Tuesday, December 6, 2011

From A "My Window" Type of Person

       
    I am one of those people who just don't instinctively know their left and right.  My sister and I share this affliction. 
    When we give one another driving directions – we employ the “Your Window, My Window Method” Turn left at the corner just won't work with us.
    For example when instructing one another which direction to turn.  It's like this,  “Just go your window at the next light and then go quick my window.” 
    It is a mild form of aphasia. We have learned to compensate, using the sister code.  When there is someone else giving the directions it can get ugly.  I stuck a little R and a little L on my speedometer of my Mustang.  That helped for eleven years, but I had to take a bit of teasing for it.

    The Hokey Pokey?  A chore.

    Oh, and that little trick of making an “L” with your left hand? Well my right hand makes an “L” too.  It's backwards, but my mind doesn't immediately see it as backwards.  I can also read upside down, and in mirrors, which came in handy when I taught kindergarten.

    When I was in School Teacher School, (which is what I called that year I spent learning educational jargon after I had my BA,) we saw a film about this very thing.  I remember one part of the film very well.
It was filmed with the fish-eye lens to make it scary.

    There was a child pretending to be the teacher, and he had a tea cup.  He held the cup up to the teacher, who was playing the child and asked, “What is this?”
The Teacher/child answered, “It's a tea cup.”
Then the child/teacher turned it upside down and again asked what it was.
The Teacher/child said, “A teacup?”
The Child/teacher said, “NO! Now it's something else!”

    Next he turned it around so the handle was on the other side, and the frustrated Teacher/child meekly said, “a teacup?” 
“NO!” Bellowed the Child/teacher.

    Suddenly, I understood what children went through learning to decipher the sticks and balls of the printed word.
I suppose I had learned to read in a less precise way, as I taught myself to read by deciphering the Sunday comics, before I went to kindergarten. I probably used the Right Brain method.  (I probably just made that up.)





    People who are dominated by the left hemisphere are practical, linear, detailed, and orderly. They process things from part to whole.  The see all the details when they enter a room.  They are the engineers and the scientists of the world.

    Those of us who are right brained dominate are artistic and impulsive. We see the whole room.  Furthermore we get a feeling from it.  Color and music are always involved.

    Needless to say the well balanced person taps into both hemispheres. The school district that employed me gave all of us a test to discover whether we were right or left brain dominated and I came out almost totally RIGHT.  Was anyone surprised?
      That explains why I was always having my students put on shows.



    They found that almost all of the teachers tend to be either evenly situated between the corpus callosum and if they were dominate on one side it was definitely to the left.

    So here's my question.  How did people who see everything black and white in politics become the right?  How is it that the unbending conservatives, the My Way or the Highway people become attached to the musical, interior decorator, mural-painting side of the brain?
Thank you Mercedes Benz for the brains.

4 comments:

Lora said...

I'm the same way, and I looked up the reason why so many people can't conceptually grasp left from right and it had something to do with being so smart that your brain was busy doing bigger and better stuff during the time that your right and left sides were supposed to be learned.

Geniuses!!!

Lori E said...

I love the teacup analogy. So true. I only have an issue with numbers. I can do them on paper but can do nothing in my head. Can't even remember them long enough to turn a page and write them down. I have to go back a couple times and look.
Words, pictures, colors, however, are right at home in my brain.

Bunny Jean said...

Very interesting. I almost always say the opposite of what I mean. Right when I mean left... I think I have dyslexia in talking lol!

I do know that I tested as being very analytical. Combine that with my OCD and perfectionism I have a terrible time finishing anything.

xoxo Bunny Jean

Debby@Just Breathe said...

Now that is a cute story with you and your sister. I don't know where I fall into that group.