Catflower Comforts (non_plot challenge #31 - privacy)

(A little backstory, self-contained, from 7sinsspinning. )

At the end of a dimly lit street, around a corner and behind a grove of trees with red leaves that fluttered delicately in the wind, there was a house.

It was an old house, and unlike the others in the neighborhood was designed in a kind of Victorian style; lots of gables and towers and crumbling bricks and a flowering climbing plant that covered the largest west facing wall and held the stones together with its long tendrils, and a porch that seemed to sag if you so much as looked at it in a disapproving manner.

In the house lived seven sisters of unlikely name and unlikelier vocation who were the darkest of southern belles, like the poisonous catflower that opens at dusk and spills its sticky pollen over the night wind to burrow into the skin of the unsuspecting traveller, leaving them (if they're lucky) paralyzed to die of exposure and starvation before the young pods grow teeth and feed upon their kill.

This is not the story of the catflower. But the catflower and the creatures that live in the dark house are not without certain similarities.
( Continued. )

Thought patterns (The Care and Feeding Of Phinnia; first in a series)

I was thinking this morning about the five types of thought patterns.
This is one of the very few things I remember from those dopey guidance classes they frogmarched us into in highschool. So yeah, that was about a hundred years ago now, and as such this recollection will likely have holes, but I'm trying to remember. I seem to think that we all vacillate between all of them, and it depends on the person and the moment which they're more likely to use.

1. Circular thought, which was symbolized by a pentagon, which I can't draw in one line ascii art, so you'll have to imagine one - round and round and round.
2. Separate unconnected thoughts (which looks like |||||) - no connection between things, just individual bits of data.
3. Linear thought (-----) A leads to B leads to C, etc.
4. Thoughts spreading out from a central point, like (*) - jumping off in all directions from an idea.
5. Logical leap - (-|||-) a beginning and an end and the middle gets leapt over, kind of like those 'aha!' moments. salyavin would call this 'blackboxing'.

They're all useful. The asterisk is useful for brainstorming, the vertical lines often are the first set of ideas that lead to connections, circular thought sometimes helps us solve a problem - the logical leap is responsible for wacky ideas that work. But the culture that we're in stresses the linear line. And that's not particularly fair. Testing and academics are often skewed toward the logical-mathematical, and even though that's not a bad skill to have, it's not better.
What I'm trying to say:
(a): I can do linear, but only under emulation: it's difficult for me. I'm more inclined to numbers 4 and 5 on this list. Okay, yeah, I jump around a lot. But that's what I do. It's me. That's where the wacky ideas come from, the logical leap. So I can only loosely understand (and only provide in a limited way) a need for linear structure. Yes, this extends into my personal life: I eat when I'm hungry, I go to bed when I'm tired, we don't really have much in the way of 'time' and 'structure' unless it's imposed by an external force. Things are usually about the same time and order every day, but they don't have to be. That's the thing. I'm not married to this. I can't be. It's been proven that too much in the way of structure and pressure makes me physically react badly. It's brain chemistry. The pieces are all part of a whole, and the pieces get picked up eventually, even if they don't get picked up beginning to end.
(2): What do the teachers out there think about this? It's obviously got connections to Gardner and his seven intelligences; and the notion of kids learning 'test taking skills' wasn't lost on me either.