If I had a nickel every time a student came up to me and said, "I'm an x learner and your class is very y," I'd have a lot of nickels.
Every single time what they really mean is, "I'm doing terrible in your class, and even though it's probably my attitude or study habits or preparedness, I'm going to blame you."
It makes it easier if it's a learning style you enjoy. If a professor is just going to read from a book all day, I'm honestly going to have a bad time. I came to this class for you to convey the concept; hence why I'm paying for said class.
I had a professor who everyone seemed to love, but I did terribly in his class and just hated going. He'd constantly go off on tangents and every day he'd give us a totally illegible, handwritten page of notes. I never did well in his classes. Someone told me, "Well you rarely read the text books right; you just always go to class and take notes? Maybe you're not a book learner and people who like x are book learners?"
No, people who like his class put up with all his idiocy and find it cutsie pootsie. I took architecture classes in grad school that went over the exact same material (op codes and VLIW) and the professor was just better at explaining things. I was like, "Oh...this makes sense .."
It wasn't the teaching style, that other professor was just terrible at explaining these concepts (and really even understanding them).
In my own experience of studying during my life - which admittedly is a sample size of one and hugely biased, I would say that without fail, every class I've failed to gain traction in is because I was uninspired or lacked critical prerequisites in my understanding that helped my understand during the class, or some combination thereof.
I'm an X learner is a symptom of this. I'm an X learner means that I have pigeonholed myself as only being able to effectively learn when (for example) I am being taught by a highly engaging orator who exudes passion for their subject that exhibits as a charisma so drawing that I am excited by the material...
...I wonder how many teachers fit that description... looking at my history of taking classes, I'm going to reach into my farcically small data set and suggest almost none.
So... perhaps given that, I need to find a way to discover how engaging a topic is of my own accord so that I'm inspired to dig deep and understand it from the most fundamental levels required in order to absorb the material presented by my motivated, but somewhat uncharismatic teacher.
So for me, an X learner, my X is someone who absorbs material most effectively when my teacher is amazing... and I've done the leg work to understand what they're talking about before I sit down in their class and start asking stupid questions to disapproving tones of the other students.
I'm a fun learner and your class is very... not fun :P
Likewise, it's not a poor visualization because I/you are not a visual learner, it's a poor visualization because it's a poor visualization.
There's so much depth to presentation and feedback as broad concepts, and it's a real shame when improvement is stifled in favor of reductionist knee-jerk reactions like "This just isn't my style".
I'm sure there are a lot of parallels with "gamification" in learning/workplace environments.
I’ve been in plenty of situations where I was an X and the class was a Y. But rather than complain to the teacher about it, I would just self study harder and stop attending lectures. It usually worked.
I don’t expect that teachers can solve my problems, any of them actually, and especially when they are the problem what can you do?
i do actually learn best by reading. if the professor produces a set of authoritative notes for the class, i will get an A on every exam. as long as the professor makes it clear exactly what sections of the text are important, i will learn everything and still get an A every time.
if the professor says important stuff during lecture that cannot be read somewhere, i have no chance of retaining that information.
Conversely, I retain almost nothing I get from books. But if you can explain something so I actually understand it, I don't even need to revise come exam time. If I understand it, or at least well enough to reconstruct a complete understanding on the fly, then I'll ace the exam. If you expect me to try and learn it from a book, I'll still do okay, but it'll take me 10 times longer to learn it.
Writing own notes help in situation where informations is only said. Then you can read it. Pretty much no one is able to consistently remember heard information after single hearing, overwhelming majority of people need to revise it.
Writing helps because writing is an effective learning style, even if you burn the notes as soon as you write them. (Reading might help even more, but reading without writing helps less than writing + reading)
Of course people differ in the way they learn and process information - but the division between visual/auditory/kinestetic is silly as claiming that someone learns better on a Tuesday because it was born on that day.
Every single time what they really mean is, "I'm doing terrible in your class, and even though it's probably my attitude or study habits or preparedness, I'm going to blame you."