It isn't how smart you are but how you are smart: Multiple Intelligences and what that means to you and your student.

“I hated school.  I was never very good a book learning,” says about a dozen guys I know who can turn a pile of rust and spare parts into a seductively purring war machine.

“I barely graduated.  I was just so glad to be done with the whole thing,” says several handfuls of women I’ve talked to who, with one glance at a bargain bin in a fabric store, can shame the runways of Paris.

I worked for a woman without a high school diploma who merely had to shake a notebook at the store safe to make the inventory match up with the deposit.

I watched a man without a GED fabricate an aluminum gizmo that solved centuries’ worth of fish processing needs in the time it took for me to eat a sandwich.

My own mother, who earned a GED months before I graduated from high school, is a brilliantly talented cook, seamstress, embroiderer, quilter, and creator of beaded jewelry.  She could turn any of those talents into a lucrative enterprise but for a deeply entrenched lack of self-confidence caused by her troubles in school. 

I think that most educators are aware that a high school or college diploma is no real indicator of a person’s intelligence and certainly no indicator of a person’s worth…  Well, I hope so.  What diplomas appear to indicate is a person’s ability to play the game.  Which is not an un-useful talent in the working world but it isn’t an indicator of raw talent or ability.

My MAT program turned me on to a particularly useful tool for empowering students and aiding teachers in pedagogical differentiation.  In other words:  It makes kids feel good about their abilities and helps teachers reinforce those good feelings by giving kids different ways to show that they know the material.

This tool is called Gardner’s Theory of MultipleIntelligences.  It is somewhat controversial in that it is based on the rather “soft” science of behavioral psychology which has more to do with enculturation than how the brain physically operates.  However, the Multiple Intelligences thing WORKS!!!

Gardner has put forth the idea that people express preferences for certain types of stimuli and expression.  His original work included 7 categories:

·         Verbal/linguistic-  reading, writing, & speaking

·         Logic/mathematical- numbers, patterns, & sequencing

·         Visual/spatial- drawing, sculpting, building

·         Kinesthetic- body, movement, athletics, dance

·         Musical- listening, singing, playing music

·         Interpersonal- engaging with people

·         Intrapersonal- introspective, wise about one’s self, self-expression

Another category, Naturalism- orientation toward the natural world, has been added and another, Technological- orientation toward technology is sometimes included in the list.

This concept is a very handy way to make lessons more interesting and appealing to students who dread holding a pencil and despise reading. 

In a study of about 50 7^th-12^th grade students, I found that orientation toward Verbal/Linguistic types of learning and expression was, in general, the least often expressed as the dominant preference in individual students.  And yet it is the dominant form of teaching and assessment in schools!  Most interesting to me, when I averaged out all of the dominant forms of expression, they were almost equally distributed among all of the Intelligences, reinforcing the need to distribute teaching and activities among the different Intelligences.

As a teaching tool, Gardner’s theory is great, but the most important aspect to me is that it empowers students to believe inthemselves. 

Imagine a student who struggles at reading and writing and, therefore, despises school.  That student, perhaps a brilliant athlete, a talented artist, or a skilled outdoorsman, is simply biding her time before she can drop out and be rid of hated worksheets forever.  She is suddenly handed the results to a quiz that shows her “Intelligence” for the things that she loves to be extremely high along with a list of activities that would play off her talents to allow her to succeed at the things at which she struggles. 

Who is awesome now?

The visual breakdown of my intellectual strengths and weaknesses has inspired me to deliberately use my strengths to my best academic and social advantage and to purposefully work on my weaknesses.

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND that parents and teachers profile themselves and their students using the following websites.  They are both designed for adults and older students but an upper elementary student may benefit from them with the help of a teacher or parent.

The Birmingham Grid for Learning

And

The Multiple Intelligences for Adult Learning and Education

Are rich, white kids smarter? A rant.

