Memory Monday ◈
There Isn’t One Right Way to Learn
For a long time, I thought I wasn’t smart.
Reading and spelling didn’t come easily to me.
When those things were being taught in school, I was sometimes taken out of the classroom. I believe the idea was that I would get extra help.
But it backfired.
The room I was sent to didn’t really teach me anything. I mostly sat there and did homework.
When I was 12, I moved from Mendocino to Portland. For the first time, I was in a larger school and had a stable living situation.
I worked incredibly hard.
I learned how to study. I learned how to do my homework. I learned how to work within the system I was in.
By tenth grade, I was getting mostly straight A’s.
But what people couldn’t see was how much work it took.
I would stay up all night finishing assignments, especially writing assignments.
Around that time, I started taking Latin.
My teacher was Mrs. Sullivan, the last Portland Public Schools teacher teaching Latin.
I was so excited to take her class. My mom had studied Latin. My dad had studied Latin. My grandparents had studied Latin. And I want to be like them. .
One day, Mrs. Sullivan asked me:
“Are you dyslexic?”
I said no.
She asked if I’d ever been tested.
I hadn’t.
She had noticed something important.
Not that I couldn’t learn.
She noticed the way I was learning.
I was tested, and sure enough, I was dyslexic.
After that, I was able to work with a tutor who specialized in dyslexia. I began learning strategies that actually suited the way my brain worked.
And I made progress.
But something else happened that changed the way I saw myself.
After my biology teacher, Mrs. Dumas, learned I was dyslexic, she came to me one day and told me that we were going to play a game in class in a few weeks.
She said she didn’t know why, but every student she’d taught who was dyslexic had been particularly good at this game.
I don’t remember all the details of how the game worked, but I remember the tree.
We divided into teams, and we had leaves representing different species—animals, reptiles, and other groups—that had to be placed on the tree in particular ways.
And somehow…
I just knew where they went.
I couldn’t have explained why.
I could see it.
And our team rocked.
I’ve thought about that experience many times since.
Because Mrs. Dumas did something important before we ever played the game.
She told me she thought I would be good at it.
I’d spent years believing that because reading and spelling were difficult for me, maybe I wasn’t smart.
And here was a teacher telling me that the way my brain worked might actually help me do something well.
She gave me the confidence to trust what I saw.
To trust that I might be right.
To trust that I was smart.
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I think about Mrs. Sullivan and Mrs. Dumas now when I teach dance.
One of my favorite parts of teaching isn’t figuring out whether someone can learn.
It’s figuring out how they learn.
Some dancers need to see the whole dance first.
Others need everything broken down into small pieces.
Some want words for each movement.
Some want numbers.
Some learn through sounds.
Some need to watch.
Some need to do it.
Often, it’s a combination.
I’m a kinesthetic and auditory learner.
I learn by doing, watching, and hearing.
Words and numbers aren’t my first language when it comes to dance.
It can take me hours to translate something I know in my body into words or counts.
But another dancer may need exactly those words or counts before the movement makes sense.
Neither way is wrong.
There isn’t one right way to learn to dance.
That’s something I want people to discover in my classes.
If something doesn’t make sense the first way I explain it, we can try another way.
And another.
Until we find the way that makes sense to you.
Because sometimes the problem isn’t that you can’t learn something.
You just haven’t been shown it in the way you learn yet.
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I’d love to hear from you.
How do you learn best?
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Until next Monday…
Keep listening.
Keep dancing.
Keep the music alive.
— Maldon
