How do we learn?

I think schooling helps with a childs personal growth. I believe that a person's basic social skills are learned at a young age and school is a major contributer to this. Growing up in Massachusetts I had never heard of home-schooling. That was something that I guess is not prevelent up north like it is in North Carolina. Upon moving here, I met a family who prefers home-schooling and in my opinion, I believe that they are doing a disservice to their children. I was there one day during "school" time and honest to goodness they spent one hour working on school work and then they were done. What kind of education is that? It is a pretty pathetic one, in my opinion. Their children are also receiving a bias education, when it comes to religion and sciences. Just because you may not believe in something, does not mean that you should not learn about it (evolution). They are also lacking social interaction with other children. They only interact with their siblings on a daily basis. They do, however, have what is called Friday school, which is a meeting of a group of home-schooled children on Fridays. That is the least that can be done for those children. School is definitely not only about academics, the bus ride to and from school, after-school sports, lunch in the cafeteria, etc. all of these elements of school are very important to the personal growth of a child.

After reading the text and watching the videos this week, I have realized that there is not only one proper way of teaching a child. Some children are visual learners, others learn verbally, and many need to take the hands on approach. An effective teacher uses multiple teaching styles in order to reach all of the children in the classroom.

My results from the learning styles assessment were that I am more of a visual learner. I agree with those results. I have always needed to see what I was trying to learn, it helped me. Flashcards have always been my number one tool in studying. They are very useful to me.

In chemistry class in high school, our class was told to memorize the perodic table of elements. At first glance, we were scared. A classmate and I decided to study together. Her idea was to just "memorize" the elements as they appeared in the chart. I told her that there was no way that I could do that successfully, so I came up with another idea. It may sound funny, but it worked for us. We associated the letters with a funny saying that we could remember. For example: AU is gold and we said that "gold is Always Universal as a gift" AG is silver so, "Almost as Good as gold" and so on. I can not remember exactly what grade I received, but I know that I did good. It actually turned that awful task into something that was sort of fun.