I read the Temple Grandin, PhD book “Visual Thinking”, and wanted to share my thoughts on it with you. Your first thought may be “Why this book? This doesn’t seem like anything to do with personal finance.” And directly, you’re right. Indirectly, it’s quite related – in terms of learning how you learn best, choosing the education you need, and pursuing a career path that won’t drive you crazy and cause you to need to career change.

Let’s start with who Temple Grandin is. Raised in an era when very few women earned professional degrees, she’s a professor in animal science at Colorado State University. She’s a visual thinker, and her books, lectures, and vlog appearances on visual thinking and autism are excellent educational resources for parents. I’ve read several of her books. Even better from a parenting perspective, I’ve watched several of her videoed lectures and vlog appearances aimed at parents, with my children – who thought she was wonderful! She is an engaging speaker in her own dynamic way, personifying living her own best life even though it’s not one that’s standard in our American society. She’s a living icon for those like her.

Education facts

Next, some facts that Dr. Grandin presents. And these are disturbing about the state of our education and career preparation system:

• After the ~1990’s, public middle and high schools lost their preparatory curriculums for life skills and object visualizers. Specifically, they lost their art and theatre programs, their welding and automechanics, and their home economics programs.
  • These children are not only deprived of the time learning in a way that fits their brains, they are spending that extra time struggling with (or checked out in) classes designed for verbal thinkers.
• We do very poorly on the international standardized test of problem solving skills, the PISA, which is performed every 3 years. As Temple describes it, if this were the problem solving Olympics, we not only wouldn’t medal, we wouldn’t even qualify.
• Nearly 70% of American children go to college. But only 41% will graduate in 4 years.
  • The rest are dragging out their educational process, costing far more, or will eventually drop out having accumulated the expenses but not earning the signaling premium or job eligibility from completion.
• Nearly 60% of community college students need remedial math, more than twice as many who need remedial English. Among 4 year public colleges, 40% needed one or more remedial classes, with 33% needing remedial math.
  • Related to the next point, and with the same problems.
• Only 37% of 12th graders have the math skills needed for entry-level college course work.
  • Which since we know far more than 37% of 12th graders are headed to college, means that many of them will be paying for non-college level work at college level prices. This re-iterates my point that you don’t just want your kid to get into college, you want them to be ready for college level work by spending some extra time and money in high school on tutoring. Or spend the first year or two of remedial work at your local community college, which is far cheaper for both credits and housing.
• Out of 170,000 California community college students placed into remedial math, 110,000 (64%) of them will neither get an associates degree nor transfer to a University of California (California makes the internal transfer process and credit alignment much easier than many other states).
• 40% of engineering and science students change majors or drop out. When pre-med students are added to that, the number climbs to 60%.
  • Changing majors often results in a large financial penalty, by requiring an additional semester, year, or years of college tuition and housing costs.
  • Dropping out, as we saw in my recent book review post on “The Case Against Education“, has its own large costs, having paid college expenses without earning the signaling premium.
• 25% of college graduates earn no more than does the average high school graduate.
• 40% of recent college graduates end up in jobs that don’t require a college degree. Part of that is because 28% cannot find a job in their field of study.
  • Again, costs and time lost. But also, our educational system allows for situations where in some fields, as many new graduates are turned out each year as the entire field currently employs, without even considering the far more common problem of how many job openings there are in that field each year.

Verbal vs Visual learners

Most of the American education system is designed by and for verbal learners. Just like in my professional work as a data scientist supporting laboratory research by helping develop internationally utilized CLSI guidance documents, where all of their evaluation protocols have historically been pages upon pages of unbroken lines of text (part of why I was brought in was to help change that! Got to love an organization that sees its flaws, and works to change them.). My children, like about 1/3 of people, are visual learners. They excel and thrive in a Montessori learning environment, where they can see the lessons they are being taught. If you or your children were/are in a non-Montessori learning environment, and thriving on the way the material is presented, you are likely among the 1/4 of people who are verbal learners, or 45% who are a mix of verbal and visual learners.

For the remaining 1/3 of people, those visual learners, the current education system doesn’t work well for them. And even the 45% who are a mix of verbal and visual learners would find their learning enhanced with more visual presentation of materials. For the 25% who are verbal only learners, I still can’t say they would be harmed by a more visual presentation in education – for instance, in my data science work I have never had anyone tell me they strictly preferred the pages of written text to summarize their statistical analyses, compared to the figures and summary tables I also provide.

Visual learners, those “clever engineers”

Just like her visual learning itself, Temple is the master of a good visualizable turn of phrase. We all know someone, maybe a grandpa or a craftsman demonstrating their art at a local craft fair, who is an excellent clever problem solver. And our current education system doesn’t do a good job of preparing the next generation of clever problem solvers for careers solving our home and industrial problems. Since we can’t control the education system, we can at least help identify those children in our lives, and help direct them into aligned career paths.

