The Learning Process

When we grow up to be adults, it’s hard to remember how we learned a few things in life. Things we use every single day, that we probably never could imagine life without them – such as math. Numbers are everywhere, we use them all the time and the memory of not knowing them got lost in so many other moments in life.

I myself don’t remember how I learned about numbers but I do have a strong memory about how I learned how to do additions. We were learning numbers and mathematical operations with Montessori Golden Beads (very funny actually) but somehow I couldn’t quite understand how additions worked (or any other operations) quite well – it just didn’t make any sense to my 4/5 year-old brain.

One day, this boy from my classroom was really happy sharing with everyone how his older brother explained to him how to add numbers and this got my attention right away! How come we were studying the same class with the same professor and he could “totally get” how to do operations and I didn’t? I asked him to share the “secret” with me. Well, he showed me his hands and started raising fingers - “hey Victoria, do you know how one finger means 1 and two fingers means 2? Try to add other fingers to your number, it will turn out to be something completely diferent.

I have to say - I spent literally the ENTIRE day adding and subtracting numbers from my fingers – in just a day, I learned how to make additions and subtractions by seeing it literally in my hands. I was marveled by the possibilities and felt that nothing could stop me from learning new things. None of my professors had had that idea, I guess because they were so stuck by rules and thought they’d had just one way to teach things.

My brain was always a little non-orthodox. What made perfect sense for some of my classmates learning from the teacher made ZERO for me and I’ve always loved learning things in a more practical way, using daily situations as examples so it could make sense for me. This wasn’t very easy as in school we are conditioned to learn literally by-the-book. Somethings work, but not everything – not for me at least.

Whenever I’m interviewing a new student one of our basic questions is to know if they had any previous experience with English lessons and how. Many of them went to languages schools, a few of them had private teachers and some, just the regular school’s English lesson.

Well, the very first “problem” they mention to us is that the lessons simply don’t work for them. And sometimes it’s not even the teacher’s fault – sometimes the curriculum is really outdated, sometimes the coordination doesn’t allow them to think outside the box, and many other issues. Don’t get me wrong – for some people this model totally works! But not for everybody.

The importance of learning something new in a way YOU can understand is not something people are discussing enough, specially in Education. What works for one person doesn’t mean it will work for everybody. And what is more important: giving a lesson from the traditional perspective or making your student actually learn?

Understanding personal needs can be a game-changer. Each and everyone of us have particularities when we enter the learning process. Some people simply can’t learn if they don’t write everything in a notebook, others can learn by listening very carefully to what the teacher is saying with absolutely no need to write stuff down.

The important question is: What is YOUR learning process? What suits you the best? What meets your expectations? No comparisons, it’s all about you. Interesting fact: there’s no wrong answer – just you! See how important it is to be somewhere you can be free enough to say “hey - this doesn’t work for me” or “I really want to learn about THIS other than going through a lot of things I will simply not use at the moment”?

Finding your own learning style is a game-changer. You will learn faster and the lessons will not be boring. Once you start noticing your progress, you will know you’re on the right path and things will get more and more interesting, especially when you start putting everything you learned into practice.

So, if you want the kind of customized English experience I was talking about, click here!