One day i was sitting on my computer and decided… im going to teach myself how to play the piano. Sounds wierd, but i really wanted to teach myself the song Love Song by Sara Bareilles. So i sat down on my mothers piano and played the piano for three hours and taught myself how to play the song. Then i played it for my mom, who has a degree in music, who told me: read me some music and i will be more impressed… so i showed my friend who was amazed (a much better response)! Then she bragged about it to another friend, who really doesnt like me obviously, and said well really its not that hard of a song. So then i came to this conclusion: I dont play the piano and i taught myself a song that is more complicated then you would think, to just play by ear! I used to play the piano with my mom when i was little, and just couldn’t be bothered to read music (probably have ADD or something who knows, and hence my moms little comment about reading music)… i also played the flute! i would never read the music… just ask my mom to play it first then i would copy it back to her pretty much identically! i enjoyed it, but at the time there was no way my mom could really teach me… but now there are a lot of programs that deal with playing by ear (if those were around when i was a kid i would be pretty awesome i think! haha) I’m like that movie drumline, haha which is probably why i want to play drums! Sooo i guess that means im a self learner… right?
i also work really good when i get to bounce ideas off of other people and get their responses… sooo am i a group learner?
wait that contradicts the first learning…
so i guess maybe im a hands on learner?
well wait i am good for just reading a text book and understanding it…
Ok. so i have no idea how i learn best… it feels weird, but i just seem to be able to learn anyway like exactly the same. I always seem to have that problem, just being a little bit of everything. Like those STUPID personality tests you had to take in highschool to determine what you should become when your older, i always got like perfectly even scores in all types of personalities and such… how is that supposed to help me! All my counsellors and teachers just said, oh i guess you will do good in whatever it is you do, but really… if i didn’t know i wanted to be a teacher then how would that have helped me at all
which brings me to my second point, maybe thats why i should be a teacher? if i can learn in different ways, either by working hands on, or reading, or memorizing, or whatever all the types of learning is, then should i be able to help students more effectively? If i can imagine myself in the shoes of each student, and understand how they learn and find that way in me, can i help them even more? I always had a teacher tell me that there are many ways to skin a cat, which i always thought was disgusting, but i always took into consideration when doing math. I would do a each question in a section a different way just to get a better understanding of the questions… haha yes im wierd and i love math also…
Soooo helping my friends study has always been easy, because i know my friends really well, and have always known how to teach them in ways that they understood, which they always thought was weird because their teachers could never make them understand (but really, not many teachers have time to teach a class in a million different ways).
So now you know how i like to help other people learn, and i just love learning! Like love retaining useless information like the fact that your height is equal to the length from the tip of one finger to the tip of the other finger when you hold your arms straight out (for all of those who tried that i swear it is so true), and looking at movies and being able to name five movies that every actor has been in (if they have been in that movie) but really… what kind of learner am i?
p.s. that was not a rhetorical question, please someone shed some light on this for me, what kind of learner am i?!?!?!?!
