Left, Right. Got Brains?

I really haven't spent a lot of time here lately.  Heck, it's been almost a year.  I've been writing some songs and poems since my wife passed, but those tend to start out with pen and paper rather than with a blank computer screen.

What prompted me to come back here was a Facebook post based on one of those cutesy online quizzes that supposedly reveal your personality based on seemingly innocuous questions.  This particular quiz is meant to determine which brain hemisphere I use more, left or right.

One must remember that there is a connection between the two hemispheres, the name of which escapes me at the moment.  The point is that a physical, interdependent link exists between the two.  They discovered the supposed differences between the two hemispheres on a man who was missing that connection in his brain.  This led to the leap in left brain/right brain theories in psychology which eventually filtered down to pop psychology theories and books and exercises supposedly designed to help build up human abilities in one hemisphere or the other.   More watering down of the discovery of a left and right hemisphere sadly occurred in education.  Thus prospective teachers are trained in the mantra of brain-based education.  

What is forgotten is that all these theories and practices developed from examination of a man with brain damage.   Allow me to reiterate:  A MAN WITH BRAIN DAMAGE!

This is why whenever presented with the idea of brain based educational practices my response was always, "I am not concerned with what side of the brain my students may use.  I just want to know if they have any brains at all."

Maybe that's where the idea for zombies came from.  Maybe zombies are just teachers looking to see if their students have any brains.

I am not denying that some students are more creative than others or that some are more analytical than others, which is supposedly the real focus of left brain/right brain studies.   Emphasizing this as a focus of educational reform, however, is another misguided attempt to turn classrooms into experimental labs. 

Students need to use their brains to create and to analyze.   Music classes, art classes, literature classes help them.  So do math, science, and grammar classes.  We don't need to determine which side of the brain students use, and we don't need to focus on teaching to one side or the other.  Instead, we need to develop curriculum and methods that help students use their whole brain.

Maybe It Was a Bad Idea to Begin With

An interesting discussion of the state of education appeared in the New York Times.  

I’ve been a day sub and a long-term sub.  I’ve taught in a federally funded Title 1 program.  I taught in a public school, then a private school, and again in a public school.  All together, I dedicated more than 35 years to continually push back the frontiers of ignorance.

I’ve seen numerous attempts at educational reform – writing labs, performance based education, longer class periods, shorter class periods, brain based learning, visual learning, and a whole slue of other attempts at pushing back those frontiers, attempts at making student learn.

Sometimes reforms work.  Other times they don’t.  They might work for some students and not for others.  Sometimes large numbers of students are affected, and sometimes students still fall between the cracks of the system no matter how laudable the reasons for the reforms.

And, sometimes, the reason change doesn't work is because it was a bad idea in the first place.

I certainly don’t have the answer to the nation’s education woes.  No one really does.  If they say they do, they’re selling you a bill of goods.

What works in one school district doesn’t always work for a district in the neighboring county.  What works for one teacher doesn’t always work for the teacher in the next classroom.

I considered myself to be a fair, but strict, teacher.  I referred to a teacher down the hall from me as the “Mother Earth Goddess” of the high school. Students who liked a stringent, take-no-excuses approach tended to do well with me as their teacher, and students who liked a touchy feely approach tended to do well with her.   When touchy feely students were in my classes, they tended to be, well, not as successful. We always had a running joke about scheduling that if we could ever figure out a way to pair up students based on the type of teacher with whom they would do best, we could make a lot more money being consultants.

We have come to a point in this country where we think that the test scores are the be all and end all of education.  Yes, test scores, are a measure of how we are doing, but it is only one measure.  And, frankly, it is a rather unimportant measure.  Does it really matter where we rank in reading and math compared to other nations?  Why?

When we go to the doctor, we don’t ask him or her what grades they received in med school.  We’re sick, and we just want to get well.  When our sink is backed up, and we’ve depleted the store of every kind of liquid drain opener, we call the plumber. We don’t ask where he trained or what kind of grades he received. We just want the sink to stop overflowing. 

It might matter how a person is inclined, whether they are geared to more academic or technical pursuits, but, really, does it matter what grades they receive in school or how they do on tests?  What matters is the ability to do their jobs proficiently and correctly.

My 35 years in education taught me some things about student success.   Parental involvement in their children’s progress is important.  Students’ involvement in other activities in a school is important.  Community support for a district and its teachers is important.  Still, one thing seems to always be forgotten when discussing school improvement – the role of the teacher’s desire to affect change.

The most effective changes in education always start from the bottom up rather than top down. When a superintendent or principal comes up with a program, or when, God forbid, state or federal officials come up with an idea, selling it to all teachers and getting them to buy into it, well, simply, that isn’t very effective.

But, when one teacher tries something in the classroom and it works, another teacher sees it and asks, "Hey can you show me what you're doing and how to do it?" Then another teacher, then another, and it spreads through a department and maybe a school. Then another teacher tries a variation and it spreads.  We teachers tend to talk to each other about what is working in our classrooms and what isn’t.  We learn from each other.  We really do want our students to learn and succeed in life.

What is needed is the ability for teachers to explore and, yes, experiment, with new methods and ideas in their individual classrooms. Then, when something works, keep it going.  If we try something and it doesn’t work, we won’t keep doing it.  And if it stops working, we’ll try something else.