Ember Being Smart Summary

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.

Summary Chapter 2 of “The smartest kids in the world and how they got that way” written by Amanda Ripley (2013) described the school experience of Kim and her journey in attending school in Finland. Kim can be described as intellectually gifted, adventurous and curious about the world. Kim did not want to spend her whole life in the small town of Sallisaw Oklahoma, and with the persuasion of her sister, she sought opportunities to study abroad. Kim read information on Finland, and she appreciated how education is viewed differently there than in the United States. It was expensive to go to Finland, so Kim raised money, earned scholarships and received a donation from her grandparents (Ripley, 2013).

Additionally, Albert Einstein once said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” There are different forms of intelligence that go beyond what our school system measures. Students are not a unit to be measured, and students cannot be assigned a numerical value to identify their intelligence. Students are diverse—they learn at different speeds, and they learn in different ways. Focusing solely on test scores is hurting our students and deviating away from building our society on success and excellence. Critics are slowly realizing the problems associated with standardized tests—they create anxiety, they are extremely biased, and they do not measure the ability to think deeply.

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.

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.

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.

"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,

❖ 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

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

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 author of Hidden Intellectualism, Gerald Graff, told the readers how he believed just because you are not school smart, you can still be very smart. As a kid, he lived in the melting pot of a Chicago neighborhood with people ranging from Chinese immigrants to “hillbilly” whites from southern Appalachia. It was frowned upon by the other kids around to be school smart, so he learned about the world of sports and saw that being sportsmart was way better than being school smart. As he grew older he began to see how being intellectual about sports helped him so much more than school ever would.

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

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