Destin Sandlin’s “Backwards Brain Bicycle- Smarter Everyday 133” YouTube video is so interesting! In the video, Sandlin shows viewers that he is incapable of riding a bike that has been rigged by an engineer to work backwards (the bicycle turns in the opposite direction of the handlebar.) Sandlin is incapable at first of mastery of this bicycle, because he cannot unlearn the original way he learned to ride a bike. As other people volunteer to try to attempt riding the backwards bicycle as well, at the conferences and Universities Sandlin speaks at, they too cannot figure out how to ride the bike as the unlearning process of the original bicycle model is too complicated for the human brain. Sandlin explains the reason the new bicycle is too complicated is because ,“Once you have a rigid way of thinking, sometimes you cannot change that.” I relate this phenomenon to how we should think about our students and how they learn. Sometimes students have a lot of difficulty with learning something new or learning it the way you teach, because their brains have been trained to think differently. Or perhaps their brains have not been trained at all in that area of learning, so they cannot make the same connections as you. Therefore, when we have students who are struggling, we need to come up with different ways to better meet their learning needs.
I also relate this backwards brain bicycle project to my experiences with learning math. I remember in 8th grade, I could not keep up with my Algebra classmates. I tried so hard, and had always been very strong in math; however, I just could not get it like everyone else. Each day the potential of me passing the class felt significantly lowered and when I asked for additional help, the teacher told me that I just had to keep up and learn like everyone else, or I would fail. So, I failed, and dropped the class. A year later, I retook the same math course in high school, with a different teacher, and the math was so easy for me to understand. Everything just clicked. I eventually realized that it was not that I could not learn Algebra, but the way I was being taught in 8th grade was not beneficial to my learning process. This experience relates to the backwards brain bicycle, because I think my 8th grade math teacher had a “rigid way of thinking” that Sandlin describes, where she felt math should be learned the way she was teaching it, instead of trying to figure out an alternate way she could make the content click in my brain. As a teacher today, I am going to try to teach new skills in ways that make sense to everyone, and when students cannot keep up; I will try to think figure out how to teach them so that it makes sense to the way they learn.
Destin. (2015, April 24). The Backwards Brain Bicycle. Retrieved fromhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0&list=PLbRLdW37G3oMquOaC-HeUIt6CWk-FzaGp&index=2
I also relate this backwards brain bicycle project to my experiences with learning math. I remember in 8th grade, I could not keep up with my Algebra classmates. I tried so hard, and had always been very strong in math; however, I just could not get it like everyone else. Each day the potential of me passing the class felt significantly lowered and when I asked for additional help, the teacher told me that I just had to keep up and learn like everyone else, or I would fail. So, I failed, and dropped the class. A year later, I retook the same math course in high school, with a different teacher, and the math was so easy for me to understand. Everything just clicked. I eventually realized that it was not that I could not learn Algebra, but the way I was being taught in 8th grade was not beneficial to my learning process. This experience relates to the backwards brain bicycle, because I think my 8th grade math teacher had a “rigid way of thinking” that Sandlin describes, where she felt math should be learned the way she was teaching it, instead of trying to figure out an alternate way she could make the content click in my brain. As a teacher today, I am going to try to teach new skills in ways that make sense to everyone, and when students cannot keep up; I will try to think figure out how to teach them so that it makes sense to the way they learn.
Destin. (2015, April 24). The Backwards Brain Bicycle. Retrieved fromhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0&list=PLbRLdW37G3oMquOaC-HeUIt6CWk-FzaGp&index=2