Left Brain vs Right Brain

Today I will "attend" a softball clinic. I get to sit upstairs in the parent gallery for 3-4 hours while my daughter squats and catches for some very high quality pitchers who aspire to go on to the major college level. She also aspires to a college softball career, and if she learns to hit rise ball and change up as well as she catches them her aspirations will move forward. It is winter in NewEngland. It is the season of softball improvement.

Besides playing on the free WiFi, I am bringing Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind, in anticipation of the DEN webinar later this week. While Pink is referred to as a seminal work for all things 2.0, I have not had the chance to read it, and really I should.

The proposition as I understand it is that with the Internet putting pure information at your fingertips, it is less important to have a vast reservoir of knowledge in your head, you can aways just get it from the 'Net. The critical skill is how you can creatively put the pieces together. Recall level thinking will sink into the background, giving way to folks who can think abstractly and creatively. Thus the left brain vs right brain split.

Right now as I await Mr. Pink's opportunity to educate me, I am having problems with this analysis. Perhaps it is that I am a successful left brain thinker. A product of the educational systems of 35 years ago, you could pound stuff into my head and it would stick. I have tons of arcane factoids tucked away in my head (and to my horror they seem to be leaking away slowly as I age). My family won't play Trivial Pursuit with me, I rarely lose. I recognize that it is just a type of knowledge that stays with me. Stuff that others forget especially in certain subjects, just sticks in my head. I am a left brain master.

I love history. When this whole technology thing fizzles out, I would love to return to teaching high school history. I would love a a class of really bright kids who were into it as much as me. We would read meaty textbooks, historical non-fiction and primary sources. We would write essays and papers and stuff information into our heads for the pure joy of stuffing information into our heads, and people would think we were smart.

OK, my bias is revealed. I hope that I will be able to do Daniel Pink justice with that mindset going in. In this rush to right brain dominance, is there not room for the left brain thinker? Does not a large reservoir of information in your head, rather than a few clicks away, allow for context in your thinking? If you have a broad liberal mind (in the educational sense of that term) doesn't it provide a knowledge base you can immediately to apply to the situation at hand? If you have a good information base in your head, it can help you provide context and meaning to new information. Is that not still valuable?

My understanding of the process of early reading tells me that a large lexicon of internal information helps young readers. Perhaps the most important thing that parents can do to increase reading skills for the very young is not to buy Hooked on Phonics, but to pull the kid onto your lap and read together, everyday. When you are searching for that unknown word, your ability to decode the word phonetically is important, but the more context you can bring the better. It is how close reading works.

In the classroom, it is the classic error of your kids seeing the word S-O-C-R-A-T-E-S and saying it, SO-crates, rather than SOCK-rah-tease. If you have information in your head about the Greeks, even with the incorrect phonetic pronunciation the rest of the text provides the context to get it right. You could read forever about old SO-crates (as I have had students do) and just think it was some old Greek guy without connecting the passage to that very special philosopher and teacher.

There are others beside Pink who have the right brain perspective. I have had the chance to hear Will Richardson speak twice in recent months. His remarks challenged me to think more about these ideas and where I stand. I thank him. I still feel very half-baked in my thinking on so many School 2.0 ideas and topics. Pink and Richardson make me uncomfortable, and that is good. These days I feel that I do not know what I know, but I sure know more than before they challenged me. And as always, I get to write and podcast more when I know it.

Let's see what Daniel Pink brings to the conversation. Have a good week everybody.