I can’t remember all of my learning experiences, but a couple stands out. A few years ago my husband taught me how to ride a motorcycle. The key to riding a motorcycle is balance and you can’t see balance. This was hard since I am a visual learner sometimes. No matter how often I watched my husband ride around the parking lot it didn’t help. The way I finally learned was I just got on the bike and went. My husband walked and ran beside me yelling out instructions. It’s a lot easier to hold the bike up when you’re going fast (10-20mph) then it is when you’re going slow (5mph). But, going slow is the key to balance, which is the key to riding. After many hours of circling that parking lot I finally got it. It’s just like riding a bicycle, you never forget how.
Another thing I’ve learned how to do is put things together. (Toys, furniture) My husbands works a lot, and if I want things done sometimes I have to do them myself, even the “manly things”. When I’m putting something together I can’t use the instructions, they confuse me. If the instructions show what the completed project looks like, I go by that. I guess this is the visual learner coming out in me again.

The thing I like best about learning is of course the knowledge or the ability to do something that follows the learning process. I like it when people ask me a question about something pertaining to communication disorders and I can answer them or when my mom asks me to show her how to make a tasty peaches and cream braid.

There are a few things that give me fits when I’m trying to learn. Some things just take time and when I’ve got somebody standing over me saying,” do you understand yet” just makes it harder for me to learn. Another thing is when I was in high school I had a lot of trouble in math, I had to have a tutor. The reason I had to have tutor was because the math teacher told me that I just didn’t understand it and because of the depth of my misunderstanding I was never going to get it and I just needed to stop wasting her time. Did she have a right to give up on me? Maybe she did, but it still hurt me in the area of math. One last thing that is giving me fits. Until recently I had always learned by listening, taking notes, studying and spilling everything back out on a test. I had never had to learn by application. Now it seems application is the only way I’m learning and I’m still struggling with this.