Posted on 01/13/2011 3:39:14 PM PST by decimon
Where do athletic and artistic abilities come from? With phrases like "gifted musician", "natural athlete" and "innate intelligence", we have long assumed that talent is a genetic thing some of us have and others don't.
But new science suggests the source of abilities is much more interesting and improvisational. It turns out that everything we are is a developmental process and this includes what we get from our genes.
A century ago, geneticists saw genes as robot actors, always uttering the same lines in exactly the same way, and much of the public is still stuck with this old idea. In recent years, though, scientists have seen a dramatic upgrade in their understanding of heredity.
They now know that genes interact with their surroundings, getting turned on and off all the time. In effect, the same genes have different effects depending on who they are talking to.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
There's one in me! It's my tapeworm--Obiwan! (just ask him)
I had TWO geniuses inside of me. One boy and one girl.
You girls have all the fun.
Here I am stuck at home listening to that loudmouth tapeworm.
That part WAS fun. (Just give your tapeworm a name!)
:-)
Glad they escaped. Hey, that's great!
Just kidding. Hope you're all doing well.
I’ve TRIED!
I keep saying Hey! SHUT UP!
He says his name isn’t SHUT UP! It’s Obiwan.
No, and we need to stop feeding crap like this to kids in school. Not everyone is a potential star. Not everyone is gifted. Most people are in fact ordinary, and many struggle even to be competent. This is reality. This is life. That’s the state of the universe. Hard work will get most people much farther than talent will anyway. THAT’s what we need to teach our kids.
VRW Conspirator - you gave a serious reply on a thread reserved for wisecracks. Not very brilliant of you! Bzzzt! But thanks for playing! /jk
This is very much Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences.” There was an attempt in the 1990s to utilize these categories in grammar education; I was involved in the start-up of a charter school that used this concept of multiple intelligences as the foundation of its charter.
NCLB essentially derailed a lot of that, because of its demand on outstanding performance in testable academic subjects in order to continue to receive any Federal funds. (The 11% of our budget we got from the Feds wasn’t a huge proportion, but for a charter school - where every penny counts - we had to consider the fiscal realities. We couldn’t afford to give that money up.
It is a great idea, but as long as student success is measured purely by high scpres on “dot tests,” academic performance will be the “most faavored type of genius.”
This, by the way, was the one area where your ideas match almost exactly the philosophies of the teachers in the classrooms. The teachers had all come to our school with years and years of classroom experience, and they knew first-hand the different types of genius that certain children are born with. They all were tremendously enthusiastic about being able to use a variety of standards.
We spent a lot of time in committee developing “rubrics,” which created testable performance standards in non-traditional study areas. It was very difficult work, since the entire school system, from the Post-War era on, is based on the “give them a test and see how smart they are” model(thanks, Stanford-Binet.) The laziest and least-involved teachers will always prefer to use traditional academic testing, since it requires so little effort to administer,
I’m part of the “degraded rabble”. My yearly review is coming up. This year it’s a 360 degree review which means some who probably rode the short bus to school will help decide my raise.
Fall on your knees and thank God Almighty that you are being considered for a raise at all, no matter how your “committee” got to work. Many people in this country will get no raise and are thankful just to be employed. Jes sayin’.
Our family produced a supergenius, so I know better than most that not everybody measures up in that regard. Among the many things I learned from our supergenius: genius is overrated and a lot like having more money than you can ever spend, only you can’t give it away.
Courtesy *PING* to Post #6.
No, there is not.
I stopped reading after this line. Someone with the tact and diplomacy of a rusty razor surely must be wanting of demonstrable wisdom. I really don't want a lecture from a wannabe who tells me I am too serious for this thread then in the same breath waxes, ahem, seriously. Nice! Go ahead, look in the mirror and tell yourself that you are a genius. Oops, you are just a smarta$$.
Hey, I *know* I was being a smartass. No offense was intended. I actually admired your comment, and was trying (poorly, in your opinion) to use a bit of humor to state it.
Please excuse me for trying to pay you a compliment in a way you don’t approve of. I won’t do it again - but then, you probably wouldn’t want any praise from this “someone with the tact and diplomacy of a rusty razor” who is “surely ... wanting of demonstrable wisdom” either.
Btt
If so, it might be harder to find in some than others.
D’oh!
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