Comments on: Willingham on learning styles

By: Everyone Read It! » Blog Archive » Are learning styles valid?

Everyone Read It! » Blog Archive » Are learning styles valid? — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 01:21:06 +0000

[...] tip: Joanne [...]

By: Lightly Seasoned

Lightly Seasoned — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 12:49:55 +0000

Now that would be some real high stakes testing.

By: Quincy

Quincy — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:40:44 +0000

I believe the correct formulation is that you’re hampering they’re learning by not putting them in a situation where they will be killed if they don’t know what a direct object is. Obviously, killing them yourself would be very harmful for the student teacher relationship.

By: Richard Aubrey

Richard Aubrey — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:28:30 +0000

Lightly. I think the knowledge that one is to be hanged in the morning concentrates the mind wonderfully.
Consequences do matter, especially when, as with grammar, the subject has no intrinsic interest.
But, yeah, if that were the situation, I think you’d have a fair amount of luck.
However, boards of ed being what they are, the consequences you can deploy aren’t particularly motivating to a significant proportion of the students.
WHich, I expect, is clear to you.
However, in the million years, it isn’t the parents doing the killing, it’s the situation the kid failed to learn about.
You know that the lessons about drunk driving in driver ed are gory for a reason.

By: Lightly Seasoned

Lightly Seasoned — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:15:08 +0000

Does this mean that what I’m doing wrong is not killing them if they don’t learn what a direct object is?

By: Richard Aubrey

Richard Aubrey — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:59:25 +0000

Linda. Trained by their parents in radio procedures…?
Excuse me. Does this have anything to do with the issue?
Point is, we taught each of these kids the exact same way, from Ft. Jackson to Ft. Dix to Ft. Benning. From one year to the next. And they all learned.
Different learning styles were irrelevant.
Kirk. Yes. Which makes it an even more useful demonstration since even WW II vet parents had little to teach, the procedures being different. It was the military’s business from start to finish.
As to machine guns, etc. see Keegan on WW I and The Face of Battle. For various technical reasons, the defense, including the machine gun (“concentrated essence of Infantry”) ruled. Not a matter of being ignorant. In fact, the British and French officers had had their combat experience, to the extent they had any, in the colonies where, as with the Boer War, the battlefield was fluid and manuver was king.
Not a matter of ignorance, but of weapons and terrain that made the Western Front such a horror.
Anyway, the point is that the idea of learning styles is hokum.
I guess, come to think of it, I gave you another opportunity to take me extremely literally as if you had an argument. Let me try this again: There is one way to learn. Listen, watch, be concerned that if you don’t, you’ll die. Try. Even if it’s not the parents doing it.

By: anon

anon — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:35:00 +0000

Even after all of these many years, it’s sad that so many “educators” personalize knowledge and steadfastly refuse to learn from the results of scientific research.

By: Kirk Parker

Kirk Parker — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:10:19 +0000

“how many of them were being trained by their parents in radio procedures ”

Effectively zero.

By: Tracy W

Tracy W — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:02:09 +0000

Richard, yes, I got that the learning styles don’t appear to exist in the way that Dan Willingham talked about. But just because a hypothesis wasn’t proved before 1950 doesn’t mean that the hypothesis is necessarily wrong.

As for your example of the recruits to Vietnam, how many of them were being trained by their parents in radio procedures and navigation? And even if all the Vietnam recruits were all trained by their parents in radio procedures and navigation, this is not enough to support your assertion that for millions of years children only learned by being trained by their parents.

Nor does parental training limit itself to things that you need to know or die. Parents and other adults often teach cultural matters, like songs, dancing, how to paint, etc. Parents may also teach skills that are useful in their own lives but are not useful in where their children wind up, for example Maori had to abandon many traditional Pacific island crops as they settled into NZ because the climate didn’t support them. To take a military example, the settled tactics of 19th century warfare turned out to often be fatal when faced with machine guns, it was a case where learning from the previous generation of soldiers was a good way to die.

By: Richard Aubrey

Richard Aubrey — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:20:03 +0000

Tracy. I’m not talking about discovering previously unknown learning styles. I’m talking about the (non)-existence of the other half dozen.
Linda. Sorry to have afforded you the opportunity to be overly literal as if it were an actual argument.
Many animals lack any kind of verbal speech at all yet teach their offspring.
So the million years still counts. The anatomically modern humans, at least 150K YA, descended from less anatomically modern humans. Not from nothing. Unless you want to insist Ergaster and Erectus were into learning styles, their kids learned to listen to their parents (not merely SVO sentences) or die.
When I was in the Army, Infantry trainees got about four hours worth of radio procedures, about the same of calling for supporting fires, (both of which were presumed to be the responsibility of sergeants and officers)and a day of map reading and land navigation. You’d think they knew nothing.
Yet the war in Viet Nam was replete with stories of these kids, seventeen weeks’ training from draft to Viet Nam, and three months, say, in country, getting on the radio and calling in artillery and working tac air like pros. The sergeants and officers being dead.
Maybe they’d watched.
Point is, we taught them by lecture, followed by example, followed by them each taking a turn followed by a test.
Oh, yeah. And the implicit caveat, learn or die.
Worked.
Of course, we had the top half of the nation’s kids, the other half being mentally, morally, or physically ineligible.
Then there are expectations. Saw a Civil War recruting poster which said, in big type, “The Goths and Vandals are at the gates of the Federal City!”
The target audience was adventurous farm boys and mill hands in their late teens. Who could be expected to get the allusion, even though it was a slur on the Confederate army, and feel compelled to enlist. Today? Heavy metal concert.
Ever read a McGuffey Reader?