Choice Book Final = Bringing EVERYTHING together.

Empathy:
Quote: "Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else's position and to intuit what that person is feeling."  I choose this quote because I belive that empathy is a skill that is lacking in our society.

Question: As I am writing this post, CNN is on the TV in the background.  I can't write in slience, so I turn on the news.  They are discussing the recent shooting in Chatanooga, TN.  The main topic is the motivation of the shooter and mental health.  On page 164, Pink discusses apps that can detect the presence of emotion, not identify the individual emotion, per se.  In the years since his book was published, the technology has emerged for computers to detect and identify emotion (Dunham 2014).  A friend of mine is a physician, he workes in his office full time, but part time he is an internet based MD, where he video chats with patients and can diagnose certain ailments.  If we were to blend the tech doc with emotion reading software, can we work to detect individuals who may be experiencing a crisis before we learn of it after a shooting, or other instance of mass violence?


Aha:  I clearly saw myself and my wife in this chapter when he discussed Men, Women, and Empathy.  However, my wife is the logical numbers orented analytical mind, she takes the traditional "male" mindset.  I am an abstract emotionally conected funny one.  I have difficulty working with numbers, and she doesn't understand much that exists in an abstract plane.

Play:

Quote: "When you are payful, you are activiating the right side of the brain.  The logical brain is a limited brain.  The right side is unlimited.  You can be anything you want."  I chose this quote because it goes well with my connection and Aha! moment.

Question: If laughter is the best medicine, why are many of today's schools and teacher lounges the complete oposite of Disneyland; they are the grumpiest places on earth?  What is it about the walls of the school that suck the joy out of some teachers?  I like to self motivate.  Whenever I start to feel grumpy, I simply stop being grumpy, and just be Awesome! instead.  It works most of the time.

Aha: I hate flying.  Well, let me take that back, I don't like cramming my six foot four frame into a tiny pressurized tube that is hurling through the sub-stratisphere at mach 5.  What I hate is the possibility that the aforementioned pressurized tube will meet an unexpected and explosive landing.  I really enjoyed the segment about Southwest Airlines culture of play.  I try to exclusivly fly SWA because I am relaxed during the flight.  If the flight attendents are happy and playing around, then I feel much more comfortable and relaxed during my flight.  I even forget that my knees are in my face because of the lack of legroom, they make it a fun flight.

Meaning:
Quote: 1. "...calls this movement the "Fourth Great Awakening." ... "Spiritual (or immaterial) inequity is now as great a problem as material inequity, perhaps even greater."
2. A transition from material want to meaning want is in progress on an historically unprecedented scale - involving hundreds of millions of people - and may eventually be recognized as the prinicpal cultural development of our age."
These were just so good, I had to put them together.


Aha: I had no idea that there was a labrynth outside of my church until now.  I just thought it was a nice design in the floor.  Religion factored heavily for me in this chapter.  Prayer and quiet contemplation always make me feel physicaly better.  I am prone to high stress and as a resul high blood pressure, but time spent in church and other relgious based activities make me feel better, and acording to the free blood pressure checker at CVS, healthier too.  I was able to use my own experience to prove what Daniel Pink was trying to argue in this chapter.

Final Connections:
On page 168 Pink states "EMPATHY... it connects to the three high concept, high touch aptitudes I've already discussed." (Pink, 2006)  I think he is minimizing his argument.  I think that all six of the aptitudes he discusses are interconnected.  If we ignore any of them, we won't experience the totality of letting our right brains steer the ship for a while.  Pink's writing style in this book is incredible.  The chapters are not autonomous, they build on each other as the book progresses.  It is impossible to comment on later chapters, without bringing up information from earlier in the book.

When Pink talks about Play, it's like I wrote in my previous post on the book, it reminded me of the FISH training philosophy.  Play is essential to motivating employees and to keeping customers happy.  I think that play is also essential to motivating students.  If our students are not happy or concerned with things outside of the classroom, they are not going to perform well on their school work.  One of the bect books I've ever read is by Mickey Hart, one of the drummers for the band The Grateful Dead.  It is called, "Drumming at the Edge of Magic."  In it he discusses how drumming and rythm are central to the human experience, and that music gives meaning to life.  I kept writing, "Drumming at the Edge of Magic" in the margin of my book.  This book is connected to all of Pink's argument in part two of A Whole New Mind.  I really want to read more of his books!

Dunham, W. (2014, March 21). A Computer Can Recognize Emotions Better Than Most People. Retrieved July 19, 2015. 

 Hart, M., & Stevens, J. (1990). Drumming at the edge of magic: A journey into the spirit of percussion. San Francisco, Calif.: HarperSanFrancisco.

Pink, D. (2006). A whole new mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future. New York: Riverhead Books. 
 

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