Whole New Mind

I really enjoyed this book - ended up reading the whole thing and even brought parts of it in to the classroom to see what my students thought.

One thing in particular I did was to give them the multiple choice question from the book on page 58:

According to the latest research, IQ as accounts for what portion of career success?

a. 50 to 60 percent
b. 35 to 45
c. 23 to 29
d. 15 to 20

And of course the real answer was 4 to 10, so sneaky.

The average percentage taken from a fairly even distribution between the 4 possible answers was 35% for my students. This was the starting point for a quick 10 minute discussion about what they saw as Right/Left brain activities and whether they felt that school was preparing them for the future.

Interestingly, most students were well aware of outsourcing, and India and China, and yet also felt that the college track and knowledge sector jobs were still the most secure.

another tid bit I found shocking, less than half the class knew what their grandparents did for work. Only 3 or 4 in the classes generally could say what their great grandparents did!

At the end of the discussion I put up another poll (this is done on my course website):

The ideas presented in class regarding Left/Right brain thinking, and in particular how right brain thinking is more important than ever were


Confusing 21.7 %
Does not make sense with what I know about what colleges want from me 17.3%
Interesting and something to think about 43.4 %
A waste of class time 17.3 %

The whole discussion came on the heels of a 'Stressed Out Students' speaker (the founder of the program from Stanford) coming to the school a few weeks ago. What I found most interesting about THAT, was a small core community amongst the teachers that found disturbing the notion that any hint that rigorous AP courses and SAT scores were not the most laudable goal for any student. This is even though it has been pretty well proven a lot of the kids are cheating or not retaining the information OR doing better in their careers. One teacher started yelling how hard the AP kids work for their test scores and credits and that the speaker was crazy when she mentioned the possibility that listing where students go to college create a community of competition to go to the 'best' schools. He felt they deserved the top recognition for their achievement and alot of others agreed.

This reminded me of 3 years ago when a star athlete graduated. 15 minutes of the 40 minute 'Senior Farewell' at the end of the year was ALL about this one student. He was a great kid, but this was patently ridiculous and talk about sending bad messages to student. From what we publicize and applaud from the top down at our school site if you are not going to Stanford/Berkeley or better or a star athlete you are basically nobody. Nice.