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kimberkitIn 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...
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Date: 2005-07-01 01:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-01 02:00 pm (UTC)I agree that smart is far from one-dimensional, but I suspect that narrowing it down to categories like music, spatial, interpersonal, etc... is still far from accurate, though it's probably a better model than a simple line of smartness. When we learn new ways of doing things, we can feel the mind-muscles being worked, can feel ourselves learning, and the feel of new neural pathways forming, of our mind stretching. I think that for each of those, for each of the things that we can learn where our mind stretches in some new and different way, there is a level of intelligence that we have that is specific to that sort of thought. Then there are two other factors that come to mind: (1) How good we are at recognizing when to apply certain types of intelligence to areas outside of the places where they are commonly used, and (2) how quickly and precisely (two seperate categories) we are able to learn truly new systems. Oh, and I suppose our recall rate... no, that's not right... our recall momentum. How long it takes us to sharpen old ways of thinking, long left unused.
Mmmm...
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Date: 2005-07-01 03:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-02 08:57 am (UTC)I know that when I think of a person as "smart" (or more often, "not dumb") it means to me that this person has that little light behind his eyes that shows he's thinking. It has very little do with actual skill and more my general impression of the person.
As for working at things and aptitude, they are definitely not directly related. A good example applies here in China: there are six of us on the trip that are at the same level in Chinese. Some of us never study. Ever. Some of us study every second that isn't occupied by some other activity. However, we all seem have the same level of communication and comprehension (in some cases, even, the students who study very hard are actually worse at Chinese than the students who never study). Everyone on this trip is fairly "smart," as one would generally use the word. So what accounts for this difference?
Now you went and got me thinking.