Why Jeannie Can’t Tell Time (www.attachmenttraumanetwork.org/)

Staring at the analog clock in my therapist’s office, I wondered which hand was the big hand and struggled with my need not to go over my time.

“I can’t read the clock,” I said. It was awkward because I was 62, but I really wasn’t.

This awkward therapy moment is brought to you by my dissociative disorder. It was a watershed moment in understanding one possible reason for uneven learning in the classroom. I spent forty years as a teacher educator and felt the frustration of helping children who knew how to do something one day and not the next. To suddenly find myself unable to do something I had obviously been able to do for at least fifty years was astounding; but on that day, I was six-year-old Jeannie. Read more.