by Catriona Ellis
Before I start, I need to get one thing straight: what follows is NOT a scientific article in any way. I do not take any science subjects, nor do I wish to do any scientific research for this article or be anywhere near science for the vast majority of the rest of my life so the following article is purely speculative. I am merely theorising. More specifically I am going to hypothesise about the brain, and more specifically than that, about neurology with respects to learning styles.
(source: grandcanyon.com) |
Before I start, I need to get one thing straight: what follows is NOT a scientific article in any way. I do not take any science subjects, nor do I wish to do any scientific research for this article or be anywhere near science for the vast majority of the rest of my life so the following article is purely speculative. I am merely theorising. More specifically I am going to hypothesise about the brain, and more specifically than that, about neurology with respects to learning styles.
I distinctly
remember an argument that sprung up between my mother and I many years ago when
I, as an unknowing and geographically-ungifted child questioned:
“Am I
correct in saying that the Grand Canyon is in Austalia?” or something to that
effect, (I may not have actually started with “Am I correct in saying” because
at such a naïve age I was most probably was unaware of such a phrase, but that
is beside the point.) Anyway, in answer to my highly legitimate question my mother
got a little angry:
“You should
know that. Why don’t you know? That’s unbelievable. Go and work it out.”
I was
shocked. I was angry. I could not comprehend how I was supposed to know where
the Grand Canyon was having never been told, and this is my point: Some people
simply don’t learn things for themselves.
I will illustrate further with a
second example:
More
recently my family and I were discussing driving lessons and when I could learn
to drive, when this bombshell hit the table:
“Cat, you
show absolutely no aptitude for driving.”
Once again,
I was shocked. I knew the comment wasn’t meant to be insulting, but I felt
cheated that at some point I was meant to have shown an ‘aptitude for driving’, having a) never been told how to drive or how road signs operate and b) never
having even been told that I should think about ‘showing an aptitude.’ It was
baffling to say the least. I didn’t even know how to ‘show aptitude.’ Was I
supposed to have shouted out the new speed limit whenever I was driven from an
A road onto a motorway? Should I have been researching stopping distances in my
non-existent spare time? In answer to such questions, Mum merely replied,
“Well, you
should at least know how the clutch and brakes work.”
WHAT? How
was I supposed to know? I don’t even take Physics! Is everyone else simply born
with an innate understanding of the mechanics of moving vehicles or is it just
me being dumb? I am sometimes told that I have little commonsense but things
had now gone far enough. I needed to know why I seemed to apprehend nothing of
the world whilst everyone else understood everything. It was time to question
back. So, I braced myself and fired questions at my family:
“Why do you
expect me to know things when I’ve never asked them before?”
“How do you
expect me to learn if you’ve never told me?”
“Is the
Grand Canyon in Australia or not?”
And I was
merely met with:
“Well, your
brother always knew these things.”
Silence.
They had pulled the brother card and that was low.
“No no, we
don’t mean to say that he was more intelligent than you, but that he taught
himself how brakes work and which Wonders of the World are in which continent.
He never needed to ask.”
At the time, I was too upset to really take on board the last sentence aimed at me before I
stormed (very dramatically, I hasten to add,) from the room, but, looking back
on it, it raises an interesting question: Do some people simply not learn for
themselves?
After thinking about it for a while (it’s a lie, my Dad only
proposed this to me yesterday…), I would have to say that I agree: I think some
people just can’t think up answers for themselves. That’s not to say that these
people, and I would categorise myself as one of them, can’t motivate themselves
or work independently, but it is to say that they need to be told before they
can act. Let me give an example:
If my
brother and I were given an identical task, let’s say learning how to use a
sewing machine, we would approach it very differently; I would probably ask
someone to show me how to use it, then watch a YouTube tutorial, (how is there
literally a YouTube tutorial for everything?) and then I would sit down and
have a go on the machine myself. However, my brother would dive straight in to
begin with, pressing all the buttons and making mistakes until he learnt how to
perform complex operations on his own. I have to be told, whilst he can do it
for himself. I suppose this really comes down to that good old, “What kind of
learner are you? Kinesthetic, visual or auditory?” I would argue that someone
who has to be told something in order to learn it could be catagorised as
visual or auditory whilst a do-it-yourself like my brother is kinesthetic, but it’s
more interesting than that because the ‘being told’ element to the first group
of learners could be performed in multiple ways: the Internet can ‘tell’ you
something if you read it online, a person can ‘tell’ you how to do something by
showing you, a documentary can ‘tell’ you something if you watch it and this
really sums up my point: some people just have to be told.
Potentially
this is why it is often harder for do-it-yourself learners to revise whilst for
us ‘being told’ learners it’s easier; we are told the information in class and
it’s just a matter of working out how to memorise it, but for do-it-yourselves
it would be better never to just give them information in class, but to let
them work it out for themselves with gentle encouragement and guidance then it
would stick in their heads because it might be easier to remember how they worked something out as opposed
to what they worked out. I’m only
theorising of course, but I genuinely feel that teachers should use a wider
range of teaching techniques to encompass a wider range of teaching styles and that
maybe if this were done, results would improve. It’s just a thought.
To conclude,
if someone asks a dumb question like the whereabouts of the Grand Canyon please
don’t just tell them that they should know because odds are that they wouldn’t
have asked if they didn’t know. Please just answer and put them out of their
misery because for years the locations of major landmasses were serious issues
for me and only recently have I realised that I just need to be told.
P.S: For
anyone who doesn’t know, the Grand Canyon
is in Arizona, USA.
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