See math, hear math, touch math, feel math.

Ah yes, the learning styles blog.

When I collected my learning styles survey from my students, it was a very low day among all the highs and the lows of teaching. My students weren’t understanding anything I was teaching, apparently. I wasn’t sure if I was going to fast, if I talked funny, talked too much and didn’t put enough on the board or put too much on the board and talked too little. One thing I was sure of was that I didn’t do enough hands on activities. My kids tell me this at least every other day. Mr. G., it be so boring up in here. Why can’t we do no fun activities. Because you would do even less work at that point than you do now, you would hit each other, throw paper and whatever manipulatives the activities required, and I would be finding little algebra tiles under desks and behind books for the next three months. That’s why. But I was sure that I wasn’t doing enough of those things to be a good teacher. This is where my learning styles survey actually told me something new. Where I had expected to see that my students were all kinesthetic learners who understood no oral instruction and very little visual, I found the opposite. My students are mostly visual learners, followed closely by auditory learners.

They see math, they hear math. They don’t need to touch it or feel it. Thank goodness. So I think I need to resort to better visuals. Typing up notes for the overhead doesn’t cut it. Especially since a certain clumsy fourth block student knocked my overhead off the desk and onto the floor, where it’s nice little glass face broke into far too many little pieces. I need to get that LCD going, have some numbers rolling in on powerpoints, add some sound effects.

Riiiight. That is what I should do. But my land of should is currently very far from my land of reality. In fact, I believe it would be correct to say they are two disjoint spaces. So, I’ll try to be a little more visual every day, and I’ll stress less about doing those fun, hands on activities that my kids claim to love.