Mr. Mills Blog

I am in the middle of reading a book called A Whole New Mind. It talks about how we are moving from a left-brained work force to a right-brained work force. As I explained to all of my classes this week, your left brain controls your speech, sequences and things in order. Left-brained people are most likely to be computer programmers, accountants, etc. Your right brain controls your “art side” and is much more visual. A Whole New Mind discusses how computers are making a lot of left-brained jobs obsolete. Since computers can do so many of these left-brained tasks like programming and accounting, it is more important that our schools produce students who have a sensitivity to the arts. Creative people are needed in our society, so having the skills to be a visual artist, dancer, musician, or comedian can be just as important as being able to figure out a math problem quickly. Just something to think about.

A professor at Yale University, Robert Sternberg, is even creating a test to measure these types of skills. It is called the Rainbow Project. Here is an explanation of the test:

The test, dubbed “The Rainbow Project,” evaluates creativity and problem-solving rather than analytical skills. Instead of multiple choice questions, it asks students to write captions for cartoons, outline how they would solve a problem, or write stories with unusual titles like “The Octopus’s Sneakers” or “35,381.”What most interests many experts about Sternberg’s early experiments is that they appear to predict students’ freshman GPA in college more accurately than SAT scores, and with a narrower gap between ethnic and socio-economic groups…

I think this is a step forward for the education of all of our students.