Our newspaper says our minority students are having a rough time learning math and science. That’s nothing new, but we have exacerbated the problem by using terrible textbooks. The last math book I looked over was unbelievably bad. Only the most talented of students could have done well with that awful book.

Unfortunately, it isn’t just bad books with many Indian students. There’s something else involved.

A professor at BYU, where they have a good population of Indian students, published a superb article on the problems created when left-brain math teachers try to teach right-brain students. The professor, a right-brainer himself, discovered that he could teach math to Indian students more successfully than most teachers, because most male math teachers are left-brainers, while a high percentage of Indian students are right-brainers. Mixing right-brain students with those teachers is akin to mixing oil and water.

No teacher can do consistently badly with an entire class of human beings, as did these teachers, without beginning to question his or her teaching ability, and the students probably thought they were just too dumb to learn math. But with both the teachers and the students, their genes were playing saboteur.

The newspaper says the school administration is looking for minority teachers for these students. Is that really necessary, or could a right-brain teacher teach these kids better than a typical math teacher?

Let me tell you how it was with me. Though I loved math and science, I definitely was a right-brainer. I had a memory that would permit me to read material and remember six months later what page it was on and whether the page had any smudges on it, yet, while I did extremely well with some teachers, I did astonishingly badly with others.

When some teachers tried to teach me, my eyes would practically glaze over with the first few minutes. I would try to listen more intensely, but unless the teacher wised up and put things into context, my brain would practically slide under my desk and take a nap.

Left-brainers are not good at putting things into context, and that’s just fine — if their students are all left-brainers. But the right-brain kids need to have the whole picture; they can’t learn something that seems to apply to nothing. A teacher who lectures, rather than engaging in a two-way, carefully guided conversation, may lose most of his right-brainers.

When I went to junior high, in Durango, our gym teacher tried to teach us to play speed ball. She spent an hour teaching us the rules, then she expected us to play the game. The left-brainers did okay, but we right-brainers wondered whether we had accidentally taken a left turn at Albuquerque (a la Bugs Bunny) and ended up on Mars. We had no idea what we were supposed to do. The teacher was really ticked.

It’s not hard to learn to teach right-brainers, but if a teacher doesn’t understand the problem, he’s not going to be able to fix it. He doesn’t have to have minority genes (though if they would make him a right-brainer, they couldn’t hurt). What he needs is to be taught the ground rules for teaching these kids. Some left-brainers may never be able to teach higher math to right-brain kids, but the more talented and devoted teachers can probably learn to do so.

Healthy minority kids really can learn math and science, but left-brained teachers, lousy textbooks and trendy teaching methods can make it so hard that only the most motivated ones will choose to do so.