I am definitely a right brain person. Logic, organisation, timelining, the fine details are not my strong points. Sometimes that's viewed as a bad thing, especially in my semi-leadership position where others view disorganisation or not knowing where precisely something is heading as a weakness. But for those of us who enjoy the big picture, letting the imagination off its chain, playing and exploring, there is hope. I've just started reading another of the edublogosphere's favourite books, Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind, and although I'm only a little way in, my right brain hopes are up. It seems that while left brain skills have been highly valued in our society for a long time (witness the highly paid and valued professions of accountancy, law and medicine), Pink argues that the scene is set for people with creative, visionary, experimental right brain strengths to have their day in the sun. Having said that, creative bookkeeping has been around for a long time.

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The reality is that everyone has a blend of left and right brain skills - Pink points out that you can't have one without the other - but it is possible to spot people's preferences in different ways. For instance, The MYLU team were looking through the abstracts for the upcoming Middle Schooling Conference and I found that I was interested in very different choices for my registration form compared to some of my colleagues. I was really taken by The ideologies of education: Must we choose? Yoram Harpaz but others thought how boring and were far more intrigued by The teacher in a thinking classroom Clinton Golding. It was like, "Give me something I can use tomorrow in my classroom, not this ideology stuff." I could be wrong but maybe that was a left brain choice while my preferences led me to the big picture concept stuff. Anyway, you would need a good blend on any staff of both hemisphere preferers (is there such a word?) and it would be desirable for all students to be exposed to both sides of the equation. It will be interesting to see how this book pans out and whether it supports or debunks any of the "brain theory" stuff that seems a bit evangelical to me at times.