Have you read anything by Dr. Linda Silverman and visual spatial learning?
Thanks for your reply. I have read several writings by Linda Silverman about visual-spatial learners, as she calls them. I don't think she is the best authority on that subject, and I don't recommend following her advice, but I will give her credit for raising the issue that different learners may have different customary approaches to some subjects as they begin the learning process.
I have attended various seminars and read various articles and books about "learning styles," and every time I am tested on mine, I fit into the "all of the above" category. I definitely have a bigger visual element in my thinking about mathematics and other subjects than many people I know. When I ask my wife (a piano performance major who works as a music teacher) about her learning styles or modes of thinking, she also says "all of the above." Whether in modern foreign languages (my undergraduate major), computer science (my oldest son's major), or music (my wife's major), the really thorough experts learn multiple representations of the subject. My wife learned some very helpful visual representations of music theory through one of her professors
https://www.areditions.com/books/rs002.html that she teaches to most of her students. The crucial issue about learning styles is that learning styles themselves are learnable, and good education is all about broadening a learner's toolkit so that the learner can apply more approaches to learning new material in whatever domain the learner is learning.
A person cannot unlearn concepts through extra practice; they can only become demotivated.
Thanks for your reply too. That's my sense of the evidence, that motivation matters a lot in learning, especially learning difficult subjects, and too many American children grow up fearing hard work in learning. When I was learning Chinese as an undergraduate, I prepared by visiting the Chinese class at my undergraduate university while I was still finishing up high school. I asked the teaching assistant who was leading the first-year class that day if it was required to listen to tapes of Chinese in the language lab. She said, "We don't require attendance in the language lab. But you can always tell who listens to the tapes." That was all she needed to say to motivate me to listen to every inch of Chinese-language audiotapes in the language lab while I was an undergraduate student. That had the gratifying effect of impressing people who grew up speaking the language when I lived overseas (of whom the crucial person to impress was my girlfriend-then-wife) and gaining me professional employment as a Chinese-English interpreter after I returned to the United States from living overseas. I had been lucky that my first year textbook included a preface that said "language learning is overlearning," a saying of linguist Leonard Bloomfield that many brilliant language teachers have taken to heart.
So to help a child keep motivation when they get to the "I know that" level, before they reach the error-free, second-nature level of performance, it is important to let the child know that all the great performers in any domain--from Mozart right on to the present day--have devoted time, effort, and motivation to overlearning their domain. That's how people get to be really good at what they do.
