Left-Brain Thinking Only Went Out With Shoulder Pads and Big Hair

I hated school as a kid. The majority of work I had to do made very little sense to me. It was work that I wasn’t very good at or interested in. There were, however, a few classes I really liked and excelled in. These were the big-picture classes that connected class material to the world outside the school building. A few of these classes were: English, because I was learning about human behavior through stories; Photography, because the assignments forced me to look at the world with new eyes; Ethical Issues was a blast because it was driven by interaction and made you explain your thoughts and views; and Biology, because almost everything we learned could be applied to everyday life. Aside from English and Biology, the classes I most enjoyed were half year electives and weren’t considered Important.

I grew up in an affluent suburb and went to high school in the 80’s when the expectation of an MBA became the norm, if you hadn’t already decided on medical or law school. So of course the classes that were considered Important were the ones that would get me into a good college (read Ivy League), and were the very classes that made the least sense to me. Between the math classes that were Greek to me, and movies like, Secret of My Success and Working Girl, the one thing I learned for certain was that I wanted no part of Corporate America. But to hear my guidance counselor tell it, there was nothing else to consider. The entire make-up of my high school emphasized what Daniel H. Pink refers to as “knowledge work” in his book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers will Rule the Future.

The world has changed a lot since the 80’s. Unfortunately, the standardized testing craze in school today keeps the emphasis on “knowledge work.” In the following excerpt from A Whole New Mind, Pink explains three reasons why “knowledge work” is no longer king.

Abundance
Lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers, and executives [referred to as “knowledge workers”]. What distinguished this group from the rest of the workforce was their “ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytic knowledge.” … Knowledge workers and their thinking style [left brain/L-Directed] have indeed shaped the character, leadership, and social profile of the modern age. Consider the tollbooths that any middle-class American must pass on his way to the land of knowledge work … the PSAT, the SAT, the GMAT, the LSAT, the MCAT. … These instruments all measure what is essentially undiluted L-Directed Thinking. They require logic and analysis – and reward test-takers for zeroing-in, computer like, on a single correct answer. The exercise is linear, sequential, and bounded by time. … They’ve created an SAT-ocracy – a regime in which access to the good life depends on the ability to reason logically, sequentially, and speedily.

In an age of abundance, appealing only to rational, logical, and functional needs is woefully insufficient. Engineers must figure out how to get things to work. But if those things are not also pleasing to the eye or compelling to the soul, few will buy them. There are too many other options. Mastery of design, empathy, play, and other seemingly “soft” aptitudes is now the main way for individuals and firms to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Abundance has brought beautiful things to our lives, but that bevy of material goods has not necessarily made us much happier. The paradox of prosperity is that while living standards have risen steadily decade after decade, personal, family, and life satisfaction haven’t budged. That’s why more people – liberated by prosperity but not fulfilled by it – are resolving the paradox by searching for meaning. … abundance has freed literally hundreds of millions of people from the struggle for survival and, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert William Fogel writes, “made it possible to extend the quest for self-realization from a minute fraction of the population to almost the whole of it.”

Asia
In recent years, few issues have generated more controversy or stoked more anxiety than outsourcing. … programmers … throughout India, the Philippines, and China are scaring the bejeezus out of software engineers and other left-brain professionals in North America and Europe, triggering protest, boycotts, and plenty of political posturing. The computer programming they do, while not the most sophisticated that multinational companies need, is the sort of work that until recently was done almost exclusively in the United States-and that provided comfortable white-collar salaries of upward of $70,000 a year. Now twenty-five-year-old Indians are doing it – just as well, if not better; just as fast, if not faster-for the wages of a Taco Bell counter jockey. Yet, their pay, while paltry by Western standards, is roughly twenty-five times what the typical Indian earns-and affords them an upper-middle-class lifestyle with vacations and their own apartments.

Automation
Last century, machines proved they could replace human backs. This century, new technologies are proving they can replace human left-brains. Management meta-guru Tom Peters puts it nicely, saying that for white-collar workers “software is a forklift for the mind.” It won’t eliminate every left-brain job. But it will destroy many and reshape the rest. Any job that depends on routines – that can be reduced to a set of rules, or broken down into a set of repeatable steps – is at risk. If a $500-a-month Indian chartered accountant doesn’t swipe your comfortable accounting job, Turbo-Tax will.

