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In her parenting book How to talk so that kids can learn, Adele Farber cautions against making evaluative statements, like "you're so smart." That doesn't tell a child precisely *how* they succeeded, and doesn't leave a child enough room to make that evaluative judgment for hirself. I've been thinking about that, though, and I think we make that judgment a lot, for others; the judgment of how "smart" someone is.
Armstrong (The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing, 2003) and Gardner ("Multiple Intelligences Go To School," Educational Researcher, 1989) argue that there are 7 or 8 intelligences, and that we generally only measure how logical/ linguistic someone is, without measuring their musical, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal, or intrapersonal intelligences. (Armstrong also goes into a big thing about sociocultural bias & such, but we won't bore you with that.) Still, generally, a kind of quickness on the uptake seems to be the mark of a "smart" person, at least amongst people I've met. I wonder how much of that is a reflection of how you've grown up -- you've always been praised for being a smart person, so whether or not you're showing it off at the time, or even whether or not you fully believe it yourself, you "act" smart.
It's an interesting question for me, I guess, because it really took me up until long, long after college to believe that I was bright. I always figured I had greater experience, or worked at it, or was just lucky to be born into a family that had enough money to ensure that I *seemed* smart. (And, for the record, teachers really do mostly lean on having had greater experience with a subject, not just raw intelligence. I've had one or two students who were blindingly fast, and probably faster than I was, but it was still okay teaching them.) It honestly never occurred to me that it wasn't just a matter of working at it, and that the other kids weren't just not applying themselves for some unfathomable reason.
More on the question of whether "smart" really exists in the form we think of it, later...
Armstrong (The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing, 2003) and Gardner ("Multiple Intelligences Go To School," Educational Researcher, 1989) argue that there are 7 or 8 intelligences, and that we generally only measure how logical/ linguistic someone is, without measuring their musical, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal, or intrapersonal intelligences. (Armstrong also goes into a big thing about sociocultural bias & such, but we won't bore you with that.) Still, generally, a kind of quickness on the uptake seems to be the mark of a "smart" person, at least amongst people I've met. I wonder how much of that is a reflection of how you've grown up -- you've always been praised for being a smart person, so whether or not you're showing it off at the time, or even whether or not you fully believe it yourself, you "act" smart.
It's an interesting question for me, I guess, because it really took me up until long, long after college to believe that I was bright. I always figured I had greater experience, or worked at it, or was just lucky to be born into a family that had enough money to ensure that I *seemed* smart. (And, for the record, teachers really do mostly lean on having had greater experience with a subject, not just raw intelligence. I've had one or two students who were blindingly fast, and probably faster than I was, but it was still okay teaching them.) It honestly never occurred to me that it wasn't just a matter of working at it, and that the other kids weren't just not applying themselves for some unfathomable reason.
More on the question of whether "smart" really exists in the form we think of it, later...
