learning

You know, being a teacher has taught me a lot about the ways we learn. Children with Autism usually have certain learning strengths and weaknesses. Most of my kids are visual learners - they have strong visualization and visual memory skills and very poor auditory processing skills. That's why I use text, charts, and pictures to teach concepts, instead of just presenting them orally. The more I discover about how my students learn, the more aware I'm made of my own learning strengths and weaknesses.

For example:

I do much better interpreting and working with words than I do with actual images. For example, it takes me much less time to read a list of words than it does for me to name pictures of those same words. I internalized the english language so thoroughly when I learned it that I now rely on it to process everything. I have to feed all images through my language system and apply labels to them before I can process them. It's interesting that I work like this (and probably a large number of people do) because it's obviously not how I was born. I have no idea how I processed images before I had language... I can't even imagine doing it.

Unlike my kids, I have very poor visualization and visual memory skills. I would be the worst crime witness ever. As I've discussed with many of you, I cannot remember color, I have to memorize it. I know that a stop sign is red because I *know* it, not because I see the red color in my head when I remember a stop sign. I also cannot really visualize details or anything besides basic, blurry images. What I remember when I remember an event are the actions, sounds, moods, and feelings. The pictures of people in my mind are rough approximations... an outline with straight or curly hair.

Because I have such poor visualization skills, I have a particularly hard time translating text into space. Examples: visualizing the descriptions of people and settings in novels... I kind of just glaze over those parts. Or following the directions to a board game. Unless the directions are accompanied by handy dandy 123 pictures, I can't focus on the directions and figure out what I'm supposed to do unless I concentrate really really hard. This is also why I always hated doing labs in science class in high school.

I am good at spatial reasoning (looking at cutout papers and knowing what shapes they'll form, reading and following maps). I am also good at conceptual memory (if that's even a term). I won't remember what anything looked like, but I'll remember the concept being discussed. I do well in history because I remember events and what they meant, and can place them generally on a map of time I keep in my head, even if I don't remember specific dates or names. I learn best through examples. Explain to me how something works or how to do something by giving me a specific example of the concept in action. From that, I can extrapolate how to apply that concept to pretty much any situation. If someone doesn't give me an example, I create one for myself and use that as my memory marker. That's my best study strategy.

It's helpful that I know all of this about myself now, although I wish I'd realized it while I was still going through school. I might have been able to organize my learning in a more useful way. If I go back to school, I wonder if it'll help.

How about you? How do you learn, oh you 3, maybe 4 people who read my blog?

k8