100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People

21. People Have Different Learning Styles

My daughter had trouble learning math in school. My son, who is older, was pretty much a math whiz, and I can hold my own through algebra and geometry, so the fact that my 8-year-old daughter was struggling with basic concepts like subtraction was a mystery.

One day after school she was in my office. She was working on her math homework and was obviously struggling. She was trying to do the adding and subtracting with her fingers, as she always did, and all of a sudden a light bulb went on in my head—“Oh, maybe she’s a kinesthetic learner!” I happened to have sets of colored pens on a table in my office, so I started giving her addition and subtraction problems with the pens. I would literally hand her ...