Notes from West Egg

Well, that may be going too far, but he’s certainly someone whose premise I hope and pray is right! According to his excellent book A Whole New Mind, the U.S. economy is transitioning from the Age of Information to what he calls the Conceptual Age, an era that will be kind to creators and empathizers. It’s an age that will reward imagination, joyfulness, social dexterity and humor. Cultural creatives comprise one-quarter of U.S. adults; they are right-brain dominant and are good at:

• seeing the big picture
• synthesizing information
• feeling empathy and sympathy by taking the viewpoint of the person speaking
• embracing an ethic of caring

My people! 

The Information Age rewarded reasonably priced and functional products; it required people strong in logic, calculation and sequential thinking. But now that the “left brains have made us rich,” says Pink, these qualities and people are no longer enough. With so many cheap products flooding the marketplace thanks to overseas labor, consumers have an abundance of choices (for example, cell phones) and are starting to crave items that are more aesthetically, emotionally or spiritually pleasing (as in the iPhone). And jobs that depend on routine skills are disappearing overseas, as well.

What cannot be outsourced or mechanized are those six very human, creative qualities above. And these are what we should incorporate into our teaching. As an English teacher these aptitudes make me very happy! The study of literature can easily incorporate the six areas. We can ask students to tell what makes a story emotionally engaging, what makes a poem beautiful, what gives a whimsical quality to that scene in a play: this is design. What about empathy? How better to understand character interplay, conflicts and motivations than to ask students to empathize with the characters, to map out their relationships and explain why they care (or don’t care) for each other. How about updating the characters of “Antigone” with their own Facebook or MySpace pages? What music would Creon listen to today? What would his mood be? What famous quotation would Haemon highlight? What gods would make his top friends? I will definitely be using my Ning page for this activity.

In fact, now that I think about it, the six aptitudes defined by Pink are probably what led me to major in English in the first place. Finding meaning in literature is one of my favorite things in the world, and applying that meaning to my own life IS my favorite thing in the world. 

How refreshing this is after eight years of drilling down into stories and poems and non-fiction with all those left-brain dominant standards, such as this one:

 ”3.2 – Evaluate the structural elements of the plot (e.g., subplots, parallel episodes, climax), the plot’s development, and the way in which conflicts are (or are not) addressed and resolved.”

I believe in the standards, believe they are necessary so that there is an overall scope and sequence to our students’ progression through the grades. I love organization and logical progress. So I will not be tossing the standards by the wayside. Rather, what I will try to do is balance them with creative, meaning-making opportunities. It’s not enough to evaluate structural elements since apparently we could outsource such tasks to our student friends in India or China!

Our students should also be asked to take those elements and create something new, unique or playful. For instance, with the 8th grade standard above, they could identify the parallel episodes and then — I’m totally making this up right now — try to discover “perpendicular episodes” (i.e. the parts of the plot that are most disparate, jarring or contrasting to each other) or they could take an episode in the plot that has no parallel and insert one of their own making, then evaluate how it adds or detracts from the meaning of the piece.

The possibilities are rich, or, as Pink says, ”meaning is the new money!”