TEACHER STRATEGY
Let us start our examination of the Teacher person A by taking another
look at the diagram of mental symmetry. Notice that the Teacher is at the
top left corner of the diagram. This is easy to remember. His head is
always in the clouds working with theories, therefore his name is at the top,
and he uses left hemisphere processing, so his name is on the left of the
diagram. Any other questions?
If you look at the diagonal label, you find that the Teacher person
thinks emotionally. Your response at this point may be: “What!? You mean
that those dry, mathematical sorts actually feel? They are so dry, you
couldn‟t get a drop of emotional moisture out of them if you put them
through a wringer.” Exactly. The reason that the „dry theoretical type‟ can
exist without any apparent feeling is that he has discovered another type of
emotion—that of understanding. Like the ferns which live without roots
and obtain their moisture directly from the air, the Teacher person can pull
feeling directly from the rarefied atmosphere of theory and understanding.
We have all experienced the positive Teacher emotion of comprehension,
when the „light‟ goes on inside and things suddenly make sense. We also
have all sensed the Teacher pain of not being able to put things together,
and of having to live with fragments which do not fit. We will describe
Teacher emotion in detail in just a moment, but first let us look at some
other aspects of Teacher thought.
The diagram indicates that Teacher and Server modes work with
analytical processing. This type of thinking involves sequences—as in
reading the book from page one through to the end. A sequence is like a
train. A train may consist of just the locomotive or it may contain a long
chain of railroad cars. In the same way, a sequence may have only one
single element or it may be the result of joining together many segments.
Speech and writing are verbal sequences. For instance, a sentence can be as
short as „Hi‟ or as long as some of the statements in this book. Notice how
A If there are seven different cognitive styles, then one might expect that
one seventh of the population belongs to each group. This does not appear
to be the case, at least in North America. Rather, the Teacher individual
may form only 1% of the average human population, or even less. Our
experience is that many people who appear initially to be Teacher persons
actually have the cognitive style of Contributor or Facilitator. I suggest that
one of the major errors made by others who use this scheme of cognitive
styles is that they confuse the intellectual Contributor and the naturally
curious and highly verbal Facilitator with the Teacher person.