Re: can opener dad and his 9-year-old, a thread.

One of the things that teachers do is learn their students' learning style. Some do best just by listening. Some want to visualize. Some want to learn hands-on. Some need to move around physically.

Some students can do all of these things well. Some students emphatically cannot learn effectively through only one avenue. It's why, whenever I talk, or a student says anything, I put it on a whiteboard immediately. Auditory and visual learners both get something.

It's why I suggest, particularly to my kinesthetic learners, taking their sentences, pasting them on index cards, and then moving them around until the order makes really good sense, so that they can have really strong, cohesive paragraphs.

Some people - like me - may be really good visual learners in the sense that we don't forget things once we've seen them (this helped immensely when I studied art history), but are weak as shit when it comes to looking at an object and determining how it works.

(It's a running joke in our house that if I'm assembling anything, there is a direct correlation between the amount of swearing coming from the room and how badly I'm fucking up everything. I don't know why I keep drinking from the Ikea river)

At 9 years old? A can opener? That I've never even seen someone use? EVER? I'm a *watch someone use a thing* visual learner. I am not a "will figure out the mechanics of a machine that might as well have come from the Etruscans, or like, Mars" learner.

Moral: if you have kids, learn how they learn, and TEACH THEM THAT WAY. Do not starve them until they are suddenly engineers. That wouldn't have worked with me. I would have probably gone to the neighbors' house and filled up on mint Milanos instead. While hating my dad.