think you know,
Speaker 2: you have to figure it out for yourself. It's nice
Speaker 2: if someone could coach you and lead you that way,
Speaker 2: but you know, there's an awful lot of people like
Speaker 2: I just saw an interview with Paul McCartney who says,
Speaker 2: you know, no one in the Beatles knows how to
Speaker 2: read music. None of them ever learned how to read music.
Speaker 2: And in fact, John learned to play guitar by banjo,
Speaker 2: which has less strings, and so his mom taught him
Speaker 2: chords on a banjo, and later on somebody would show
Speaker 2: him another chord and he could add a string to it.
Speaker 2: You know, So sometimes you have to Sometimes you have
Speaker 2: to work it out, and a lot of really accomplished
Speaker 2: people do work it out. It'd be nice if somebody
Speaker 2: could help you well.
Speaker 1: And you know, as a as a special educator, I
Speaker 1: think that one of the responsibilities that my colleagues have
Speaker 1: is to help you figure it out, like not to
Speaker 1: figure it out for you, but to help that individual
Speaker 1: find the way that works for them, which is why
Speaker 1: you know, it's all referred to as individualized educational programming,
Speaker 1: but it's oftentimes not as individualized as it as it
Speaker 1: needs to be. So but so thank you so much
Speaker 1: for spending your time with us. I appreciate it, and
Speaker 1: you know, I look forward to hearing hearing about your
Speaker 1: adventures and in the future. I know that some of
Speaker 1: us travel vicariously through your through your photographs, so we
Speaker 1: appreciate this. What I appreciate your ability to take a
Speaker 1: good picture and to share pictures of food that sometimes
Speaker 1: I'm not sure I would eat, but other times I'm
Speaker 1: very interested in.
Speaker 2: But you are.
Speaker 1: That's another that that's a whole nother podcast. You're you're
Speaker 1: daring your daring choices about about foods that people have
Speaker 1: offered you. So but all right, well, thank you so much,
Speaker 1: and thank you to our audience for listening to us today,
Speaker 1: and we will be back in a couple of weeks.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Universal Unique exploring the neurodiverse
Speaker 1: world of the extraordinary. Join me doctor Lorie on Transformation
Speaker 1: Talk Radio every second and fourth Monday at eleven thirty
Speaker 1: Pacific time, as we continue to explore navigating a world
Speaker 1: not designed for diversity, for advocacy and support for individuals
Speaker 1: with disabilities, Let's connect. Learn more about consulting and life
Speaker 1: coaching at Noopallisticconsulting dot com.