It's pretty obvious if one looks at grades, test scores, attendance records, college acceptance...  Pretty much any standard of measurement out there, that upper-middle class, white children are more successful than students of other socio-economic classes.  One of the primary purposes of 2001's No Child Left Behind Act was to close this "Achievement Gap" in the United States.

But are rich, white kids smarter?  Do children really inherit a social or genetic predisposition to academic success?

Sugata Mitra, an educator in India began to wonder why it was that all of the children of wealthy people he knew were "gifted."  He wondered what would happen if you gave poor kids access to the same enrichment materials that their wealthier counterparts had.  He found that, given access to materials and left completely to their own devices, students who had never seen a computer, who didn't even know how to read, acquired knowledge at a rate as great or greater than those studying in traditional classrooms.  His "Hole in the Wall" project has sparked an international movement promoting project-based learning, peer teaching, and cloud schools.

Mitra and his Hole in the Wall computers.

So how do poor kids in India compare to those in the United States?  Why do poor kids in the United States who are given access to public education perform at consistently lower levels than their wealthier counterparts?

It isn't just a matter of access to enrichment materials.  It is also how students interact with the materials that are provided to them.

Middle- and upper-class students are setup to succeed with standardized tests, which is the most common method of sorting through college applicants, tracking into enrichment programs, and determining student, even teacher, success.  Not only do children from higher socio-economic statuses experience, on average, more enriching and healthy environments in utero onward but most of the contextual questions on standardized tests, worksheets, and in textbooks are geared toward the suburbanite and leave the urban and rural dwelling kids at a loss. 

An elementary teacher who spent nine years teaching in Gambell, Alaska told me that her students, on a state-mandated standardized test, were given pictures of a whale, a cat and a cow and told to circle the one that they eat.  The students in Gambell DO eat one of the three on a regular basis but it AIN’T the cow or the cat. 

Successful spring whale hunt in Gambell

So even if they've changed the names on the tests in the last decade and now Jamaal and Constancia are part of the story, what do Billy George and Anna-May McCoy know from breaking ten dollar bills at the mall after getting off a 15 mile train ride?  Details like that make a huge difference, especially to younger kids who are, possibly, left to wonder why a splitting maul needs so much money.

In a class I attended during my Master's program we were led in a debate over a hypothetical “case study.”  Students from a poor, urban environment were being bussed into an affluent, suburban school in order to raise their test scores.  The principal of that school did not integrate the students into the rest of the student body, however.  He kept them together in isolated classes in an isolated wing in order to, he said, give them time to adjust and to bring their scores up to par before mixing them with the rest of the population.

Controversy over busing has occurred since its inception.

A teacher from the kids’ previous school had transferred with them and the question of the case study was “What obligation, if any, did she have to those students and to her new principal?”

I was struck at how my class worked and weaseled to try to figure out how Ms. Blah-blah could get those kids a fair shot in the school when my thought was WHY are we trying to integrate those hard-working, blue-collar kids into a population of snotty, entitled, shallow, sheltered, materialistic brats?  Why on earth do we believe that their middle and upper class, white culture is desirable?  What is it about that culture that raises those kids’ test scores?  The nice classrooms?  The new jeans?  The grassy playing field?  Isn't this program just another form of the BIA's relocation program?

What makes the difference is that those little suburbanites have probably never had to worry about where their next meal is coming from, if they’re going to make it home safely after school and they've had books and iPads in their pudgy, white fingers from the time they could eat their Gerber Strawberry-Apple Puffs.  Plus the entire curriculum of this nation and every test that those suburbanite white kids will ever take has been written glorifying the lifestyle that they lead.

It is interesting to me that we would rather focus on changing our methods of education and evaluation than try to address the very real issues that are ACTUALLY causing the problems!  Those problems being that lots of little kids don’t have decent health care, food to eat or education!  I absolutely agree that all students would benefit from project-based, student-driven learning and SIGNIFICANTLY less time spent preparing for standardized tests.  But shouldn't we also be addressing the issues that create disparities between the classes as well?