Characteristics of Object Thinkers or Object Visualizers

How do you recognize an object thinker or object visualizer in your self or your children? And in what careers do their skills help them thrive? (This was one of the spots where Temple’s non-verbal side definitely came to the forefront; I had to stop using the audiobook and switch to the physical book and start taking notes in order to follow along properly.)

These people are like Temple herself. They see in pictures. They are the ones who build the trains. They can’t pass algebra. They think in photo-realistic images. And they have big gains in their abilities as they get older and have more experiences, as Temple puts it they have put more pictures in their Google search database. They are good with their hands. They are happy to tinker and solve problems in the field under pressure (these are the ones the military wants to put in the field to solve their problems under fire).

As for careers, they are graphic designers, artists, skilled trades people, architects, inventors, mechanical engineers, designers, and mechanics.

I found it really useful to see this list all grouped together, because often I see all engineers lumped together. And yet, having gone to an engineering university for undergrad, I knew that not all people thrived in all sorts of engineering equally. Similarly, I’ve seen people, especially women, routed toward architecture, when their brain was better wired for those careers you’re going to see in the next list, those of spatial visualizers.

Characteristics of Spatial Visualizers

How do you recognize a spatial visualizer in your self or your children? And in what careers do their skills help them thrive?

These are the people who see in patterns and abstractions. They are excellent at logic. They are the ones who make the trains run. They are mathematically inclined. They are also good at a paper folding test – they were shown a piece of folded, holed, and then unfolded paper; the goal is to then re-fold the paper to how the hole was originally created. This group as a whole also doesn’t like to operate outside their comfort zone, which is very different than the other type of visual thinkers.

For careers, they are the mathematicians, the musicians, most engineers. They are the statisticians, the scientists, the electrical engineers. They are the physicists, the computer programmers, and the composers.

This list was enlightening to me. I wish all students looking at choosing or changing their college major were given a list of careers sorted in this way. I was made to feel like a weirdo for being undecided between degrees as apparently disparate as an engineer, physicist, scientist, and biostatistician; and my friends were almost all engineers and computer programmers. Despite their surface differences, they aren’t all that far apart, and were all good choices for someone with my brain type.

How to succeed at college as a Visual Thinker

Whether you are an Object Visualizer or a Spatial Visualizer, there are two main things Temple recommends you do to succeed at college.

1. Don’t ask “what do you want to be?” Instead as “what are you good at?” That will help you head down the right path for your brain type.
2. Ask for help. Don’t wait. As soon as you struggle, pursue tutoring. This is what Temple sees as the biggest mistake that college students make.

Getting career ready

Students with internships received 14% more interviews. Especially if you happen to graduate in a down market, this can be the difference between a job at graduation, and no job – it decreases post-graduation unemployment by 15%. It also is associated with increased salaries, and improved grades in college. Not all internships are paid; but if you check out apprenticeship.gov, all of those opportunities are paid.

Steps for educational and career placement success

1. Think about the thing(s) you did obsessively between ages 13-18. That’s the thing(s) you have the most chance of being world class at.
2. Be college ready. Get the education you need to be ready before paying college prices. That can be tutoring, or community college.
3. Look at the lists of careers of Object Visualizers, and Spatial Visualizers. Realize you probably don’t span both lists. Not sure which one you’re on? Think about who are the adults you love to spend time with, and then what jobs they do and love. Once you figure out which list you are on, choose a career from within that list.
4. Get an internship.

Visual thinker tidbits

In the later chapters of the book, Temple throws in some great tidbits that aren’t about education, but that are about the power and thoughts of visual thinkers.

• Most design problems can be sorted into four basic design types.
  • Design error
  • Operator error
  • Poor maintenance
  • Complex combination of risks.
  • Look at the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics for the historical data that is the best road map we have for preventing future accidents. This is especially important in high stakes design, everything from crushing accidents of employees to bridge collapses.
• Humanity debates the consciousness of animals, but to people who think in pictures, animals are no different from humans. They do not think or live verbally, but they store their memories as pictures and other sensory memories. Human alert systems can be similarly wired, which is why sometimes we can sense danger without needing words to tell us danger exists.
• The term deferred maintenance in our current language usage actually means infrequent or no maintenance, such as maintenance that only happens after an accident.
• After a horrific incident, we tend to say that things could have been worse. What we mean is that we are thankful that the damage wasn’t worse, but yet we know it can and will happen again, and we move on with life as if we don’t realize that, and we are complacent. Visual thinkers can be our protection against the verbal thinkers’ inclinations towards complacency, as they see in their minds eye the problem, and what is needed for the solution.

Turning visual as well as verbal thinkers loose on our problems, and empowering them the same way that we currently value and empower verbal thinkers in our society, would help reduce the blind spots that exist in our current system.

Conclusion

Knowing what type of learning you need will help you get the most out of whatever education you are pursuing. Pursing the right career will keep you on an earning track without needing to retreat to career changing with its inherent step back in financial payout. And the right career can help you enjoy the career you have, bringing you better work-life balance and joy to your world.

Make sure to read the rest of my college related posts for ways to optimize your children’s financial future via education and job selection.