Last year I went to an assembly where an educated man talked about emotions in the brain. He showed two pictures of brains, one filled with an explosion of color and the other with not so much color. The color represented emotions in the brain. The beautifully colored brain was a teenage brain, and the less colored brain was an adult brain. He explained how, when someone in high school is doing math homework, for example, he or she may get frustrated and say, “Why am I even doing this? I could be out playing soccer. This stinks. I hate math.” However, when a college student, for example, would be doing math homework he may be thinking, “Just have to get this finished then I can go play.” The amount of reason and emotions were almost complete opposites. However, he did not mention the outcome of the homework. When I listened to this speaker I made a false interpretation of what he was saying, and, truthfully, many people make the same incorrect judgment. I thought that emotion and reason were complete opposites. I thought that emotion gets in the way of learning, so I left that assembly with a new goal in mind. I wanted to be less emotional about all my subjects so I could improve my grades.
When I helped teach a discovery math lesson on Tuesday, I had this wrong idea in my mind. Why it was so hard for some students to stay focused and complete their worksheets? I thought that the ones who were struggling were so emotional and hated the task that they just barely could finish it. I kept saying to myself they just need to use the reason in their brains instead of the emotions.
Because of some delays with finger printing at the police station, I could not go to Kearsarge Elementary School today. I spent my time reading more about the brain and the role emotions play in an academic setting. I read what the five most respected neuroscientists had found in their research. These five neuroscientists are Joseph LeDoux of New York University, Candace Pert of Georgetown University Medical Center, Jerome Kagan of Harvard, and Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio of the University of Iowa. They have found that emotions help to focus the mind and help people set priorities. Without emotions many more people would make significantly more mistakes in thinking. An example of how reason and emotion can come together to help drive attention and create something meaningful is when a person must write a paper for school. The person’s mind and reason tell him or her to get focused and begin writing, while the person’s emotions fill him or her with passion either about the topic or receiving a good grade, which helps him or her to stay focused until a heart-felt paper has been written.
These ideas were based on three new discoveries, “the physical pathways and priorities of emotions, the brain’s chemicals involved in emotions, and a link between these pathways and chemicals to everyday learning and memory.” My thoughts are just a small part of what I learned and read about in Teaching with the Brain in Mind, written by Eric Jensen. The idea that reason and emotion work well together, instead of being complete opposites that make work hard to complete, is one that I found to be very interesting and something that could help me while I am working in the guidance office and classroom. The next time I help with a discovery math group, I will try to help the students find that math can be fun if they get their emotions working to help them finish their tasks.
(Source: Jensen, Eric. Teaching with the Brain in Mind. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1703 N. Alexandria, VA., USA, 1998)
No comments:
Post a Comment