The Right-Brained Student

In third grade, she ignored half the questions and drew pictures of polar bears and Viking ships in the margins of her history quiz. As a junior in high school, he got the snot beat out of him for decorating the football captain’s locker with glitter glue and condoms. As graduation approached, she finally worked up the appropriate force of will and mollified her parents by spending a couple of weeks pretending to study for the ACT. He ended up cramming for two days and scoring a 34. At a host of different scholarship dinners, she ignored the key speaker and used the back of her fork to make smiley faces with the expensive food. He survived most of his interviews by pretending to be Marlon Brando, much to the annoyance of various advisers and admissions faculty.

Academia is not really geared towards right-brained thinkers. For many of us, the ability to effectively categorize and manage our college lives is a mysterious and unattainable skill – something we will probably never experience outside of the context of extreme stress or amphetamines. We are not lazy. We just work hard at all the wrong things. We do homework if it amuses us. We fail classes if it doesn’t. Our perception of life is consistently warped by absurd creative whims, and therefor life is often difficult to take seriously.

I’m not saying that all creative types are right-brained, or even that all right-brained people are absent minded and academically challenged – right-brained is just a term I use for lack of a better one. But you know who you are. If you ever took a Myers-Briggs test you probably scored either “Starving Artist” or “Mad Scientist.” Most of your class notes include colorful profanity, covert sketches of all your professors and random short stories about homicidal platypodes. Because seriously, doodling isn’t a learning style - it’s just a good way to pass the time while somebody with a bad sense of fashion talks about uninteresting subjects.

From an outside perspective, the lifestyle and habits of the right-brained student appear violently irresponsible. This is probably an accurate assessment. We don’t really know. Irresponsible is one of those words we didn’t actually invent, and its specific definition continuously eludes us due to the fact that it appears to constantly mutate and shift to accommodate all of our behaviors. Furthermore, as we enter the strange and frightening phase known as adulthood, our perception of responsibility grows progressively dimmer. According to the society around us, responsibility means finishing college, whereupon we can all get divorces and become alcoholics. Mentors and religious leaders tell us that being a Christian will save us from this kind of worldly misery – but statistics tell us otherwise.

Statistics also tell us that this whole concept of job security is little more than an amusing joke. As creative types, we won’t really have to worry about it – we were always planning on happily starving anyway. But the opportunity to make vast and unfair quantities of cash in exchange for prostituting our talents will always exist, if we ever choose to take advantage of it. Ironically, in today’s economy it’s dangerous not to own three different LLC companies that exist mostly in your own head. This thread of logic also extends to point where we begin the question the wisdom of getting a college degree in the first place, but we prefer not to think about it very hard – it’s too painful. Just because we are disconnected from society’s thought processes does not mean we are immune to status symbols and expectations. Of course we want a college degree. Who wouldn’t? People will think we are cool and give us money and stuff.

So why does a college degree so often seem uniquely tailored to elude people like us? Why the exaltation of tasteless ad hoc studying skills over actual problem solving?

It is my opinion that creative intelligence is something that should not be marginalized the way it is, especially in academia. Are right-brained students really that useless to society? Sure. Some of us will starve in the gutter, and most of us will finally quit trying and just get normal jobs to make everyone happy – spending the rest of our sad lives secretly doodling on the walls of our cubicles. So there is no serious threat to status quo, and perhaps no justifiable reason for time-honored academic traditions to change just to suit our abnormal little brains, no reason to revise the archaic and nonsensical systems of grading and qualification that reward students for behaving like trained monkeys. But there are a few examples that speak otherwise – a few survivors – young men and women too courageous, or indifferent, or stupid to give up on the dreams of childhood. They are the ones who regularly make an impact on the society we live in. They are the ones whose records and films we collect, whose writings we read and whose thoughts we share with one another. Their academic careers and experiences with the “real world” may have shaped them in some way – but most likely as an obstacle, a crucible, a battlefield littered with broken dreams and scraps of misplaced hatred. In the end, survivors will survive, my only question is: couldn’t it have been a little bit simpler?

In third grade, she ignored Columbus and drew a polar bear with adorable ears. At the age of 25, she wrote a six-figure check to PETA on a whim.

He never looked back, and never hesitated, because he knew the future. It existed inside his head, and he did with it as he pleased.