The thing is, back in the day, my high school was right for emphasizing “knowledge work.” It was what was what was in demand. But that was then. Today school is just as narrow in its thinking, if not more so. While society has changed, school is still stuck in that SAT-ocracy mindset of the last century. By continuing to treat students as a collective, they are ignoring the fact that there are more components to intelligence and ability then the ones that can be measured on standardized tests. Instead of creating a curriculum to keep up with the times, school is busy trying to force students into a 30-year-old mold that was shaped using ESEA/NCLB guidelines that are even more archaic.

When economies and societies depended on factories and mass production, R-Directed thinking was mostly irrelevant. Then as we moved to knowledge work, R-Directed Thinking came to be recognized as legitimate, though … secondary, to the preferred mode of L-Directed thinking. Now, as North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan evolve once again, R-Directed Thinking is beginning to achieve social and economic parity – and, in many, cases, primacy. … L-Directed Thinking remains indispensable. It’s just no longer sufficient. In the Conceptual Age, what we need instead is a whole new mind.

We must perform work that overseas knowledge workers can’t do cheaper, that computers can’t do faster, and that satisfies the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual demands of a prosperous time.

Design. Story. Symphony. Empathy. Play. Meaning. These six senses increasingly will guide our lives and shape our world. Many of you no doubt welcome such a change. But to some of you, this vision might seem dreadful – a holistic takeover of normal life by a band of poseurs in black unitards who will leave behind the insufficiently arty and emotive. Fear not. The … abilities that now matter most are fundamentally human attributes. After all, back on the savannah, our cave-person ancestors weren’t taking SAT’s or plugging numbers into spreadsheets. But they were telling stories, demonstrating empathy, and designing innovations. These abilities have always comprised part of what it means to be human. But after a few generations in the Information Age, these muscles have atrophied. The challenge is to work them back into shape. Anyone can master the six Conceptual Age senses. But those who can master them first will have a huge advantage. - A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

The US Department of Education is touting college and career-ready students as one of the guiding principles of the reauthorization of NCLB, but reading the Blueprint for Reform shows that they have clearly missed the boat.

Looking back now, I’ve come to understand that what I really hate about school is the one size fits all treatment of students, or for all you Star Trek fans, the Borg mentality that all will be assimilated. I agree with the foundation of school policy that ALL students can learn and need the opportunity to do so. But that’s about the only statement that can be applied to ALL students. There is a whole lot of lip service, both in and out of school, recognizing the inherent strengths and weaknesses and various learning styles in people. However, the reality is school doesn’t deal with people; it deals with students who are thought of as nothing more than a blob of dough to be formed with a politically decided cookie cutter.

Age is Not Just a Number

I’m pretty bad with numbers so it used to drive me crazy when parents would refer to their children’s ages in terms of months, i.e., 15 months, 20 months, etc. But once I had my daughter I learned why parents used months instead of just rounding to the closest year. In the world of Pediatrics age is an important tool for gauging growth and development.

In the world of education age is an important tool for gauging kindergarten readiness. So much so that birth month alone can determine whether a child starts kindergarten on time or, if already in kindergarten, stays there another year. However, after first grade age is suddenly no longer considered and students are treated as if they have all reached the same levels of development and maturity.

When my daughter’s academic struggles began to appear in kindergarten, I remember thinking that she seemed almost a year behind the rest of her class. Reading Outliers: the Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, gave credence to that gut feeling.

In its entirety, Outliers looks at the many advantages that affect success. In the chapter “The Matthew Effect” Gladwell writes about how cut-off dates and relative age affect success.

In the mid-80’s, Canadian psychologist, Roger Barnsley noticed “an incredible number of January, February, and March birth dates” among the elite players of Canada’s junior hockey league. (pp. 21-22) The more he looked into the phenomenon the more he saw that the majority of the elite players had birthdays closest to the age-class hockey cutoff date of January 1st. (p.24) If a boy turns 10 on January 2nd he is grouped with kids who are going to be 10 in one month, 6 months, up to 11 months (almost a year) later. So when coaches start to pick the most talented players from this age-group for the all-star teams, what they are really doing is choosing the oldest players who are more physically mature and better coordinated then their younger teammates. (p. 24)

