Isadore Leon Saucier – Upper Elementary Education, 1955

Isadore Leon Sonnier

BA, Upper Elementary, 1955

                Up front I am a highly visual person, according to the Sonnier Model of Hemispheric Preference, which explains that I have two visual hemispheres and am not at all analytical.  It also means that I remember faces and friendly persons with fond memories forever.  I forget names.  They are just not there.  Believe me, my mind is filled with beautiful USL people, fellow students and a host of outstanding, cordial and impressive teachers.  I enrolled as a freshman, a I veteran and an ex-Marine.  The GI Bill contributed generously to the financial support of my education.

                Regrettably, I cannot remember names.  However, Newman Club events are like yesterday.  So many fond memories which include two trips, a convention in Nashville and, with Fr. Sigur, my driving eight or nine girls to lay apostolic training at Grailville, Ohio.

                Also, I remember four years spent with the Campus Choir, everyday at four, with the most beautiful girls on the campus and, guys that I will never forget, except their names.  I also sang Handel’s Messiah as a tenor with the Lafayette area chorus.

                I have fond memories of a Chemistry professor who invented a more accurate way to determine melting and boiling points of elements and compounds.  It was simply a tube within a tube where gradual changes could easily be seen and the temperature at which the change took place.  My interest was captive to every word he said.  This visual person learned a lot because the chemisty professor had something to show to every word spoken.  Today, I call that Holistic Education, an intricate part of my professional career.

Which brings me to my career.  My Lab School training was very good.  However, I was less than an outstanding student teacher.  I first taught in Port Allen and later in the Baton Rouge schools as a junior high school teacher.  As a board member of our Louisiana Science Teachers’ Convention, I supported the invitation of a person from Jefferson County Colorado whom I met at a national convention.  Later, he hired my wife, Claudine, and me to work in his district so that I could study at the University of Northern Colorado.

I attended a sufficient number of summer and academic year National Science Foundation programs to be admitted in Science Education at Northern Colorado and to graduate with a doctorate in Earth Science Education.  In parallel interest, I studied and published articles on human individual differences.  This led from journal articles to books: Teaching of Science in the Affective Domain, Methods and Techniques of Holistic Education, Affective Education:  Methods and Techniques, and Hemisphericity as a Key to Understanding Individual Differences  (theme:  Truth has two values and both are needed to liberate its reality).

Early on, a post card came from Spain requesting the reprint of my journal article, “Teach the Left Brain and only the Left Brain Learns, Teach the Right Brain and Both Brains Learn.”  I also included a copy of my first book, Teaching of Science in the Affective Domain.  Just months later, from Spain, came an empirical study of Holistic Education.  This became the basis for the Sonnier Model of Educational Management  and prompted the book, Affective Education:  Methods and Techniques, leading to The Sonnier Model of Hemispheric Preference.

In a desire to have more people understand and appreciate our behavioral differences as something good and not hateful, as in current politics-USA, a new book advocates just that:  The Two Sides of Truth, in which authors are currently sought. Please go on line and get your personal invitation from my web page:  http://www.st.usm.edu/sonnier.html  (expires May, 1999).