Making Sense of Style.

C ertain things about her son, Ned, left a lasting impression on Jane Arenberg. A violinist and an orchestra manager in Mount Vernon, Virginia, she'd seen him strug gle at an early age with violin lessons. When his instructor tried to show Ned how to play a few notes, "his eyes rolled up to the top of his head and his attention wandered away," Arenberg recalls. But he seemed to learn much better when instructor and pupil were positioned back-to-back and Ned could play by listening and repeating. Even Ned's relations with others were affected by his acutely auditory style. "If I raised my voice even slightly, he thought I was screaming," Arenberg says. When Ned's kindergar ten teacher began doing "look-see" reading games, "Ned couldn't do it— he'd get extremely frustrated." At the end of the year, Ned's teacher said he wasn't ready for 1st grade After spending nearly $1,500 to have Ned examined by specialists, one of whom suggested hed require "mas sive intervention," Jane and her hus band, Richard, decided another ap proach was called for. On a hunch that Ned's program needed to be geared more to auditory learning, they en rolled him in a 1st grade immersion classroom where students learn En glish and Spanish simultaneously. In the new school, which stresses the development of language skills through verbal fluency, Ned has thrived, keeping up with the class and gaining in self-confidence. "He's doing fine in a regular school setting, after I was told that Ned would fail, and fail big time," Arenberg says. Winning New Converts Ned's experiences may not be typical, but they dramatically underscore what some experts believe is a prevailing indifference on the pan of schools to students' personal learning styles. That may be changing, however, as the no tions that individual learning style