A Little Note About Intelligences

As most of you know who bother to read my blog, I was a psychology major in college. I remember one of the things we discussed in, I believe, Psychological Testing was the fact that their has been some debate concerning the biases of intelligence tests and that they, perhaps, only test a certain type of intelligence. This is really something I should have followed up on the research through the years, because it was something I found very interesting at the time. The idea surfacing then was that there are different kinds of intelligence and that someone brilliant in one may not be in another. I'm not sure where the issue has come to rest or if it has come to rest at all, but, personally, I think there are different kinds.

Right now I'm working as a Maintenance Assistant at a hotel. There's one full-time guy and then there's a guy, probably in his early sixties, that comes in a couple days a week. These guys are both “country boys” with thick accents and, sometimes, bad grammar. Well, the older guy got kind of embarrassed during one of our breaks because he was trying to tell us about eating in a restaurant and he got mixed up on the proper usage of “eat” vs. “ate” (and some pronunciation/variation on those words that I'm not even sure what it was). We didn't call him out on it, he did. Anyway, the way he was acting made me sad because he was making it seem like I was smarter than him since I use proper grammar and went to college (some who've read multiple posts may disagree on the proper grammar:).

Guys and gals, I may have graduated Magna Cum Laude from college, but I can't fix my own plumbing, wire my house, fix my own car (without getting a detailed manual), and so many other things that both of these guys can just figure out. I know a lot of this know-how comes from experience, but none of these things are simple, they're all complicated and require a lot of intelligence.

Anyway, just wanted to share that. Whenever you're tempted to judge someone as less intelligent than you, stop and wonder a moment about all the things they can do and know of, about which you are clueless. That's not to say I don't think everyone should try to learn, better themselves, and speak as properly as they know how (or strive to speak more correctly), but perhaps our definitions of what we should learn and how we should better ourselves should widen. I suppose what I am saying is that I believe we should all strive to be well-rounded individuals in various areas of life, instead of strictly experts. This is something I need to work on in my own life, because I am simply dismal in math and I don't read/watch as much non-fiction as I should.