Emma’s Education Story #2: Visual Learner
During my elementary school years I attended a fine arts school. I didn’t choose to go to an arts school for any particular reason. The school was a regular elementary school for the first few years of my education, and then made a transition a few years into it. There was no obvious reason for me to switch to a different school in town, so I stayed. As a student that grew up dancing, painting, and having a general creative side, I loved the artistic environment. Although the curriculum was still standard across the board, the way that it was taught was through more creative techniques. Attending an arts school meant spending a lot of time practicing lines, rehearsing dances, creating artwork throughout basic studies, and showing learnt skills through presentation. For me, it seemed as if I was in a educational setting that allowed me to do quite well in most areas of study. However, at that young of an age, I wasn’t yet thinking about my future career plans and the impact that that form of education would have on me in the near future.
After the seventh grade, I started high school at a non-arts school. It wasn’t long before I realized that many of my peers appeared to be entering high school with a greater knowledge on the topics that were being discussed and the curriculum that was expected to be known prior to entering the eighth grade. It never occured to me that while receiving my elementary education at an arts school, that I was replacing arts studies with some of the beneficial knowledge that would have helped me in high school. Needless to say, my high school experience was not a walk in the park. I was able to pass all of my classes, but it felt like my friends seemed to ace their tests and fly through their homework much easier than I did. For me it meant staying after class to ask the teacher for help, going home and asking for help from my parents with homework, and studying for hours on end. At this stage in life I felt my confidence in my knowledge diminish. I convinced myself that I just “wasn’t smart” and kept that expectation for myself up until the last few years of my life. I did well in most of my high school and college classes, but in certain subjects like math, biology, chemistry, I continued to struggle.
I doubted my educational abilities and after high school graduation I settled with a job that I knew I was capable of doing and would get paid an average salary. At a work conference we participated in a workshop that gave us results on what kind of personalities we have and what kind of learners we are. It was of little surprise when the results showed that I was a visual learner. It never occured to me that there are different learning styles and that there was a possible reason that the ways I had been studying information, and having that information portrayed to me was in a style that didn’t communicate best with my brain.
After learning that I was a visual learner, education became something that I learned I could adjust to meet my needs. The difference was incredible. Sometimes it takes asking for additional resources and searching for my visual tools, but I now feel more confident in my ability to learn and continue to try and find ways to retain information. Although I wish I had have had this realization earlier in life, I am thankful for my new understanding and hope to find ways as a future teacher to help transfer information in all forms of learning styles to my students.