The idea of "hand work" vs "brain work" is very fascinating to me. Yes some tasks are more dependent on being efficient with either one's hands or one's mind, but what task can you do without using both? Even if the pianist is not actively thinking of the cord structures and rhythms of their song, they must still use their brains in order to play. When I think of "hand work" I normally think more along the lines of the arts or manual labor. When I think of "brain work" I think of any kind of work really. The two should not be placed in a sense of "verses" one another. They should be seen as separate tools that are used to build the same structure.
I think it's funny how we tend to think that "intelligence" leans so hard on the ability to write papers and read books. As Mike Rose puts it, "we tend to undervalue, or miss entirely, the many displays of what the mind does everyday, all the time, right under our noses" (73). Our brains have to preform countless tasks everyday in order to simply function in society, yet these are not the things that will get you a scholarship for college.
I have a brother who is five and a half years older than me. He has never been very good in school; he'd fall around the C range in most of his classes; however when he wasn't at school he managed to do things I only ever dreamed of. Down the street from the house we grew up in was a large area filled with manzanita bushes and oak trees. One day, around the age of 13, my brother and his friend began to develop this harsh terrain into a trail that will last for generations. They started their work with Swiss army knives (you know, the ones that have like six different tools in on little red casing) eventually moving to bigger tools as the years went by. After school and on the weekends my brother and his friends would work on the trail. Over time they managed to turn the dense manzanita grove into a bike trail three loops long (with many smaller trails leading to different roads), filled with jumps and ramps, and mapped out courses. The entrance to the trail was marked by a set of tree houses put together with wood that had been "borrowed" from my dad. One day my mother, my father, and I were taking our dogs for a walk past the trail. For a few days my dad had been missing his wheel barrel (it was a big wheel barrel. One of the old ones that are made out of metal and probably weight more than the person who's pushing it). Sure enough when we got to the trail my mom spotted the wheel barrel tied off about twenty feet up a tree. When they asked my brother how they'd managed that, my brother proceeded to explain how to use a pulley system. He had never learned about this in school, but from his time building the trail he had learned in depth about pulley systems, blue printing, tools, support systems, time management, cooperation, and many more things that have already helped him in his adult life.
There are many different ways people learn, and testing them on one specific way doesn't make much sense to me. My brother may have been a "C student" in terms of how effectively he could read and write a six page essay about Huckleberry Finn, but if he were being tested on how well he could construct and build a working system, he would have been at the top of the honor roll every year.
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