Getting into my right brain

MS# 1619brain/about 893 words

March. 24, 2011

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Harley L. Sachs

Apt. 222

2545 SW Terwilliger Blvd.

Portland, OR 97201

503 299 4222

Serving the Right-Brained Students

a column by

Harley L. Sachs

Being in your right brain isn’t the same as being in your right mind The left brain is supposed to be the part that deals with logic and language while the right brain deals with relationships, shapes, music, and intuition. To use an analogy, the left brain is the digital side, the right brain the analog.

As it happens, some people are mostly left brain, and a few others are right brain. What’s happening with public education today is that the right brain folks are being short changed. I’m referring to the wholesale cancellation of classes in art and music. This is a real travesty committed in the name of saving money.

With Michigan’s budget on the skids, threats against unions and tenure, cutbacks in state support for local schools, the first things cut are the analog right brain courses, the ones that nurture creativity and imagination.

To short change the right brained students is akin to not permitting Afghan girls to go to school.

What we should be cutting instead are expensive sports like football or swimming. We spent a million dollars to build a swimming pool for our Houghton High School when the swim team consists of only about twenty students. When my daughter was on the team they practiced at 8 AM at the university pool. It was a tough commute in the UP winter, but it worked. Recently the school had to build an equal access gymnasium for girls’ sports. Where is the academic achievement in that?

As for football, our school superintendent says that if it weren’t for school sports, lots of kids would simply drop out. Not that any of them could make careers in sports after graduation—if they graduated at all. If you must have a school sport, pick something cheap like soccer. All you need is a ball. No helmets, padding, or fancy uniforms. No swimming pool, either. That may be why soccer, known as football in the rest of the world, is played in the poorest countries.

This is not vocational training. We need plumbers and electricians more than football players. The odds of becoming a sports pro are about like the chances of winning the Powerball lottery. Not only are the numbers of sports professionals few, but those that play bone crushing sports like football die early deaths. Nobody ever died from music unless they swallowed a clarinet reed.

A quick check on Internet sources will bring on a discussion of the flaw in our public education. It favors left brain people with math, science, and language, the sort of courses that are the core of a college education. That curriculum should be no surprise since almost all public school teachers are college educated. They went through a left brain curriculum and think that’s the route to take.

That’s not fair to right brain people, and some of those students have a very difficult time in school. What’s a greater threat to those right brain kids is the tendency of school boards caught in a budget crunch to do away with music and art.

Those of us stuck in left brain activity are missing out.

Though few of us are exclusively locked into one side of the brain or the other, I realize that as an author and student of foreign languages I reside mostly in my left brain. Not entirely, though, for I don’t do sudoko or whatever that Japanese number puzzle is called, nor do I do crossword puzzles, having an inferiority complex because I don’t know many three letter words, horizontal or across other than “the” and “asp.”.

Though I sometimes doodle, my right brain was undernourished until I was faced with the challenge of illustrating one of my own books. The original illustrator was dead. I enrolled in an art class to switch on my right brain.

I wondered, “How the heck you switch on your right brain?”

The art teacher took an upside down line drawing and blocked off all but a small strip. All I got to see were a bunch of meaningless lines. The exercise was to copy that portion. By degrees, we progressed to more and more of the picture until it was clear what we were copying. The idea was to forget about what the picture was, but to concentrate on the shapes and the lines, right brain activity.

I was reminded that forgers are known to forge names by writing them upside down. That way they concentrate on the lines, not on the names.

Like a truck with a balky transmission, my brain clunked from left to right in very low gear. After two hours of this I was in a fog-like trance. It was a strange feeling, like being groggy after a heavy sleep, or recovering from an anesthetic after an endoscopic exam. Where was I?

The single lesson worked. Turns out I was never an exclusively left brain person after all. I often think in analogies, the comparisons similes and metaphors are made of. To be a whole brained-person you need to utilize both your left and right brain.

We need the creative abilities and imagination of right-brained students. If your school board is thinking of cutting art and music to save money, tell them to drop football instead. It costs many dollars per hour to maintain a swimming pool. Pencils, paper, paints and brushes are cheaper than helmets and padding, and though drawing shifted me into a temporary fog of right brain activity, it didn’t wreck my knees or cause a concussion.