"Barnsley argues that these kinds of skewed age distributions exist whenever three things happen: selection, streaming, and differentiated experience. If you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the ‘talented’ from the ‘untalented’; and if you provide the ‘talented’ with a superior experience, then you’re going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff date." (p. 25)

After this illustration of the effect of relative age in hockey, Gladwell goes on to show how relative age affects students. Economists, Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey, compared the relationship between student scores on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, TIMSS, (math and science tests given every four years to children in many countries), and month of birth: (p. 28)

"They found that among fourth graders, the oldest children scored somewhere between four and twelve percentile points better than the youngest children. That, as Dhuey explains, is a ‘huge effect.’ It means that if you take two intellectually equivalent fourth graders with birthdays at opposite ends of the cutoff date, the older student could score in the eightieth percentile, while the younger one could score in the sixty-eighth percentile. That’s the difference between qualifying for a gifted program and not.” (p. 28)

“Dhuey and Bedard subsequently did the same analysis … looking at college. What did they find? At four-year colleges in the United States . . . students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are under-represented by about 11.6 percent. That initial difference in maturity doesn’t go away with time. It persists. And for thousands of students, that initial disadvantage is the difference between going to college … and not. … 'It’s outlandish that our arbitrary choice of cutoff dates is causing these long-lasting effects, and no one seems to care about them,'" [Dhuey says]. (pp. 29-30)

With such marked differences in development and maturity at the kindergarten and first grade level, elementary school teachers don’t like to mention the possibility of learning disabilities because they don’t want to confuse maturity with ability. My daughter’s kindergarten and 1st grade teachers proceeded to do just that anyway. If they had compared my daughter to only the students of the same relative age as her instead of her whole class where the relative ages could differ by over a year, they may have been more likely to see red-flags in her academic progress.

Gladwell makes a suggestion for dealing with relative age that makes sense:

Elementary and middle schools could put the January through April-born students in one class, the May through August in another class, and those born in September through December in a third class. They could let students learn with and compete against other students of the same maturity level. (p.33)

Though relative age is just a small part of the problems in the school system, acknowledging it in elementary and middle school could mean real education reform.

The Annual Review

My daughter's annual review is at the end of this month. And like every year I've been slightly crazed since I got the letter with the date and time. I'm sure this year's annual review will be just as pointless as last year's.

I told them that my daughter will only do her math homework, (and any other homework that she doesn't know how to approach) in resource room or in a small group with her special ed. teacher. Without constant guidance and support the work completely overwhelms her. They give her a special ed./resource room teacher who treats the resource room period like study hall and spends the majority of her time texting on her Blackberry. She also commented on the 3rd quarter interim report card that my daughter was making progress, while the math teacher, Bio teacher, and Spanish teacher all commented that my daughter was in danger of failing because of missing homework assignments.

I told them that the 8th grade math teacher was so terrible and condescending that she created a case of math anxiety in my daughter that is off the charts. They put her in a class with a math teacher whose idea of motivating her students is tell them how dumb they are; and they're in trouble if they don't learn "this stuff" because there is no lower math class for them to go to.

I tell them outside of the academic setting my daughter functions beautifully. They tell me that she has ADHD and needs to be on medication.

I tell them that my daughter thinks she's stupid and wants to hide her issues from her classmates as much as possible and won't draw attention to herself by seeking help. And when she finally did seek help in resource was told that resource room is not a place for doing homework. They tell me that my daughter "needs to apply herself" and make arrangements with her teachers to stay after for extra help.

In other words, they come into the annual review already having decided where my daughter will be placed the following year and are only including me in the meeting to satisfy legal requirements.

The IEP they put together doesn't mention the way they intend to have my daughter reach her IEP goals, which in themselves are so vague that any LD student's name can be placed at the top and Presto! legal requirements are met enough to deter a non-compliance law suit.

Unless you've been the process yourself, there isn't an adequate way to convey how emotionally draining and heartbreaking the whole thing is.

Teachers - The Good, the Bad, and the Damaging

Like all students, my daughter has had good teachers and bad teachers. While I count my blessings that the majority of her teachers have been good ones, I’m finding their positive effects are negated by the bad ones. My measure of where a teacher falls on the good-bad scale is not so much my daughter’s report card, but rather her entire attitude toward school and homework.

