Intelligence

When I was in school I heard this many times,'You may not be good at Maths but you are artistic'. I grew up thinking that maybe I am not intelligent. It made me not explore lot of things where I thought intelligence was a requirement :-)) Now when I look around I hear people saying,' He is very brainy in terms of maths and science. He is intelligent' If someone is good in dance or singing, I hear people saying that he or she is talented. It gives an impression that Intelligence is limited to certain aspects only. Fortunately there are people who have a different take on Intelligence. We are all intelligent in our own way. The concept of Multiple Intelligences introduced by Howard Gardner widens the scope and helps in Acceptance of self with our intelligence. I look at MI in a very simplistic way with regard to children and learning :

• Society predominantly looking only at logical(IQ) and somewhere verbal. MI provides an avenue to widen the scope and also provides Acceptance to be other than Logical based
• MI gives me a wide framework to design my content when I am working with children
• Understanding of MI that each one of us have our own strong intelligences helps me to have purpose and in using this framework and with awareness of reaching out to all the children.
• Instead of identifying a child's intelligence I am giving exposure of all the MI's to the child and leave it to him to learn from his strong intelligence.
• Exposing the child to all these intelligences, the child becomes aware and it is a possibility that when he has a choice he can use one of the eight MI's his choice depending on his inclination at the moment to learn.