So I am a big fan of learning styles and how they affect people's daily lives. I teach, and believe me, when it comes to learning styles, there isn't a whole lot of difference between a classroom full of first-graders and a classroom full of adults, except maybe that the adults known how to use Kleenexes.

DD#2 came home with an assignment on learning styles the other night. She had been told to have one of her family members take a learning style assessment test. I've done Myers-Briggs and I know myself pretty well, but she asked me to take the test, so I did.

Unfortunately, she waved it at me and gave me pretty vague directions, so the first time through, I did it wrong. Her instructions were "rank these words using 0, 1, 3, or 5, depending on how strongly the word resonates with you." Her instructions should have been, "These words are in rows of four words. Rank the four words in each row using 0, 1, 3, or 5, depending on how strongly the word resonates with you," but she's 14 and I should have asked for clarification.

I came out strongly dominant in the "sensing-thinking" area, which can be summed up thusly:

The sensor thinker works in an organized, step-by-step, methodical manner. The ST student learns best alone, thrives on repetitious drill and practice, and has a profound need for timely feedback. These students memorize facts well and often excel at recall tests. For this student, answers are either right or wrong; "discovery learning" and "cooperative learning" will drive this student to distraction because they crave a clearly defined path to the correct answer. The ST student should study alone, in a well lit and structured area, with no distractions, utilizing repeated example problems and exercises. Complex concepts should be broken down into steps or small pieces and each step in the process should be mastered before moving on to the next.

The husband (who is an NT, by the way) loves to tease me about my need for rules. I like rules. Rules—whether they govern grammar, societal behavior, or the workings of the universe—make me very happy.

There are parts of my new job that I've really been struggling with, and I feel bad for my account supervisor because it seems like every other hour I am asking her for clarification on one point or another. It's not the medical terminology that's tripping me up—I am nailing that. It's not a problem understanding the dictators, even the non-English speaking ones (who are actually easier to transcibe because they don't mumble.) No, the problem I am having is with the "acccount specifics," the rules that govern how a particular account is transcribed.

When I was doing my coursework, we were told that they were style guidelines (yay!—and a whole book of them) but that "account specifics" rule the day and may override the style guidelines at any time. That was pounded into our heads, I suspect, to remind us ST's that we should not make an idol out of the AHDI Book of Style, 3rd edition.

Lucky me, I landed on an account with pretty vague specifics. And I have to give props here to my account manager—she is aware that this account has pretty vague specifics, and she's doing her best to clarify them (probably so I will stop pestering her). I was thrown into the worst kind of situation for an ST to be in and it has caused me no end of angst for the past 6 weeks. Instead of being given a set of clearly-defined expectations, which would allow me to concentrate on creating an accurate report, I was give a set of guidelines that went something like, "The rule for this situation is to do XYZ, unless it's this subset of this situation, in which case you need to do ABC, but if it this subset of this situation, you do 123, and if Mercury is in retrograde and there is a full moon, you should probably just have a glass of wine."

Arrrrggggggghhhhhhh . . . . .

I can give you an example that illustrates this perfectly: I was told that the doctor may dictate the date of dictation (and he or she usually does), but I was not to assume that the date of dictation was the same as the date of service (which the doctor does not always dictate). Usually the doctor does dictations the same day or the next day, but sometimes they may get behind by a couple of days. Okay, great, a rule. I carefully jotted down the rule and what to do in that situation: I am to mark the report for client review so that the client can make sure it has the correct date of service on it.

There are two levels of review for a report. The lower level is QA, which is my account supervisor. I send the report to her if I have questions about terminology or I can't understand what the doctor is saying. The higher level is client review, which is reserved for things like date of service, missing parts of transcription, etc. This past week I happened to send a report marked for both levels. I had a question that I knew my account supervisor could answer, but I had also marked the report because the doctor dictated the date of dictation but not the date of service. I got a note back from her saying I should not have marked it for client review, because the doctor said, "Today's date is . . . " and that should have gone into the date of dictation field. "But," I said, "I was told not to do that." "Yes," she said, "but you can assume for this doctor that the date of service is the date of dictation." "For this doctor only?" I asked, and she said, "Well, for this doctor and for this doctor, but only these doctors."

Rules, with exceptions to the rules. I have a Word document open on my desktop in which I am trying—not always successfully—to create a flow chart for each doctor so that I know what the rules and the subsets of rules are, because if I violate a rule I make my account supervisor unhappy. She has people breathing down her neck, too. I have kicked around the idea of asking for a different account—one with clearly-defined rules—but I really really really like this particular specialty so I am just trying to suck it up. I am now at the end of week 6 and I finally feel like I have a handle on what the rules are, which means that it's about time for somebody to change them again.

***************************************

There is another side of this coin, too. Not only am I an ST learner, I am an ST teacher, and I have to remember that when I have a room full of knitters. I try very hard to give the "big picture" and the goals for each class and each swatch, so that they people with other learning styles get their needs met, too. I will give opportunity for people to take off on their own and experiment, because some students want to synthesize concepts themselves.

The challenge for me are the people who stop listening when I say, "Here are the instructions for this swatch . . . " as I start to go over them, because those people don't like rules and guidelines and like to puzzle things out for themselves. They are also the people who aske me lots of questions on rows 2, 3, and 4, because they didn't listen to the instructions. Oh well. Class would be boring if everyone were like me.

***************************************

The funny ending to the story about DD#2's homework assignment was that she had to write a summary of what she learned by giving me that test. She wrote, "My mother needs to have directions clearly explained to her and I did not do that, so she screwed it up the first time."

We all learn.