The teachers I define as good are the ones who: respect their students; have expectations for each student, based on the student’s abilities and strengths; really celebrates a student’s breakthroughs; and are encouraging when a student makes mistakes; and recognizes when one of their students is struggling. But most importantly, a good teacher does not punish a student for what they don’t know or are having trouble learning. When my daughter has a teacher like this her attitude toward school is a good one and she is motivated to work hard and do well. She actually shows enthusiasm about what she’s learning by talking about it with me and her father over dinner.

But when she gets stuck with a bad teacher, it’s a nightmare. The bad teachers my daughter has had all had a God Complex and blamed her academic struggles on her and me. These are the teachers who: have no respect for students who are not excelling in their class; expect all students to learn at the same rate and through the classic lecture method; never consider their methods of teachings may be lacking; don’t understand inconsistent performance; who think all students not getting A’s and B’s are lazy and “just need to apply themselves;” and who are always focused on what a student can’t do, hasn’t done, and what they have done wrong. My daughter quickly loses respect for teachers like this and who could blame her? Once she loses respect for the teacher she just shuts down and has no motivation to attempt any of the work on her own. She doesn’t see the point in trying when all the teacher does is make her feel stupid. She goes into self-preservation mode and covers her feelings of inadequacy and fears with a snotty, “I don’t give a crap” attitude.

The crux of the bad teachers experience occurred when my daughter was in 6th grade. That year both she and I vacillated between depression and rage and the fights over homework were destroying our relationship. All of my dealings the teachers were met with blame on my daughter’s “poor work ethic” and my failure to force her to do her homework, work they just wouldn’t believe she was incapable of doing. It was clear something had to change and it certainly wasn’t going to be the teachers. So I shifted the focus of my daughter’s life from academics to horseback riding, an activity that made her shine. In order to counter the negative effects school was having on my daughter; I felt I had no choice but to downplay the importance of school.

My daughter’s good teacher/bad teacher experiences are explained best by the findings of Bob Pianta, the dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, and his team who developed a system for evaluating the various elements of teacher-student interaction. (I came across this information while reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, What the Dog Saw.) One of these interaction elements is “’regard for student perspective’; … a teacher’s knack for allowing students some flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom.” (p.325) Gladwell describes a video of a preschool school teacher during circle time:

“Pianta stopped and rewound the tape twice, until what the teacher had managed to achieve became plain: the children were active, but somehow the class hadn’t become a free-for-all.

‘A lesser teacher would have responded to the kids’ leaning over as misbehavior,’ Pianta went on.

Bridget Hamre, one of Pianta’s colleagues, chimed in: ‘These are three- and four-year olds. At this age, when kids show their engagement it’s not like the way we show our engagement, where we look alert. They’re leaning forward and wriggling. That’s their way of doing it. And a good teacher doesn’t interpret that as bad behavior. …’” (p. 325)

Pianta and Hamre also explained teacher-student interaction element that is most closely linked to academic success is:

“feedback – a direct, personal response by a teacher to a specific statement by a student . . . High-quality feedback is where there is a back-and-forth exchange to get deeper understanding. … The … thing that happens a lot is the teacher will just say, ‘You’re wrong.’ Yes-no feedback is probably the predominant kind of feedback, which provides almost no information for the kid in terms of learning.” (p.326)

Gladwell then went on to describe Pianta’s video of the pinnacle in good teaching:

"Then there was the superstar – a young high-school math teacher in jeans and a green polo shirt. ‘So, let’s see,’ he began, standing up at the blackboard. ‘Special right triangles. We’re going to do practice with this, just throwing out ideas.’ He drew two triangles. ‘Label the length of the side, if you can. If you can’t, we’ll all do it.’ He was talking and moving quickly, which Pianta said might be interpreted as a bad thing, because this was trigonometry. It wasn’t easy material. But his energy seemed to infect the class. And all the time he offered the promise of help. If you can’t, we’ll all do it. In a corner of the room was a student named Ben, who’d evidently missed a few classes. ‘See what you can remember, Ben,’ the teacher said. Ben was lost. The teacher quickly went to his side: ‘I’m going to give you a way to get to it.’ He made a quick suggestion: ‘How about that?’ Ben went back to work. The teacher slipped over to the student next to Ben, and glanced at her work. ‘That’s all right!’ He went to a third student, then a fourth. Two and a half minutes into the lesson – the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer [reference to a previous video where a teacher’s planned PowerPoint presentation was delayed because she forgot to turn on the computer] he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further.

