360 Degrees: Intelligence

The notion of intelligence has been debated for years. But what really does being 'intelligent' mean? Each person views intelligence in their own way. When someone hears that a student is intelligent or smart, I would go as far as to say that most people automatically connect that to getting a 4.5 or above GPA. But does the ability to scarf down fact after fact in math class, to later forget it all, really prove your intelligence?

Then there's also the other handful of people, at least from my experiences, who claim to be 'street smart', which has erupted as an faux alternative to assert your intelligence if you're not exactly up-to-par with your fellow classmates. The original 'intelligence' I mentioned before has been crowned 'book smart'. What I see is that many people associate one another in one of these black or white areas. But what about the gray areas? Can you be getting a 3.8 GPA and still be 'street smart'? To answer this question, we should look at intelligence from all points of view.

Intelligence is a very vague subject. The possibilities for intelligence are broad and never-ending. I'd like to think that everyone can be intelligent in their own ways. A scientist could be intelligent in the field of biology or astronomy, and he may have 10x as much knowledge as our president in that field. So does that mean the president is not qualified to run the country, since there are clearly others who are smarter than him in different areas? Probably not. Intelligence is relative. Just as a physicist could explain quantum mechanics to you in a heartbeat, a quarterback could explain a flea flicker play to you in another heartbeat.

I've seen people share their expertise with others, especially in areas where others may have only lightly touched upon, and the other person is awed. If the other person was shocked or still cannot comprehend that knowledge, he assumes the teller of this knowledge is intelligent. It seems to me that this has existed for hundreds of years. Think about philosophers. Why did people regard them as brilliant? They posed questions no one had the answers to. Often philosophers said that intelligence was knowing that you don't know. So if many philosophers knew very little, and simply asked questions, why were they regarded as the most intelligent people in the world? They left people dumbfounded. I'd be curious how people would answer to the question, "What is intelligence?" To me, it's all relative.

Metacognition: Kite Runner Essay

Writing the Kite Runner essay was a laborious but beneficial project. Especially because of all the planning beforehand, I felt I was not stressed at all when writing this. In fact, the words flowed write out of my fingers. By making an evidence plan before hand, I was able to secure my abilities as a writer into a structured essay, allowing me to reach my full writing potential.

I believe that the hardest part of writing a piece, such as an essay, is beginning it. I spent a good 30 minutes just thinking about possible ideas to write about. I couldn't just use anything; I needed an idea that could fill my paper with vivid language and not bore the reader. So I thought. What's the most important lesson to be learned from this book? After spending hours reading this, there must be something that stuck with me. I just had to dig and find it. What did the main character Amir achieve through the duration of the book? What was the purpose of writing the whole book? I soon realized it was for redemption. Hosseini wanted to show his readers that redemption requires sacrifice. And as soon as that idea sprung into my head, I was able to come up with thousands of things to back it up. I was surprised that I knew the idea all along, it just took a little thinking to find it.

As mentioned before, I thought this was one of the easiest essays for me to write in a long time. I knew the material well, since we discussed it nearly every day. I found my evidence before hand, and I knew the structure we had to write in. Still, there were a few things I could've done slightly better, as always. Collecting evidence was a good preparation, but before that, I think it would've been better to mark the book with key points while reading it so that it would've been easier to look back to. I wrote down many interesting topics throughout the course of the book, but not necessarily the key points. I maybe could've spent a little more time on the conclusion, but as always, there's a limit on how much time you can spend on it. Other than that, I think the writing of this essay was pretty successful, and it improved my skills as a writer.