Coping With My Learning Disability | Where Teaching Falls Short

the first thing that i ever felt i was good at was naming the presidents of the united states this is when i was four years old you see my aunt marion gave me a series of books on the presidents each book had about three presidents in them and had details about their lives talk to talked about their wives things they did and then the last book it listed them in order george washington john adams thomas jefferson james madison james monroe john quincy adams andrew jackson and martin van buren so on and so forth and i memorized them and people used to pay me a nickel or a quarter to recite them i could recite them in 30 seconds no problem faster than that even i felt good that people thought i was smart or i had a good memory because of that but then when i got to school i started getting report cards really right from first grade kindergarten i go back and look at them i still have a lot of my mom saved all of them ricky doesn't work up to ability ricky fights with other people you know was always bad always bad stuff i always was getting into trouble in school and one of the things was that i wasn't a good reader i definitely had some type of reading comprehension problem that went undiagnosed i would read a paragraph and 30 seconds later have no idea what i read i had massive problems reading books any time that we had book assignments i dreaded it because i would read chapter after chapter and not remember anything and i thought what is wrong with me i have a great memory why why can't i remember any of anything that i read by the time i got to junior high i really was doing badly in school i took algebra i remember the first marketing period i got a 38. my mom used to hide my report cards from my dad 38 rick i know mom i just i just don't understand then the next she goes well do better in next morning next morning period i got a 42. my dad ended up finding out he saw my report card he saw the 38 and 42 and he got so mad i remember him making my brother tutor me my brother was an engineering student at the time in college and a real math whiz but my brother would get so frustrated he tried to explain things to me and he'd just tell my dad i can't teach him anything he's such an idiot that's like never mind i'm not driving him to summer school and to this day all my siblings we all laugh about this my brother ironically is now a college professor right mr patience i ended up d i barely passed i got a 66 in the class that year and i passed but that's the only math class i ever took everything else in school i took non-regions class where i'm from in upstate new york regents were basically your average students you get a regents diploma and you basically were a competent or mid-level student there was no ap but we had advanced classes but i was in the non-regents students for the bad students i was a bad student when i got those report cards i'll never forget my mom used to say these teachers don't know how to teach you you're smarter than they are and i used to think you're right mom in the back of my mind i thought well mom's just saying that i am really a bad student and i really don't understand these things so i really didn't have a lot of confidence in myself now i played sports before then i played little league and i was good in little league and i was good in basketball in gym class in seventh grade we had a coach coach jacoby paul jacoby he was a coach of the high school track team and what they would do the junior high coaches they'd scout people for different sports you'd scout people for football for basketball for baseball and for track so they would teach you all the different events or whatever the sport was and they'd see who was good and they would tell the high school coaches about him when he got to track i was a very fast runner really fast running the 50 in the hundred then he got to the field events and he introduced the long jump and i remember in gym class i ran down this dirt runway and we just had a wooden board there and this terrible long jump pit but i jumped almost 20 feet and the coach couldn't believe it the other kids were jumping 12 feet something like that i could jump incredibly high when i was at age i could just about grab the rim from a standstill i had a really high vertical jump and i was fast so of course i could long jump and i long jumped in gym class as far as the kids in the high school track team so the coach said you need to run seventh and eighth grade track i went out for the track team and i started winning events i won the long and triple jump the hundred meters but in the jumping events i would win by five feet i long jumped 23 feet 1 inch in 8th grade but i could jump 22 feet in 7th grade in the long jump and my triple jump was about 43 feet or so very far i would really win events by 10 feet and i'd get announced over the loudspeaker on people that want or that set records and so i'd constantly be on the loudspeaker and even though i was doing terribly well terribly in school at least i was really good in something well that also happened to be the year that i took up guitar the summer of seventh grade because i broke my ankle right at the end of the school year first week of summer i broke my ankle and it was a bad break i was in a cast for 13 weeks i've talked about that that's when i learned the guitar i had a one dollar guitar sitting around the house that my brother mike had gotten from a friend of his a plywood global guitar was the name it was terrible but i learned my first song on it i had a chord book america's first record and i learned the song never found the time i made a video about it first chord in it is g sus right of course i learned a sus chord as the first chord but i started learning chords from that book and then i realized well i could figure out songs by ear and i learned stairway to heaven and i learned anything anything was out any beatles sung any rolling stone song i could figure out all the chords i had a great ear yeah i played cello i started in third grade on the cello but i wasn't really interested in that but the one thing about the cello was that the hand spacing of the cello when you turn it like this is exactly the same as the guitar so when i started playing guitar i had chops i could play scales and i could play any riffs any riffs that were out black sabbath whatever it was i could play the riffs i could figure them out and i could play them i remember we had field day in eighth grade field day was when everybody would sit around and i brought my guitar at that time it was a penco 12 stream because my mom after playing guitar for six months or so went out and said okay i'm going to buy you a guitar we went to music store and i'd never seen a 12 string and she bought me this 12 string this penco 12 string 120 don't tell your dad how much it costs my mom worked at the american can company she worked on the lines 120 bucks is probably what she made in a month i mean that was ridiculous that my mom would spend that much money on a guitar but i promised her i'd play it mike my brother's just used to make fun of me when i sit on the front steps at our house they said do you know any other song but that of course i'd be playing different songs all the time but every time they came in i was practicing for hours and hours and hours that was the first time i felt like i was good at something else i was good at track and i was really good at the guitar now i made a video last week where i talked about not getting into college except for the fact that i was so good in track that i got recruited for the track team at fredonia state university and i went as a history major well the funny thing about being a history major is that in my first class history class with dr chasanov i'll never forget it the first class he says open up your blue book i want you to write down as many presidents as you can so i'm like george washington john anderson thomas jefferson james and james wrote john quincy and andrew i went through the whole list so i come to the next class and dr chasanov says well one person knows all the presidents mr beatto why do you know all the presidents in order i said well dr chas enough i learned them when i was four and people used to pay me a quarter to recite them he said okay really to this day this is something that propels my youtube channel people ask me how do you know all these different things about music theory about music history you have all these stories and it really kind of goes back to that time that time when i was a little kid when i realized the first thing that i was good at was remembering things and that people actually thought i was smart because of that or that i could do something but then when i got into school i just got beat down all the time ricky doesn't work up to his potential what did they know my potential was but i always kept coming back to well mom says i'm smarter than than the teachers they don't know how to teach you my mom and i laughed about that for the rest of our lives my mom passed away back in 2016 three weeks before i started this youtube channel i was talking with all my siblings i have six other siblings we all laugh about this we get on facetime all of us and we talk all the same time oh once a week at least i'm very close with all my siblings and we laugh about teachers don't know how to teach you the mom would always stick up for me rick you're smarter than the teachers and when i became a teacher i took these things to heart and i always would think maybe the students are smarter than me maybe i don't know how to teach them the ones that didn't do well so i'd find different ways of teaching them i'd find things that they were good at search for those things and build upon it i mean that's the secret to learning it's really the secret to everything and i'm glad that my mom gave me the confidence to realize that thank you so much for watching [Music] you

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 305,292

Rating: 4.9851327 out of 5

Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, education, Learning Disability, ADHD, Music Education, Physical Education, Long Jump, Track and Field, Guitar, Learning Music, Inspirational, Motivational, Family, Learning Guitar, Inspirational Story, Dont give up, Confidence, How to be confident, attention deficit disorder, attention deficit, overcoming learning disabilities, overcoming learning curve, reading disability, reading disability teaching strategies, mental health

Id: R2WlMUIeFiM

Length: 11min 11sec (671 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021