I was born into a generation which suffered a great shift in the teaching of K-12 mathematics: since about 3rd grade, my math classes consisted of rounds of rote memorization (I'll spare you the anecdote of being the first 8-year old at Riverside to start timed multiplication tests, and the tears which followed). Rote memorization, as it turns out, yields not a robust faculty of numeric reasoning, but rather pretty good short-term memory. Unfortunately for my high school self, this meant that math got harder for me because I wasn't taught reasoning so much as I was taught to cram for tests - this has carried on into college - and while one could argue that it was primarily my own fault for not studying a certain way, it can also be argued that the teaching standards, in their pursuit of ever-increasing test averages, neglected the ever-important distinctions among "learning styles."*
Herein lies the Ästhetik-reader's interest in the matter: Brains wired more neatly on the left versus the right ("left-brained, right-brained"). I guess I would call myself right-brained. This colloquialism (importantly, a layman's term) indicates creativity, artistic impulse, affinity for literature and music, while making the tandem implication of a deficiency in math and reasoning, be it practical or abstract. This may or may not be supported by my college transcript. This left-right dichotomy is also often (mistakenly?) meshed with male-female comparisons as well. But my interests do not rest on that secondary prejudice. They rest on the way art (art, Art, "art") is filtered through my right-brainedness.
Yes, I have an affinity for music, but I don't find pleasure or utility in learning exactly how rhythms are structured in terms of fractions of an instantiated duration (4/4, 6/8, hemi-demi-semi-quavers) - my affinity is in how a beat makes me want to either pull a wallflower or wiggle my ass. Literature, similarly: I couldn't care less about the story an author wants to tell... but I am interested in the differences among (and effective use of) consonance, assonance, and alliteration, and how it makes the words sound and feel in a mouth when spoken. Example: Kafka versus Eminem.
Fortunately for my K-12 self, art class was fucking amazing: open-ended assignments, freedom to produce content under appropriate guidelines of material technique, calls home to my parents about how helpful I was to other students who didn't enjoy making their art. So my right-brainedness, my poor, poor unmathiness, might make it hard for me to calculate derivatives or whatever, but I'll be damned if I can't synthesize abstract concepts with the primal and insatiable instinct toward the sublime. I claim even that my own "creativity" (what does that even mean? Can I put that as a strength on my résumé?) is creativity unto no end whatsoever, i.e. it is without tangible or conceptual utility to anyone but myself, just a sublimation of sublimity, just practice, just expression for the sake of making expressed the things which, without expression, would render my between-ears grey matter totally paranoid à la Mr. Anderson in "The Matrix."
So if I'm not a genius because I got a D in pre-calc (further stipulation: at the University of Michigan), then I am a genius for being at peace with myself despite the antecedent to this conditional proposition. Thank you for reading. We will return you now to your regularly scheduled episode of Coloring Within the Lines.**
These are real, actual aesthetics.
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* I will also spare you the debate over the importance of learning styles, stipulating their existence for the purpose of argument.
** I did a lot of coloring within the lines as a kid. I was pressured to do so by those with whom I colored. I was praised when I did it, and my crayonstrokes were even and dense and vivid. This is significant only in that it has contributed to my habitual and ritual reference to Crayola color names and in that I prefer stark, clean, color-blocked garments over prints and textured fabrics. Precisely.
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