Ember Being Smart Summary

"the word, 'intellectual ', of course, became the swear word it deserved to be...the boy in your class who was exceptionally 'bright ', did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols,

In an excerpt from his essay “they say I say” titled “Hidden Intellectualism”, Gerald Graff gives a compelling argument on how schools should capitalize off student’s street smarts to engage them intellectually. He believes that students are being fed a narrative that is inefficient to its purpose. To counter this inefficiency there should be an integration of things that interest the students with their academics.

After reading Seal’s article which stated that Americans often thought kids are born smart while Asians more often believed that studying makes a person smarter, I was reminded my own personal beliefs on intelligence and I realized that I have thought people could get smart by exerting effort since I was in the last year of elementary school in Vietnam. Therefore, I empathized with Seal’s attitude that success and achievement are a result of working hard. I could remember that I got this attitude when I was in an important final exam which decided where my middle school was in the next year that depended on my score. In this exam, the math test was an extremely difficult test for every student because it had a strange math problem which my classmates and I had never studied before. At first, I had spent for 2 hour to solve this problem, but I didn’t succeed. So, I wanted to give up. However, I was worry about my score and thought about my mom, who hoped that I could get the high score enough to enter a famous middle school. Since I didn’t want to disappoint my mom’s wish, I tried to solve this math problem again and again and again. Eventually, I was successful to solve

Most people, when asked, say that a person is intelligent if they have “book smarts.” People that are book smart can write and converse about subjects taught in school. On the other hand, people with “street smarts” aren’t seen as intellectuals because the subjects they are knowledgeable about are not traditional. In his essay called “Hidden Intellectualism,” Gerald Graff insists that schools and colleges are missing an opportunity to translate street smarts into academic work.

Every high school has its cliques and because of those cliques, high school students face stereotypes based on the clique they are a part of. There are the straight A students, the jocks, and the druggies. That is just naming a few. For each of those cliques, there are certain stereotypes that associate with each one. For example, the straight A students stereotype is that they always do their work ahead of time, are goody-two shoes, and always worry about school. However, that is not always the case. The same also goes for the stereotypes of the jocks and druggies. This can be related to “Blue Collar Brilliance” by Mike Rose. In this article, the key concept is that working class level does not define intelligence level. The druggies, and even the jocks, could be considered to have a low intelligence level. Rose says, “Intelligence is closely associated with formal education – the type of schooling a person has, how much and how long – and most people seem to move comfortably from that notion to a belief that work requiring less schooling requires less intelligence” (264).

Being a smart kid is an honor to most, but as a child, Mark Bowden believed otherwise. In “The Dumb Kids’ Class” he tells his unique experience in Catholic school, where he was in the dumb kids’ class and then switched into the smart class, and discovers the true differences between them.

❖ Perhaps the last thing that should be mentioned when relating to how pupils learn and develop self-esteem is. “The question is, not how intelligent is the child, but in what ways is the child intelligent?”

What is the first thing people think of when they hear the “smart” kid talks about his accomplishments? Those smart kids get called a nerd and automatically have to deal negative things all because society itself thinks it is okay to do so. In “Anti-Intellectualism: Why We Hate Smart Kids”, Grant Penrod explains why anti-intellectualism exist. People will remember what the anti-intellectuals do but not so much the intellectuals. Society envy those who are smarter than them and only look at any other accomplishment besides education accomplishments. Anti- Intellectuals tend to bash others around them for their success academically. That is how society works in every generation. Penrod informs everyone of an example of how nerds can be treated differently especially in the school system. More recognition goes to sports teams instead of debates teams, which is factual. Penrod’s lack of credible information and the tone that has been presented has brought a lot of thoughts that need to be analyzed more closely on why he presented this article this way.

I found it important to understand what types of intellectuals there are and how they feel, so that we may have a better understanding of why we tend to hate the smart kids. In Grant Penrods paper “Anti-Intellectualism: Why We Hate the Smart Kids”, he talks about how intellectuals constantly see their efforts trivialized and society’s distaste for intellectuals. He provides evidence to his statement through stereotypes of geeks and nerds, public figures, and

Being a smart kid is an honor to most, but as a child Mark Bowden believed otherwise. In “The Dumb Kids’ Class” he tells his unique experience in Catholic school, where he was in the dumb kids’ class and then switched into the smart class, and discovers the true differences between them.

Gerald Graff’s essay “Hidden Intellectualism” refutes the age-old idea that ‘street smarts’ are anti-intellectual. Instead, Graff suggests that “schools and colleges are at fault for missing the opportunity to tap into such street smarts and channel them into academic smarts.” (244). In saying this, Graff argues that lacking book smarts does not render a person unintelligent. Rather, educational institutions need to find a way to effectively use this format of intellectualism to produce academic intelligence. Graff goes on to point out that society associates ‘weighty’ subjects, like Shakespeare, with intellectualism, but not less serious subjects, such as sports. In consideration of this omission on society’s part, Graff emphasizes to the

Students in tracked school system commonly attribute intelligence to being in these higher track classes, and while this may be partly honest, it is not the whole truth. As described in the previous

The questions of learning and intelligence have long been debated since education has ever existed. That learning leads directly to intelligence is an assumption which has not been subject to adequate scrutiny. Typically, a fixed mindset believes that an "intelligent" student is one who invests less of almost about everything to not only succeed but also to achieve outstanding results. That is, by studying less an intelligent student is expected to know about study subjects enough, which requires the least effort possible of him or her. Talent, moreover, has long been praised as an exceptional gift which one is helpless to develop, let alone initiate. The ideas about learning, intelligence and talent are challenged by prominent psychologists and education scholars Angela Lee Duckworth, Assistant Professor of Psychology at University of Pennsylvania and Carol S. Dweck, Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University.

Many human beings categorized the smartness of a student relying on their high Grade Point Average (GPA). In my opinion GPA only gives a brief description on the student’s

In this chapter, I will describe the three groups who took part in this study, their everyday lives and backgrounds. In describing these different groups, I approached them as communities of practice. I am drawing on Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992) where they argue communities of practice are identified as social groupings that do not only share abstract characteristics or simple co-presence but have a shared practice with regular joint activities. “A community of practice develops ways of doing things, power relations and ways of talking” (Eckert 2006:1). It is a process where participants collaborate to make sense of the world around them, (Eckert 2006). She acknowledges earlier work on speech communities (Labov 1966: Trudgill 1974: Wolfram