Eight Different Multiple Intelligences

My Intelligence+s

Let me apply myself to Dr. Howard Gardner’s theory of the eight different intelligences, or it to me.

How smart am I?

I never really had the courage to ask anyone, let alone endure a rudimentary test set by someone who has never met me or, worse still, be judged simply and conclusively by a computer program. After learning of the theory of multiple intelligences, the IQ testing system does seem totally inadequate as a way of judging my intelligence. Can I be compared to another fairly by applying the same approach and set of questions?

Dr. Gardner’s theory intrigues me. It explains so much and yet leaves a little undone. I have looked around me to discover in my family of only six, we each have different intelligences. If we were a class, I wonder how a teacher would appeal to each of our different intelligences, each requiring a slightly different teaching approach in order to stimulate effective learning. How, in a forty-minute class of twenty students, can a teacher provide a child with the “opportunity to learn in ways harmonious with their unique minds (ARMSTRONG, THOMAS)”? It seems entirely super-human and far too much to ask of a mere mortal.

In collecting experiences for this assignment, I ran over memories of my own education; perhaps my teachers did in fact possess super-human traits. I actually recall many instances when the teacher was able to accommodate for students’ varying intelligences and therefore needs, by leaving tasks open to interpretation, whereby the student could decide on their preferred presentation of an assessment task. In primary school I was required to present a report on an Australian Explorer. The method of presentation was open to interpretation and as a result I looked for a way out. Projects scared me, long boring reports scared me; I was never any good at them but without strict instruction I was free to set my own task based on my strengths, not my weaknesses.

As I remember, information for this project was only found in large books with too many words and not enough pictures or dramatic stories. Rather than a standard written report that drudged through all the significant events in Henry Lawson’s life, I creatively constructed and carefully illustrated Henry Lawson’s (hypothetical) Antarctic Expedition Journal based on only the interesting bits I cared for in the information I found and my own fancy for story telling. Having analysed this fifteen years later, I realise the task made the most of the information I had and it made the most of my particular intelligence+s.

As a teacher I will need to be aware of my students’ varying intelligences in order to provide a stimulating learning and teaching experience. Knowledge and understanding of their intelligences will only come with a finely tuned knowledge of my own intelligence+s and therefore my strengths and weaknesses as a learner and as a teacher. I need to know my strengths and weaknesses:

We are all good at something.
My father tells me
I am a writer.
He is a writer.
We like words and
Where they take us.

I am quiet.
Rarely say a thing.
Words on a page
Allow me to
Divulge, indulge.
Meander.
















Dr. Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences alleviates any anxieties I had about the awful question, “how smart am I?” My answer now seems far more applicable to the real world than a number. I am primarily self-smart, quite picture-smart and word-smart, and I like to think I am nature-smart. I understand now and graciously accept that I have a limited logical-mathematical intelligence.