Polly Bath: Think about kids who have short term or long term memory issues. You know that little kid who can remember everything from the womb but can’t remember what you just said five minutes ago? Those are the kids I’m thinking about. Or that kid who can remember everything five minutes ago but just the opposite, long term memory just isn’t there.

Memory, and I like to couple that with recall of language retrieval, it impacts our behavior so significantly. Have you ever saved something in your computer and you can’t find it? What happens to your behavior? You get irritated.

Basically, the brain runs just like your hard drive does. You formulate it, you put it in there, you file it into a certain place, and then you access it later when you need it. What happens if you misfile it? What happens if it’s not there? You get aggravated and upset.

You ever watch a little kid who’s trying to remember something? What do they do? They hit their head with their hand. Because it makes sense from a primal stance, if you will, from a four or five year old or a six year old, that if I bang the front of my head, it will fall out in front of my eyeballs. Older people or adults will look up. Think about it, when you can’t remember something, what do you do? You go, “Hold on a second.” And you look up. Why do you do that? Because you’re looking up in your brain for it to fall down in front of your eyeballs. That’s how memory works. We have to teach kids who have challenges in long or short term memory how to remedy that so they don’t get so upset.

I knew a teacher who would put math formulas on the ceiling. So when the kids were doing their seatwork, they’re like, “I don’t remember.” They would look up and see the formulas, then they were ok. It worked perfectly. It just helped them to remember.