Learning Styles

Learning styles were a 'new study' when I was in school. I had some pretty awesome teachers that tried a lot of different methods in efforts to teach each child in a way that they could learn the easiest. This was good and bad. I spent many days doing things that propelled my interest, but I also spent just as much time, if not more, doing things that completely bored me. This is not a new topic among teachers any more. It has become pretty much a given that, in a classroom setting, teachers will be expected to present the same material from a few different perspectives(well, at least as far as all my teacher friends have told me).

Three basic learning styles help meet the visual learner, auditory learners, and tactile learners. One thing that I have learned about Nevaeh, and I don't know if this is just where she is at developmentally, is that she is all three. When I was younger, I was more of a kinesthetic learner. As I grew older, I was conditioned by my high school and college environment to be more of an auditory learner. It was an absolute struggle. But I am a little bit envious of how Nevaeh learns things. For instance, if I were introducing a new concept, I would tell her about it, show it to her, then we would work it out together. She can learn a new topic from one style of teaching, but new topics become really concrete after spending time teaching in a 1-2-3 style mentioned above.

This makes me wonder if we are all naturally inclined to learn this way, and how much we are conditioned to learn in a way that is unnatural to us. I seriously wonder what our potential would be as a society if we followed the cues of our children more closely with the presentation of new ideas.