"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle." -Plato

"Empathy is the ability to see the world as another person, to share and understand another persons' feelings, needs, concerns and/or emotional state."

Quote found HERE click to learn the definition of empathy more in depth

Empathy is a feeling a bit more difficult to project than your simple happy or sad.  What do I mean?  People have a harder time showing people empathy than they would showing people they are say, excited.  This is somewhat of an issue. Why?

• Children in school can feel left out or misunderstood if their peers and teachers do not show empathy.
• People assume that everyone's situation is the same as their own, when in reality people can have much more difficult lives than they show.
• Teachers are not generally very empathetic towards their students, as long as the child gets good grades, they are basically ignored by your average teacher.
• Since teachers do not typically act with much empathy, it is very hard for children to have a trusted adult outside home that they can talk to

CLICK ME to learn about how empathy can solve teenage bullying

Children are taught to be understanding and caring and worry about the thoughts and feelings of their peers.  But as children get older and begin to have busier and more complicated lives, they forget to stop and think what their friends might be thinking.

Short video on why not to use labels, why it's insulting, and how empathy is involved

Teachers don't generally socialize with students at all, unless the child has a bad grade.  By not having communication, we eliminate the feelings of trust, sympathy, and empathy, making teachers out to be people you should not talk to about personal matters.

What children are taught about empathy in school, but is it really practiced as it should be?

I feel that empathy isn't something that so much needs to be taught in schools, but simply something that needs to be practiced more.  By developing trust and understanding, a few of the feelings produced by empathy, children will feel better about expressing feelings and seeking help when they need it.  I feel this would make schools a safer, more comfortable environment for all people, children and teachers alike.

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.