I already mentioned some of the traits of “Right Brained Learners” listed in the book “Right Brained Children in a Left Brained World”. From now on I’m going to use the term Visual-Spatial in preference to “Right Brained” because the latter term gives me such a weird mental image and it also bothers my sense of how things are. Of course, we all have a right and left hemisphere unless we have had some neurological trauma. Aidan happens to have some damaged sections in his right hemisphere from his stroke in infancy. It has affected him physically and cognitively. But my understanding is that a lot of the functions of one side can be taken over by the other, especially with children. So even someone who has organic damage isn’t going to be completely one-sided in his function. I suppose that the term “right brained” describes a learning preference in some people, but visual-spatial seems more accurate in describing exactly WHAT the approach is about. Still, I wish there was a better term even than this.
(Here’s where I think Steph’s point about communication between the hemispheres seems to ring true and provide a goal for the mentor/parents of a Visual Spatial Learner. I think that the capabilities and strengths can probably be used to reinforce the relatively weaker areas in a person’s learning equipment. For example, I have trouble organizing myself so have developed all sorts of strategies, many visually oriented, to keep myself on track. I think probably a lot of “natural learning” experiences, like natural whole foods, provide a whole spectrum of benefits and help reinforce the communication pathways between the hemispheres — but of course this is amateurish speculation).
Here are the other traits listed by Freed in the book –the ones crossed out are the ones I already noted down :
Hyper-sensitive in touch, hearing, smell, taste, sight- Powerful Memory
- Perfectionism/Competition
- Self-Deprecation
ImpulsivenessDistractibility- Delayed Motor Skills
Intuitiveness
Powerful Memory
The book says that some VS learners don’t think they have a powerful memory because things they hear or things they read go straight out of their heads. But a strong visual, image-based memory is one of the characteristics of a VS learner.
I don’t have a multitude of examples of this in my kids. Brendan had an unusual spatial, directional memory (at least for my family). When he could barely walk, I took him to his dad’s workplace and Brendan startled me by being able to get down from my arms and maneuver his way back to his dad’s office from the other side of the building, with mazes of corridors which he traversed without hesitation.
When he was a preschooler we would check out science books from the library, sometimes quite advanced ones. He would get interested in a topic, say volcanoes. He wanted books with “real” pictures, ie photos. He had little interest in the text itself but pored over the illustrations endlessly; he wanted me to read the captions over and over again, so that he could relate the visual image to the text. After a while he had the fact memorized, whatever it was, and laid up quite a stock of information this way. He learned his numbers up to 20 by lining up a train number flashcard set again and again; he learned numbers up to three digits by browsing through a 1000-page chronology of history we had, when he was about four; he has memorized more geography than I will ever know, by map puzzles and looking at atlases and tracing and labelling maps.
I noticed quite early that he had trouble processing auditorily compared to how well he learned through his eyes. He asked the same questions over and over again, almost ritually. Aidan, who is deaf in one ear, does the same thing. I think there were two reasons for this in Brendan’s case. One was that he was limited enough in his repetoire of language (he was a late talker) that questions made for a safe and effective way of carrying on a conversation. I am not a big talker either and I think that makes it somewhat difficult for my kids to hear enough of a range of conversation to develop their language capacities, so questions were a good way to start a discussion and reinforce his understanding of language. Secondly, I think that hearing the same things again and again reinforced his feeling of reality and stability in the universe. I think he had trouble perceiving the “realness” of the spoken word. That’s why photographic visuals were so fascinating to him; they provided confirmation of reality.
I remember once I came in on him while he was alone and he told me proudly, “I was talking about volcanoes!” This was an accomplishment to him! He was moving from the concrete to the symbolic! And he knew it!
Brendan’s memory is great at details. It’s interesting that he still, at age 18, has the easiest time with facts associated with an image. He can learn from a chart or a map much better than I can. I think the visual and spatial effect of a chart suits the way his mind works, and it helps him organize and categorize the information.
