Know Thyself

Something going 'round the blogosphere is the hot topic of learning styles and how they affect (or don't) your classroom experience.

I work at a tutoring center that deals with students with learning and physical disabilities, we also give workshops on study skills, note taking and a variety of other things. We don't just deal with math students and I've learned to tutor a variety of other things.

When asked, "what is the best way to study for math?" I usually respond with something to the effect of what this commenter said on Tall, Dark, & Mysterious, Mobius Stripper's site.

I think the issue with learning styles is not that kinesthetic learners need to be taught everything kinesthetically (as was suggested to me during teacher training), but that they need to (be taught how to/have opportunities to) take something they are being taught and make it personal to them.
As a 20-something, I’m still working on my learning style. I know now that I learn better from linking ideas through drawing or thinking about spider diagrams than I do from writing every detail. If I had known this when I was younger, and if I had not felt obliged to copy every word from the board, that would have been a great power.

I would guess that a huge majority of kids have no idea of how best they learn things, or even are aware of the possibility that different people learn things better in different ways. I don’t think that means pandering to visual/auditory/kinesthetic learners when it isn’t appropriate to the content, but giving much younger kids more freedom find their own path and take their own notes if they feel confident to do so.

Of course, this is one of the ideals that I wanted to try out in the classroom that made my job very difficult, because it wasn’t something that anybody else was willing to support.

Bright Mystery was the first to comment on the article that started the discussion that learning styles didn't/shouldn't dictate teaching style.

My take on all this: students should learn about their own particular learning style to help themselves, parents should help with this task, but teachers shouldn't revolve their curriculum on the wants/needs of a few needy students.

Mind you, some students need more attention than others, but that is what resource classrooms, teachers' aides, tutors and other education professionals (and non-professionals I guess) are for. There are resources people, use them.

All too often math is blamed for being a subject that is too visual, but I've done more writing in a my upper-division classes than I ever did in some of my English classes. Not all the writing was proofs either, but explaining how I got to a particular answer or why I went in a particular direction. These are the types of exercises that may be missing from education that would allow students to mesh their learning style with mathematics.

Math is such a versatile subject that I can't imagine someone not applying it to their every day life and making it "personal" for them. You use it every day and it helps you think about problems in a different light.

I had a class called Problem Solving and in class we defined a "problem" as a question or situation where you don't know what to do when confronted with it. When you do know what to do, it's not a problem anymore. If everyone thought about problems in this way then homework should really just be exercises and the questions you attempt before lecture, so that you may actually be prepared, are problems. Particularly because you are learning about what you are supposed to do with them. That's interesting, isn't it?