Visual thinkers excel at hands-on trades and mechanical innovation, but schools are eliminating shop classes and filtering them out with abstract algebra requirements. Skilled tradespeople with minimal formal education often hold dozens of patents designing complex equipment, yet the pipeline is disappearing.
Chapters
Visual thinking in pictures is a different kind of thought. And people that are good at visual thinking are often very good at mechanical things. When I was out working on installing equipment that I had designed, I worked with a lot of very skilled tradespeople who often owned big shops. Maybe barely graduated from high school, but they've taken shop class. They had 20 patents inventing all kinds of complicated equipment. And one of my concerns is we're losing that skill. They're getting shunted off in special ed. They took the shop classes out and we're paying a price for that right now.
And oftentimes students may perhaps not be as good at algebra, so they stop going to trig or geometry. And you're saying, well, help them go to trig and geometry because that's visual thinking so they can excel.
Well, this is the problem, and my concern about this math requirement screening out the visual thinkers. I absolutely can't do algebra, it's too abstract. I can do math that's related to something physical, like pi times the radius squared. I can size hydraulic and pneumatic cylinders. But as I say that, I'm seeing hydraulic and pneumatic cylinders on pieces of equipment. People forget that maybe, okay, computers run the robotics, but somebody has to design the tool that goes on the end of the robotic arm. It's something that my kind of mind can design.
