Personal Narrative: Discovering My Personal Learning Style

Discovering your personal learning style is the beginning step to a successful education. Once you uncover how you learn, you will find that you are able to learn much better. After taking the VARK questionnaire, I have discovered that I am a multimodal learner. According to the Oxford Dictionary (2016), multimodal is defined as being “characterized by several different modes of activity or occurrence”. In simpler terms, it means that my learning preferences include visual, aural, reading/writing, and kinesthetic. For me, I will drift towards different styles of learning depending on what it is that I am learning.
When learning subjects such as math and science, I find it is best to write things out. This way I am able to refer back to a concrete …show more content…
I was so excited because my aunt had given me my own car and I could not wait to be able to drive. My parents signed me up for a driver’s ed course. I spent two entire weekends in a classroom learning the rules of the road. At the end of each day we would have a mini quiz based on what we learned that day. I do not think there was one quiz that I did not get 100% on. I thought I was ready to drive. After taking the course in the classroom, it was time to begin my actual driving lessons. My instructor seemed to know what he was doing, so when he told me I was ready to take my road test at the DMV, I knew I could do it. Well I took my road test and I failed it three times. I failed it miserably each time and was told not to come back until I took more lessons. There was no way my parents were paying for another course so my dad took it upon himself to teach me how to drive. After a few weeks of driving with my dad, he felt I was ready to take my road test again. This was my last shot because each time you take your road test, it costs quite a bit of money. I passed with flying colors this time. This experience makes me think that some people are not able to learn a skill from just anyone. Obviously the teaching style of my driving instructor did not work for me. I was told how to drive, but never shown. When my dad would take me driving, he would first show me what I had to do before it was my turn. Now this style might not work for everybody, …show more content…
I was told that if you did not know what you wanted to be, science was your best option because it would open many more doors for you than arts would. In high school, I did my best in science courses simply because I knew I had to take science at the university level. Once I began taking the science courses here at CBU, I felt like I was drowning. I was given no instruction. My professors would tell me what I needed to know and I was on my own to learn it. Different people take longer to learn certain things than others so when I came to class the next day after being told I was to know 5 topics like the back of my hand, I was lost. There was no way I could keep up to speed. I did my best to make it work. It was hard for me to follow along in lectures because I was never caught up to speed with what I was supposed to know. I had 4 science-based course in one semester and each of them followed the same style of “here’s what you need to know, now go learn it on your own”. It was simply impossible for me to break up my time to evenly devote enough study time to each of these classes. So I tried my best with a study method I thought could work. I was constantly rewriting my notes in hopes that something would stick. I would type them on my laptop as well as write them out by hand. This did help me retain some information, but I could not do it fast enough to keep up with the expectations of the