But abstract, non-visual concepts like math formulas and language paradigms slip through his mind easily; he complains that they do not stay in his mind. Because he doesn’t process easily by ear, and the process of writing things out is tedious to him, it has been a challenge to help him memorize these types of things. I wish I had read some of this VSL literature earlier, when he was younger. He grasped onto algebra concepts quickly once we got to Key to Algebra and it was presented in terms of football gains and losses, and measuring the dimensions of a tree. In other words, when he could see the negative numbers in his mind, or the algebraic equation, by some visual image. He learned statistics and percentage-crunching almost overnight when he started working on fantasy football league plays. Though I regret not knowing more about how his mind worked at these earlier times, I’m so very glad I tried to work with his strengths and give him room to develop his own strategies and talents, and didn’t make these learning differences into a discipline issue (well, at least not after some rather humbling experiences in our first year homeschooling — shudder)
The book suggests harnessing the acute visual sense by teaching the child to associate auditory or other input with visual images, sometimes silly ones. I am trying this more with my younger ones. There is one difficulty though that has not been mentioned in the books I have seen so far. My childrens’ visual hypersensitivity makes them shut-down if they do not like the visual imagery or if it is not integral to what the fact is about. For example, some childrens’ math books have politically correct cartoon pictures of kids doing various activities. This is painful for my children and actually diminishes their ability to work with the concepts presented. It is visual static for them. Charlotte Mason called it “twaddle”; the pointless visuals and audios that adults throw into material meant for children. I’ve already mentioned Brendan’s very strong preference for photos over drawings, especially stylized drawings. So the trick with my kids is to find a visual that really goes with the material. My intuition here is that VS learners really need materials to be “real”, not condescending or contrived. At least mine do.
Delayed Motor Skills
With gross motor skills, this doesn’t really apply to a great extent in my family. All my kids walked between 10 months and 12 months of age. A couple of my children are really quite decent athletes, and one is exceptional. I think this is because of their situational (spatial) awareness. I don’t see why spatial intelligence combined with physical coordination shouldn’t lead to advanced motor skills. But I will note that my exceptional athlete is always bouncing into things, wrestling, jumping on the wall, landing on the ground etc. not out of clumsiness but more because of proprioceptive sensory seeking, I think.
All my children except my daughter have been late writers, and reluctant ones to a greater or lesser extent. They did not like handwriting, it fatigues them easily, and though several liked to draw none of them has shown a great propensity for meticulous detail or artistic flair. They would figure out stylized icons for representing what they wanted to represent — swords, airplanes or whatever — and then use these symbols as a sort of visual shorthand for the story or scene they were depicting. They were more interested, literally, in the “big picture” and the sequence or pattern of events, than in the actual representation itself. My husband and I fit this pattern too.
The delay in some motor skills with visual-spatial learners is said to be because they prefer to observe and learn before trying out new skills. This is very true of my children, who are always the ones hanging back and watching in any new activity. They are usually hesitant, even reluctant to try new things unless they have seen it modelled for long enough that it has become part of their environment.
Perfectionism/Self-Deprecation
This is a characteristic of several of my kids and of mine, too. We set high standards, well nigh unreachable, and get discouraged easily. In fact, this was probably the trait that made me start looking into unschooling seriously again, after several years of a relaxed version of classical education. My oldest has quite high standards but prefers a certain amount of academic challenge and competition and so I realize I tailored our homeschool approach around him to some extent. He has always been strong auditorily, and able to accomplish things just fine on a sequential timetable as long as he can go at his own pace and vary the pace with some more creative, right brained activities. We were able to work well together using a collaborative approach and lots of conceptual, analytical materials — he was strong in math and languages, enjoyed grammar and logic, so a classical curriculum suited him. As he transitioned out to college I realized this approach wasn’t working as well with my second son and my daughter. They have always done better with a less structured, more creative and sporadic style of education where they have room to pursue their interests and enthusiasms without much testing or repetition. Abstract things don’t stay with them unless they are associated with some type of emotion or image. So I started digging more into unschooling in response to this, and I have seen them flourish with a more open-ended approach.
