Low bloggage in the next few days as I complete course outlines and online sites for three different courses.

Below is what my hallway has become. Ten giant post-it pages, one for each teaching week. One colour of post-it notes for each course. All topics and Zoom sessions and assessment submissions and assessment return dates with their own note, stuck on a week. Then moved. Then moved back. Then screwed up. Then re-instated.

The idea of Learning Styles – a learner’s preference for auditory, visual, reading/writing or kinesthetic methods to understand new material translating to more successful outcomes if they have a chance to apply that modality – has been very firmly debunked.

None-the-less, I like to involve my body when I think and work. It’s why I use the pen on my iPad so very, very much throughout my day, constantly transferring documents from PC to PDF and scribbling all over them in virtual ink. If you have done a workshop with me, you know that you have spent at least some of your time out of your seat, very likely moving from one spot to another.

I was getting frustrated and stuck using Excel to try to map things out, so moved to the wall. And it involved stationery. I like stationery.

I found this a far more effective way of reconciling clashes and smoothing out busy periods during the semester. I *may* have also been muttering and narrating what I was doing as I moved paper about. Definitely a process to do in the privacy of one’s own home and not in the office.

That is the kinesthesia from the title of the blog post. The synesthesia (a tangling of sensory input so something coming in on one channel, like music, is also perceived on another, like taste)?

All semester I have used colour-coding in my calendar to mark events associated with different courses. BUT, I kept getting tangled up because the one I allocated pink simply.was.not.a.pink.course. At all. But another one… that was definitely, absolutely pink. I toughed it out for half the year because, well, it seemed a little embarrassing that my own arbitrary colour-assignment felt wrong according to some unnamed and unverifiable criteria that did not make any sense.

Today, however, I needed to choose colours for post-it notes associated with each course and I could stand it no more. I went into my calendar and changed the colours of all my appointments for each course (it was done by changing titles on colour categories, nothing more drastic). Then I changed the background shading on the Excel charts I use to keep track of each course. THEN – when I did my muttery, moving, stationery-rich hallway chart, I did it completely undisturbed by the mismatch of colours.

(Maybe working at the office would have been just a little more orthodox today).