‘In a group like this, the standard MO would be: he’s at the board, broadcasting to the kids, and has no idea who knows what he’s doing and who doesn’t know,’ Pianta said. ‘But he’s giving individualized feedback. He’s off the charts on feedback.’ Pianta and his team watched in awe." (pp. 328-329)

The difference in academic performance between the students of a good teacher vs. the students of a poor teacher is so huge (an entire school year’s worth of learning huge) it has stunned the world of education. Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, has estimated that kids with a poor teacher will only learn about a half of year’s worth of material in one school year as opposed to the kids in a good teacher’s class who will learn a year and a half’s worth of material in the same school year. (p. 318) And what, typically, has been school boards answer to that difference? To raise taxes of course, because we can’t have smaller class sizes without more teachers. But Hanushek goes on to state that:

“[y]ou’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers." (p. 318)

Something to keep in mind next time you go to vote on your school budget.

Hanushek also points out that focusing on teacher quality would boost our country’s ranking in academic performance across the world. Currently the US “is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. … the United States could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom 6 percent to 10 percent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality.” (p.318)

Seems simple right? Hire good teachers. But how can you tell a good teacher from a bad teacher before they are hired? Well, that’s a problem that cannot be addressed under the current system. So far the educational branch of government has addressed the poor teacher problem by imposing higher academic and cognitive requirements for those looking to enter the profession. (p. 329) Gladwell highlights the problem with this reform: “after you’ve watched Pianta’s tapes and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar.” (p.329)

It’s so peculiar that Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress looked into whether having a teacher’s certificate or a master’s degree were helpful in determining good teachers. (p. 330) They found neither made a difference in the classroom. (p. 330) The two credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire have no usefulness in predicting the success of a teacher in the classroom, no matter how much they seem to be related to “teaching prowess.” (p. 330)

Gladwell offers a way districts could be sure they hiring good teachers. The solution was found in the field of financial advice. Ed Deutschlander, the co-president of North Star Resource Group, in Minneapolis has a very rigorous hiring process. While he starts out looking for the same general traits that all corporate recruiters are looking for, he goes further by putting recruited candidates through a four-month ‘training camp.’ (p. 332) Those who make it through training camp are then hired as apprentice advisors where the nitty-gritty sorting takes place over the next 3 to 4 years. (p. 332) Even as Gladwell offers this solution, he knows it’s not feasible for many reasons, one being that “[t]eachers’ unions have been resistant to even the slightest move away from the current tenure arrangement.” (p.333)

Whenever I read something like the teacher studies mentioned above, I find myself wondering, “Do the policymakers in Washington and Albany know this? And if they do, why are they not incorporating it into the education laws?” In this particular case the teacher unions are in the way. Even so, just adding video footage of each candidate’s student-teaching time to the already existing list of teacher requirements, would give hiring committees more concrete information. Districts could use Bob Pianta’s system for evaluating the elements of teacher-student interaction to weed out the poor teachers during the search phase of hiring. Yeah, yeah I know, there’s already a trial period built into the system with the three year tenure track. But look how good that’s working.

Another solution would be to get rid of the teacher unions altogether. I know I’m going to lose popularity points here, but . . . I’ve got to wonder how much money districts would save if they were actually able to fire poor teachers? Well, when it comes to building new classrooms and hiring more teachers to bring class sizes to compensate for poor teachers then I’m willing to say millions. Districts would save millions of dollars if they had firing power. By saving millions of dollars in construction costs alone districts would actually have money for special education. Oh but wait, they wouldn’t need to spend more on special education if they were allowed to fire poor teachers. Eric Hanushek also found that the students of poor teachers fall so behind they begin to look like they have a learning disability, yet they make up 95% of the special education population. (www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/hanushek.htm#Learned_Learning_Disabilities:)

Since this one simple change is not going to happen, at least in the school years our kids, I will continue to use the time at home to focus on things my daughter can do. Even though I have caught a lot of crap over the years from my family and friends for my lack of respect for school I make no apologies. They can’t or won’t understand why I find it impossible to stand behind an institution governed by laws that focus not on education, but on money over my daughter’s over-all well being. They think I’m anti-education, but that’s only because they are confusing school with education.