I don't remember much about my learning style before 5th grade. I may/may not have been a note-taker. I know that in 6th grade I got in to a class (science) and as the teacher began to lecture, and none of us were writing anything down, he stopped the class and said, "Why are you all just sitting there?? Start taking notes!" Thus began my learning "style" from that point forward. I'd take tons (and I mean TONS) of notes during class. Then, in a separate notebook, I'd re-write the most pertinent notes in a more organized fashion. The repetition of reading it twice and writing it twice, I'm sure, helped me learn it better. Did that all through high school and college. So long as a teacher could present his material in an engaging way, I could and would listen - and absorb - but by that point note-taking (and then note re-writing) was absolutely de rigeur so I can't tell you if I would have learned anyway even if I hadn't taken the notes. I don't know.

I do know that once out in the professional world, I continued (and still do to this day) to take notes whenever I'm learning something and when I'm in conversation with my manager because my memory is shyte - if I don't write it down...all is certainly lost. I simply can't keep anything in my head. Certain tasks that I have to do on a repeated basis I will eventually commit to memory - but, even still, I keep my notebook nearby in case I have a brain fart.

I can't read anymore but I don't think that audiobooks would work for me. I get the feeling my attention would just wander away.

I found it so amazing about needing to understand underlying concepts before being able to grasp something. I think that's why algebra always confounded me. I simply could NOT understand what the hell letters were doing mixed up with numbers. I drove my poor algebra teacher nuts constantly asking, "But....why?" I wasn't trying to drive her nuts - I really was trying desperately to understand whatever she was teaching on that particular day but my brain simply couldn't get a hold of it. One day, after my upteenth "But...why?", she exasperatedly said, "Just BECAUSE!" and then left the room abruptly. Somebody sneaked over to the door and peeked through the window out in to the hall. The poor thing was crying a little bit out there. I felt awful about that.

More recently (as in yesterday) I revealed to my DBT therapist that I was having a hard time filling out the diary card. If you're in DBT, you'll know to what I'm referring. Specifically, I was struggling to rate various emotional responses (joy, love, anger, guilt, shame, etc.) on a scale of 0-5. A number in and of itself means nothing to me - there's no context to it. She and I had to go through each emotion and ascribe words (sometimes a couple of adjectives or a phrase) that would match each number. Now the numbers mean something to me: I have an understanding of an underlying concept that I personally ascribed to each number on the 0-5 scale. I was so relieved when we finished doing that, I felt like a 2 ton weight had rolled off my shoulders.