Criticism on Right Brain Rising

Right brain rising held some interesting facts, but the quality of the article itself left much to be desired, as far as a professional piece of writing would go. Here's what I mean.

• Seemingly juvenile words, such as "stuff", seen in multiple subtitles.
• Paragraphs that were way too wordy, it didn't exactly keep me interested for very long.
• There were many places where the author would put and asterisk and then explain at the bottom of the page, but isn't there some way he could have given a simple explanation within the text instead of constantly making us look up and down for tediously long and over thought explanations.
• Making me feel like I'm reading a story instead of a study, narrating every single irrelevant detail that happened to him.

I think this video summed up and simplified what was said in our article.

The article was very factual, explaining how people always thought that the left brain was more dominant but really, that isn't true.  But is there any way the author could have made this more interesting?  More exciting use of words, not necessarily shorter, but less repetition, and things such as that.


The author spent a little too much time narrating his adventures in the fMRI than he did explaining his point about the brain, I think he got a little off topic here and there.


I completely agree with the author's help in proving that people are not exclusively right or left brained, but in the way of quality I was expecting a bit more.  I may have found it more interesting if the author had done things a bit differently with this piece.

Habits of Mind Relfection

Habits of Mind.  The passage says a lot of interesting, insightful things about regular patterns when problem solving, but let's explore this a bit more in depth.

There were some things in this passage I completely agreed with. Of these included;

• "Good problem solvers are flexible thinkers and display confidence in there intuition."  I wanted to analyze "flexible thinking" and find out what studies really thought of it.  I much enjoyed the first paragraph of this article, it really reminded me of the Habits of Mind. Exercises For Flexible Thinking.  I love how well it conveys what flexible thinking really is and how it ties into problem solving.  
• "They call upon their store of knowledge and experience for sources of data and processes that will help them solve each new challenge." I love this sentence just because I can tie it into my own life, it is truly an everyday skill, unlike some of the other things mentioned in the passage.
• I also liked the simplistic format of the text that made each paragraph and subject easy to understand and break apart to explore a deeper meaning.

FUNNY-problem solving

Above we have a short, three minute video on a horridly incorrect problem but a good method for problem solving. Enjoy!


As well as things I enjoyed about the passage, there were things I disagreed with.

• First of all, the word "habits" itself implies a bit much. A habit is a regular pattern of behavior, but many people don't have skills such as persistence or questioning.
• The fact that they seemed to bounce between comparing these things to adults (using words like mechanics, teachers, and parents) to using words more targeted towards children (students, assessed, rubrics) also seemed a bit disorganized.

As a conclusion, hope this wasn't too boring, Habits of Mind had its strong and weak points, but was generally a great source of information, fairly easy to understand, and interesting to analyze.