you know my (learning) steez

We were required to give a "learning styles inventory" to our students and report on the findings. "What," you ask, "is a learning styles inventory?" A personality test, of sorts, and about as precise as those ones you find in supermarket-checkout-aisle magazines, I'd say. That may not be fair--I do believe that we have different learning styles. But I tend to agree with Weims the Drifter when he professes his distrust of self-assessments. Since my interest is, for the most part, in whether my students are "learning" as I define it (rather than as my students might interpret "I learn best when..."), my ideal learning styles inventory would be to teach the same thing many different ways and evaluate how well my students learned myself. There are, of course, problems with that method. Hence, the survey I found and gave, with questions that my students couldn't understand ("supplemented by visual aids and assigned reading") and that focused more on perceived preferences than observed performance.
I found that most of my students were heavily tactile learners, or at least preferred tactile learning. No surprise there, as my observations would fully support the "tactile" part, if not the "learning." I also had more auditory learners than visual learners, which corresponds rather neatly with my students' preference for having texts read to them, rather than reading themselves So despite my reservations about the inventory, it at least corroborated what I was already observing. A more detailed survey might have opened itself up to the problems of self-perceptions but might also have revealed more interesting diversity. The data I have don't tell me much more than that my students seem typical for middle-schoolers.
A reminder of what middle-schoolers are like isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. It helps to be reminded that the rampant touching, a continual issue in my classroom management, is part of a larger tactile mindset that can just as easily be set loose on an activity. It's not always easy to come up with manipulatives or other physical objects for English lessons, but the payoff can be great.