What’s your style? And I don’t mean to ask whether you prefer jeans, sweats, or formal gowns. What’s your learning style?
For me, discovering my learning style was one of the most transformative experiences of my early twenties. All of a sudden, my embarrassments in school made sense. I was a wonderful and dedicated student, but you see, I doodled. I remember one day in math class after I had done well on a test and appeared to be listening raptly to what the teacher had to say. I was listening with such apparent interest that the teacher decided to use me as an example. He held up my supposedly-beautiful notes for all to see. And what was inside? I had doodled all over the page. He didn’t notice, but others did and I was embarrassed.
It took me until my early twenties to realize that among other things, I am a kinesthetic learner. This means that I learn well by actually physically doing things. Give me auditory instructions about how to do something and they will move through one ear and out the other. I will still be incapable of doing the action.
This also means that I need to move to learn. In class, this meant that I was the child tapping my feet, squishing toes inside my boots, and yes, doodling. All of these were adaptive strategies of a learner who was asked to sit still in a classroom.
I also have a wonderful visual memory. This is probably what saved me in school, since I could visualize what the teacher had written and I could remember that.
One of the advantages of homeschooling is that you don’t need to replicate the classroom environment if you don’t want to. Teachers rely a lot on visual and auditory teaching methods. That’s the easiest way to discuss a subject with a lot of children. If your children learn in a different way, then you can easily adapt to that since you know them well and you have fewer children to teach.
Oddly enough, my child is an auditory learner. We’ll be entering the school system at some point, and this will serve her well. I find it amusing that while I was great at whole language learning, she’s a phonics kid, absolutely. But at least I understand her personal style and we can work with it. That’s a lot easier than having to adapt your own learning to the system that is teaching you.