6-3-10

The video we watched today was a professor ranting about the existence of learning styles. He believes that learning styles do not exist. I'm not sure what he is trying to say. Maybe our minds don't work musically or kinesthetically, but we have found ways to gain knowledge that our specific to ourselves. I know that I learn better if something is musical. I can tell you the words to every song I have ever learned, and every concept I have ever learned through song or a chant. In elementary school, my teachers used songs to teach us spelling, geography, math, languages, science, history, and most subjects. Maybe learning through song in elementary school taught me to learn through song for other things, but I know other people who went through the same programs and learn better through reading or seeing something on the screen. Yes, there are some things that HAVE to be learned a certain way (such as the shape of a country or continent, as he mentions multiple times), but most subjects have multiple ways of doing something.

One of the comments on this video says, "Don't confuse abilities with learning styles. Some people have troubles with mathematical ability. Trying to fix this by using one of their supposedly preferred learning abilities (ie. teaching them maths using movements, or through musical means) is not going to go much further than basic maths. Eventually, you're going to have to do the maths in the way that it's meant to be done: that is, in a mixture of visual and abstract ways. Practise is the key, not a 'cure'."

I know almost every student who came out of my high school learned the quadratic formula by putting it to the tune of the Notre Dame fight song. Whenever I do a problem that requires the quadratic formula, I still sing the song in my head as I do it. I don't consider these equations basic math, and the way I learned the formula is the only way I could still remember it. I don't know how to get the area of a shape, or what number pi is, but I can still sing you the quadratic formula if you ask me to. I can name all 50 states in alphabetical order. How can I do that? The Fifty Nifty United States. Ask me about any presidential assassination in US history. I can tell you all of them. I can tell you all of the attempted ones. Why? Because I know songs about them (as sad as that is). My fiance, who is a history major, really only knows the two well-known ones.

The comment (made in class) that if you are high in one intelligence, you are high in all of them, is not correct in my opinion, or at least in my case. I can learn a song the third time I hear it, but if you ask me to read the words without putting them to music, I probably wouldn't remember it after reading it 20 times. I can't remember anything I read in a textbook without reading it multiple times. If I see something, I usually have to ask someone to explain it to me. Most of the time I'll understand something if it's kinesthetic, but if I'm asked to think about something mathematically, I can't do it without a lot of thinking and writing things out. Maybe there aren't multiple intelligences, but students do learn different ways, and teachers should be aware of that. If my teachers hadn't taught me a song to remember the correct spelling of "community" or about the founding of Michigan, I probably wouldn't know them today.