How was your intelligence assessed?

As shared in my earlier blog, I am pursuing a course on “What future for education?”

The topic of discussion this week “What is intelligence and does it matter?” was very intriguing. I am so glad that I did this week’s course as it surfaced that my thinking of intelligence was quite skewed. If not for this class, I would have surely and wrongly tagged my daughter too under not intelligent/intelligent bracket.And more importantly I would have done that at a much younger age and would have hampered her actual potential.

Just imagine what we are doing with every kid on this planet?

There has been one common thread behind my dreams and topics of passions in my life. And that driving force or common thread I think is one of my top 5 strengths as per Gallop Strengths Finder. Developer. I feel a little unsettled or disturbed when I see potential in a person/ systems and that not being used. At times I feel it could be addressed better if we could fix our educations systems, which is somewhere a reason for my recent explorations towards Education Career.I know that it is utopian but when I read this week’s reading assignment, I felt good that there are other people too like me, who have such similar thoughts. A part of that article I wanted to share it here.

Children regularly graduate from our schools after reaching only tiny fractions of their potential. Why do we tolerate this vast loss of potential, this great neglect of our children?

As long as we insist(accept) that mathematicians(intelligence or ability) are born and not made, we will tolerate poorly designed programs in our schools and classrooms in which children who have fallen behind cannot get the help they need to succeed.

There were very poignant thoughts shared, discussed during this week. They further made me marvel the impact classrooms or teachers or parents or such systems can have on young minds.

I would like to share my thoughts, a few of the reflections and learnings of this week through my response to this week’s assignment question.

During your own education, how has your “intelligence” been assessed? How has this affected the educational opportunities you have been given? What judgments have people made about you that have been affected by an assessment of your “intelligence”?Do you consider yourself to be a “learner”? why?

1. Till college my assessment of intelligence was mostly(90%) through my performance in the examinations. Marks that I would score in them.

In fact I realised through this course, that I never challenged that approach. Rather, I formed my opinion about a person’s intelligence too based on one’s performance in exams. I would consider a person intelligent, if s/he gets a top rank, percentile, score. This was particularly true till college. (As at work we don’t any more have exams). In fact isn’t it weird that the format through which you are judged till college (Written or oral examinations) don’t exist during your work life.(Appraisals). Why do we have them in schools and colleges then?

I really loved this statement by Prof Gordon Stobart — “We develop ability, so ability/intelligence is a measure of learning, not the cause of learning”.

2. Internally, within me I might not have termed myself intelligent, but I have scored enough marks in the examinations that has placed me in positions to get into a decent engineering college for Bachelors in my country.

However, I agree that this typical definition of intelligence has had some negative impact on opportunities I have had. One was that it made me give up on aspiring for top engineering colleges in the country. Two which I think was more critical. The environment I grew up in believed that intelligent people take up courses like Engineering or Medicine, and only not so intelligent people take up other courses like Commerce, Economics, Law etc. So I think it did have an impact on my decision to choose engineering.

3. Yeah I think at an early age you are bucketed into intelligent or not category by teachers, parents, siblings, relatives. I believed I wasn’t intelligent as I never was mentioned as intelligent by my teachers or parents or siblings. Also, my marks made me believe that as I wasn’t the topper.

However, there were a few instances when I did feel I was intelligent, like when I was the only girl to get selected from the school in a Math Olympiad exam. The exam was very different from that usual school exams.It was based on aptitude and not based on remembering formulas.

Now, however after doing this course, I feel all my above assumptions and co-relations around intelligence were shallow.

4. I do consider myself as a learner, as I am always looking out for opportunities to learn. To learn about tolerance from a friend’s story, to learn about gratitude, to learn about a tool or a skill that might be handy or helpful. However, I think so far I was indeed clouded with a wrong definition of intelligence that somehow, subconsciously affected the learner in me.

This course, opened up a lot of mental blocks and gave me confidence to further excel in my journey to learn. I got reminded about characters like deliberate practice, resilience, ability to form big picture thinking.

As a parent of a 3 year old too, I learnt a lot on do’s and don’ts.