What do you think about a recent Veritassium video that discusses the idea that ‘there is no such thing as a visual learner’ (https://youtu.be/rhgwIhB58PA)
I'm completely open to being wrong or corrected, I will watch the video now. It's likely poor understanding on my part. However, I would reinforce my claim by adding that there is good psychological evidence for verbal vs spacial interest and competency, which is no doubt related.
I think it's basically just arguing semantics. Been a math teacher my whole career, and it's quite plain to me that some kids simply learn better as soon as you draw a picture, and others simply don't. Not sure why it has to be a whole debate.
I would say it's worth debating because it is an inexact and unsound principle on which recent education is built on.
More than that, in the Romanian Master's cycle, if you want to continue your pedagogical studies such that you become a high school teacher, there is an entire course dedicated to learning styles and there is one more dedicated on the other infamous inexact-semantics concept, the multiple intelligences theory.
So I would argue that it has a similarly bad effect on the education domain to any other arbitrary first-principles that lead to sub-optimal research and lack of clarity of what is really going on in some domain, which lead again to sub-optimal methods.
Regarding your observation about how some kids simply learn better after seeing some visual representation of the concepts, there could be many reasons for this (they start paying attention when you draw, they fall somewhere on the Bell curve such that they need that extra representation to get it, as the Veritasium video also presents with the memory experiment), but I would doubt that persistent learning styles of your students would be the differentiator, which is what the video discredits (https://youtu.be/rhgwIhB58PA?t=438).
