saxon math : Discover Your Child's Learning Style
Mariaemma Pelullo-Willis and Victoria Kindle Hodson are the authors of Discover Your Child's Learning Style. This book, which we reviewed in PHS #34, has the potential to revolutionize the way children are taught - and treated. Its main thrust: kids learn, think, and are motivated according to their learning styles. Their book outlines five learning dispositions, three learning modalities (each with several sub-modalities), and a variety of ways in which children's learning is affected by their environment, talents, and interests. The book also includes checklists to help you determine the learning styles of everyone in your family. Unlike other books on this topic, it also outlines a Learning Styles Model for education, one based on first determining each child's unique approach to learning rather than on "labeling" huge numbers of children as "challenged" or "deficient." With that as an introduction, let's meet the ladies!
PHS: Tell me somewhat about your book - what it covers and what kind of reception it's had so far.
VICTORIA: The book is for parents. Sometimes that message gets lost, because we end up talking about schools, but Discover Your Child's Learning Style is actually for parents and what parents can do regardless of what schools are doing. Of course the learning style profiles are in the book. They measure all five aspects of learning style. Parents can take the profiles; all of their children in the family can take the profiles; you can make charts of all the different dispositions and the different modalities. . . . It's like a unit study in a way.
PHS: A unit study on education.
VICTORIA: And how we all meet the challenge of education. The reception seems to be very good, I think it's going into its third printing. So there are at least 10,000 of these books out there, and we receive requests daily. . . . I mean I have phone calls, and people seeing me on the street ask, "Where can I get it, how can I get it?"
MARIAEMMA: It's divided into sections: Let's Get on the Team, where we have background foundational information and also some little activities for the parents to do, some questions to answer, what are their goals for their children, things like that to think about. Then there's Do the Profiles, to find out about the learning styles, and in that whole part we give specific strategies and techniques for all the different styles, so in Disposition you get techniques for all the five dispositions, and in the Modality section you get techniques for all those different modality areas. The last part is called Coach for Success.This is where we wrap it up. We have a section called Stay Fit, Focus on Solutions, Identify Goals, Track Successes, Take the Pressure Off, and there's also a chapter on how to talk to the teacher. And then there's What About Learning Disabilities? where we go into that in depth, and then we finish with Educating for the Real World, What Are We Really Trying to Do Here?
PHS: Speaking of educating for the real world, what do you think about the current trend in schools for higher standards and more testing?
MARIAEMMA: Well, you can have higher standards, but more testing isn't going to get you there. As long as we throw out information in one way to all these people who learn in all different ways, we're not going to get there. We're going to continue to have 3-5 kids in every classroom who get all the A's, and the rest are labeled.
PHS: I just thought of something - the tests themselves are geared to a certain type of learner, aren't they?
VICTORIA: That's right. We call him or her the "Producing Disposition," the visual print learner with a language reasoning talent. Students with those attributes will do fine on these tests. This is a disaster in the making because I would not be surprised at seeing dropout rates go up, I would not be surprised at seeing more use of drugs among teenagers, or at the suicide rate going up. . . .
PHS: An interesting thought just popped into my mind for the first time in my life. Regarding the use of drugs among teenagers: I'm wondering what the odds are that the ones who aren't on Ritalin - which is a drug - are using drugs other than Ritalin to make it through the day, to deal with the mind-numbing boredom and alienation they're feeling. I'm not saying that this in any way justifies it, of course, but kids don't take drugs because they're happy and feeling well-adjusted.
VICTORIA: That's right. They've got to find a way to cope with this structure that we tell them they have to go through.
MARIAEMMA: There are many reasons why kids take drugs, and there is some bad stuff going on in families nowadays. . . . But when you think about it, you spend the majority of your time in school, from the time you're five or six years old. And if that is a place that every day almost all day long is reminding you that you're deficient, it's going to take its toll, and something's going to come out of that that's not going to be positive.
saxon math
Copyright ©1993-2006 Home Life, Inc.
PHS: Tell me somewhat about your book - what it covers and what kind of reception it's had so far.
VICTORIA: The book is for parents. Sometimes that message gets lost, because we end up talking about schools, but Discover Your Child's Learning Style is actually for parents and what parents can do regardless of what schools are doing. Of course the learning style profiles are in the book. They measure all five aspects of learning style. Parents can take the profiles; all of their children in the family can take the profiles; you can make charts of all the different dispositions and the different modalities. . . . It's like a unit study in a way.
PHS: A unit study on education.
VICTORIA: And how we all meet the challenge of education. The reception seems to be very good, I think it's going into its third printing. So there are at least 10,000 of these books out there, and we receive requests daily. . . . I mean I have phone calls, and people seeing me on the street ask, "Where can I get it, how can I get it?"
MARIAEMMA: It's divided into sections: Let's Get on the Team, where we have background foundational information and also some little activities for the parents to do, some questions to answer, what are their goals for their children, things like that to think about. Then there's Do the Profiles, to find out about the learning styles, and in that whole part we give specific strategies and techniques for all the different styles, so in Disposition you get techniques for all the five dispositions, and in the Modality section you get techniques for all those different modality areas. The last part is called Coach for Success.This is where we wrap it up. We have a section called Stay Fit, Focus on Solutions, Identify Goals, Track Successes, Take the Pressure Off, and there's also a chapter on how to talk to the teacher. And then there's What About Learning Disabilities? where we go into that in depth, and then we finish with Educating for the Real World, What Are We Really Trying to Do Here?
PHS: Speaking of educating for the real world, what do you think about the current trend in schools for higher standards and more testing?
MARIAEMMA: Well, you can have higher standards, but more testing isn't going to get you there. As long as we throw out information in one way to all these people who learn in all different ways, we're not going to get there. We're going to continue to have 3-5 kids in every classroom who get all the A's, and the rest are labeled.
PHS: I just thought of something - the tests themselves are geared to a certain type of learner, aren't they?
VICTORIA: That's right. We call him or her the "Producing Disposition," the visual print learner with a language reasoning talent. Students with those attributes will do fine on these tests. This is a disaster in the making because I would not be surprised at seeing dropout rates go up, I would not be surprised at seeing more use of drugs among teenagers, or at the suicide rate going up. . . .
PHS: An interesting thought just popped into my mind for the first time in my life. Regarding the use of drugs among teenagers: I'm wondering what the odds are that the ones who aren't on Ritalin - which is a drug - are using drugs other than Ritalin to make it through the day, to deal with the mind-numbing boredom and alienation they're feeling. I'm not saying that this in any way justifies it, of course, but kids don't take drugs because they're happy and feeling well-adjusted.
VICTORIA: That's right. They've got to find a way to cope with this structure that we tell them they have to go through.
MARIAEMMA: There are many reasons why kids take drugs, and there is some bad stuff going on in families nowadays. . . . But when you think about it, you spend the majority of your time in school, from the time you're five or six years old. And if that is a place that every day almost all day long is reminding you that you're deficient, it's going to take its toll, and something's going to come out of that that's not going to be positive.
saxon math
Copyright ©1993-2006 Home Life, Inc.
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