A Whole New Mind

I got my first set of business cards today at school :). Makes me feel more official and professional, despite being on a third year teaching. Nevertheless, my first group of kids pissed me off a little, and it doesn't help to also be sick. Though not quite coughing lungs out, I feel a tenuous suppression of painful, mucusy coughs. I am frustrated at how hard it feels to teach sometimes, or when kids start acting up. I know there are ups and downs with this job, but days like this make me question whether I was cut out for this. It's part of the reason why I'm jumping ship and going for dentistry (besides finances..). Another part of me thinks that I just need more experience. I hate the insecure belief that I might not be the kind of "tough" or "think on your feet" person who could handle the stupid crap that kids would throw on me.

Still, these days motivate me to do things like get more organized with teaching and calling parents, which are things that a good teacher should do anyway.... so I can't feel crummy when it's a bit of a motivating factor. It's just hard to swallow pride to realize that I need to get better. *Sigh*

There's just SO much I want to do, with teaching and with personal goals and I feel ineffective at tackling these responsibilities because of getting overwhelmed and/or procrastinating.

Anyway, the title of this post is named after a book that I'm finishing up by Daniel Pink called A Whole New Mind. I got the book for free from my school to give the teachers an idea of how to motivate students at a design school to know what design is. I find this to be a bit of a challenge since I'm teaching math and chemistry, which doesn't quite speak to the right hemisphere. Either way, the book is great for personal reasons, and hopefully I can continue to learn how to be more innovative and creative, 2 traits that I feel particularly weak in. How to go about it is still a bit of a mystery, but at least it's in the back of my mind.

The premise of the book is that while society has typically pressured professionals to enter the professions that are very left-brained, ultimately the trend will allow right-brainers to "rule the future." The differences between left-brained and right-brained cannot be seen as black and white. There are still major connections between the two halves. For simplicity's sake, L-hemisphere is very logical, literal, and sequential, while the R-hemisphere is the creativity, synthesis, harmony, and overall big picture setter. The book isn't saying that artists will take over the world. But it says that while L-brainers have highly specialized skills, the rise of Asia (much cheaper engineerings from China or India) and automation (computers) will reduce the demand for purely L-brained tasks. Instead, people who can cross both boundaries, see connections in ways that others don't, and be innovative will be the ones who succeed.

While reading this book, I realized even more that I don't want to be a purely analytical, logical person to the point of no return. In high school, I took pride in being a science and math nerd and wanted to be unemotional and logical all the time. It's a strange desire, I know, and it was a very awkward stage. I don't think I would have succeeded anyway because I was emotional enough already. I'm not saying that science/math people are unemotional. I was just striving for knowledge and didn't want anything else to get in the way. Either way, I know that's not the way to go, and I feel too much already to ever let it happen if I wanted.

At work, I feel surrounded by so many creative and innovative people, whether it's teachers or students. And yes, I have felt insecure at perhaps being a "boring" teacher who can't think of awesome projects like so many other teachers can. I want to design my teacher website to be visually engaging and useful, and my classroom feels drab still. While I don't want to take away from the content of the class, it'd just be nice to have that extra individual touch. It's just not how I was raised, or something I prioritized until now. It means there's more catching up to do... and I hope not to be so ingrained with old ways to be hard to budge.

I can't seem to shake off this feeling that my writing is so scatterbrained...but that's just my blogging experience? Bleh.

Just want to not be sick (either with a virus or allergies, I don't even know).



P.S. Last weekend was pretty cool. Got to see Muse in concert with my sister and in a strange way, made friends with a pseudo stray orange cat - which probably aggravated allergies.