Chapter 1

A young boy named David has trouble writing stories until one day the teacher has them make collages and write about the story they created. David becomes an amazing story maker after realizing that the words he needed for his stories that would disappear before he could write them now stayed in the pictures he had made. When he forgot something all he needed to do was look back at the pictures he had made.

Author of “The Power of Pictures” Beth Olshansky begins her book with this story about a visual learner stuck in a verbal learning world. She talks about her own experience as a child when her father asked who the “good students” were. Her father was referring to the students who were good in the 3r’s (reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic). What does that make the other students? The “bad students” were good in art like she was but did the other teachers know about their strength or just their weakness.

The great minds of the new age, from Einstein to Thomas Edison, were often ridiculed in school for not being verbal learners. Most had some form of dyslexia, in the broad term meaning a difficulty with words. These visual learners would start most of their ideas with a sketch and then write out the details, much like David.  

School systems were created for the verbal learner causing visual learners to fall behind and get picked on. This causes low self esteem in children due to the favoritism of the classroom. Government aid programs such as No Child Left Behind just make it harder for the educators to help because they are so overwhelmed by standardized tests; which is a fully verbal learning test. The system as a whole ignores student’s strength and beats up on their weakness.

Research shows nearly all children are visual and kinesthetic learners but when it comes to verbal learning only 2/3 of children make it leaving 1/3 at a disadvantage in the verbal heavy schools. These non verbal learners are often mislabeled as ADD or AD/HD due to the fact that they do not fit into our verbal learning world. Most educators, principals, test makers, and educational administrators are verbal learners. Visual learners almost never reach a position of educational change let alone one that would affect literacy.

Pictures were mans first language and they function as each of our first language when we reach the age where we can grasp a stick or crayon, and write in the mud or on the walls. Our instinct to alter what is put before us is so great that it can sometimes even hinder us when it is taken away to be replaced by a new language.  Instead of using pictures to learn writing we are told to abandon drawing all together this leave children stranded grasping to learn a hard new concept that some of them will understand and some will never fully get.

The student that doodles is telling you how he learns, but is punished by a system that is designed to favor verbal learners. This is how educators were taught to teach in a verbal manner. We need to change the system so that all students learn not just verbal learners.

There is a marriage between pictures and words. “I see what you mean”, is when words take on an almost visual nature and “A picture says a thousand words”, is meaning that a good visual representation can speak its scene.

When reading/writing parts make up the whole where as in pictures the image is viewed as a whole first and then broken down into parts that are added in to deepen the whole of the image.

To end today’s blog visual and verbal learning together expands our capacity to think in new ways.