“You’re special, aren’t you?”
Special definition one: different from what is normal or usual
Special definition two: unusual in a good way : better or more important than others
When you hear the word special, you’re mind tends to define it by the earlier explanation.
Now I am the dictionary definition of a special learner. And so are you. But with a schools institutionalized version of what the normal way of learning is, you wouldn't consider yourself a special learner would you?
My name is Emily, I am obsessed with learning. Civil engineering, psychology, I draw and sing and write poetry. And all of these things i can do in school, but I still don’t like school. Now, I am the proud owner of a 504 special learning plan at school. I get the full day for standardized tests, I can take my tests in the lab and theres other, more personal things too but, they're personal of course. School teaches you one or two ways to learn things. But, If you’re like me and have what I used to consider the burden of thinking differently. That can be rough on you, your self esteem, and your grade point average. Schools like to take our thinking patterns and even in the attempt to convince people that everyone learns differently they horribly mess up by only stating three ways. Doing, hearing, and saying. Which is dumb.
I myself have a learning style of what I like to call thinking in fractions through logic. I take the problem or task and split in in half then try to use my logic and my current knowledge to figure it out. And it works. But not for my teachers apparently. Because god forbid I think different. Because that would be wrong.
        School dared me to think different. I had finally figured out that i wasn’t stupid and they had the audacity to tell my “my thought process” was wrong? because after being confused on how to find the area of a rhombus and finally just splitting it in half at both sets of vertices, if i just find the area of each triangle based off of the sides given instead of using the distance formula I’d have it! And I got the answer right but the teacher counted it wrong because I ‘showed my work wrong’. But, I’m pretty sure if Pythagoras heard that he would probably get upset because, he had to think different to come up with the pythagorean theorem. If it weren’t for people thinking differently we would still think the earth is flat! Why are we making kids learn a certain way? Why aren’t we thought to be inventors, critical thinkers, and little professors from the time we started school in the first place?
According to Department of Statistics University of California, 44% of students learn by reading/writing, 42% visual learners,  8%  Kinesthetic, 6% hearing and auditory factors. Students are put on a scale.

I like to imagine schools seeing learning styles like a stereotypical clipart picture of a rainbow.

When in reality its the whole hue color
spectrum!

Learning styles are a spectrum. while yes, the color purple is purple, but theres more kinds of purple. Theres Fandago, Damson, Twilight, Razznit, Taupe, Munsell and theres an unlistable amount of names for different hues of purple just as there are unlistable ways to describe and think and discover!
            After putting myself through school a lot I find myself learning from youtube. Minutephysics, slam poetry presentations, Vihart’s “doodling in math class” and crash course videos. I mean just last week I marathoned all of the crash course phycology videos! In a day…  In my favorite video in that series John Green said a quote I’ve taken to heart. “What if I was a truly gifted artist but who’s barely mastered long division? Could anyone tell me I was intelligent based of of those different aptitudes?”
   And then, theres college. It’s been pounded into our young minds since we were hardly old enough to comprehend the basics of the concept. And one thing almost all teenagers know, is that the more you're told to do something, the less you want to in the first place. We grew up thinking college was a necessity (which in this economy, it is) but thats not my point. My point is that they told us the top is college, but not preparing us for the world that comes after it; and making us feel as if our whole future revolves around a collection of scores.
We are worth more than the collection of numbers that dictate pass and fail. If we can help students like you, like me, like all of us learn to adapt to our own personal learning styles; we can change the world and make learning simply irresistible.