The Next Version of You by John Bickart

Author:John Bickart [Bickart, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Emerson, Dewey and Pat

One of the people we Americans quote most in commencement exercises is Emerson. One of the people most quoted in the education department of American universities and colleges is Dewey. Nobody quotes Pat, at least to my knowledge. Pat was my student. I think Emerson and Dewey would love Pat. But, I think some college professors might not.

In learning to be a teacher at Rutgers, Adelphi, and UNC Charlotte Universities, I was taught a lot about managing behavior and preparing students for tests. My college classes were mostly analytic, or what is now often called left brain lessons. You know the kind, lectures filled with concepts and information. In actual teaching, however, it’s not like that. Here’s an example. One about Pat. I was teaching in an alternative high school of about 150 students, mostly emotionally disturbed adolescents, and about 40 teachers, counselors, and administrators. Though Pat did ok on his tests, he was not great at behaving and he seemed to have an unusually high level of what many studies on the brain are calling an integration of his right and left brain. You know, he would sometimes jump from details to the big picture, or he would spurt out a string of seemingly unrelated, lateral ideas that apparently made sense to him.

Pat was the student that my teacher training had told me to manage. But, I don’t think that‘s what Emerson and Dewey really suggested, is it? Let me give you an example from my classroom. I was teaching science to a class. Pat was there. I was explaining the “right hand rule” – the rule in the physics of electromagnetism where you hold out your right hand with your fingers curled and your thumb out straight. While your thumb shows the direction of an electric current, your fingers show the magnetic field curling around the current. As I brought up the phrase, “right hand rule”, Pat said, “Isn’t that the hand you’re supposed to use for shifting gears?” Pat could be counted on to make such comments off point or only tangentially related to the lesson. I taught Pat over the span of four years in three different courses: geometry, physics, and an advanced science seminar. It was amazing how he could consistently join a discussion with a view that was in from left field. Almost every time Pat did this, the class was stopped, however. Often, none of us could make the connection to what Pat was saying, and if asked, he usually could not explain himself. One time I drew a geometric figure on the board. Pat called out, “Hey, if you turn your head sideways, that looks like a person smiling.”

I came to know and truly respect Pat. I grew to realize that he was not simply being a wise guy, making flaky remarks out of mere self-indulgence. He was aware of a good many more ideas than most of us and was following up and trying to learn to integrate them.

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