h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Intelligence and intensity"?

"Intelligence and propensity"?

"Intelligence and Concentration"?

"Intelligence and absorption"?

"Intelligence and prodigy"?

Intelligence and hyperintelligent

Perhaps just 'Genius' would do? It's usually associated with intelligence, I would think...

Not necessary. I see a stupid genius in the mirror every once in a while.












Usually while I'm driving.

Actually...

lol
same here... except I can't drive.

The only reason I do is they haven't stopped me, yet.
I absolutely hate it.

I think "genius" is one of those 'outsider' words that can be used to hinder. It is kind of like 'savant' or 'prodigy', a suggestion of otherness.


I've lost count of the people who, when they discover that I wear glasses, like to read, and speak in complete sentences, suddenly decide that sarcasm is the rule of the day and resort to such phrases as 'bookworm'.

If I were to use the term "genius", it would only be in the context of the support apparatus that allowed that quality to flower.
It is difficult to be a giant without shoulders to stand on.

Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree While Isaac's There!

I recall discovering that giftedness is classified as a Special Educational Need, alongside other learning difficulties such as dyslexia and dyspraxia... I can't help but wonder what is meant...

- Jordan

I suppose it means that whatever forces teachers and administrations to do something differently is called special education. The politically correct term when I started at a school with special ed integration was 'exceptional education', and since I've always been classified as 'gifted and talented', I got all excited thinking that someone cared about me and the gifted kids got their own little classroom. Turned out it was Special Ed, in the sense that we know it - learning disabled. (I avoid the word 'smart' since it would probably be construed as egotistical, the same for 'genius', which I'm not anyways.)
At my old school, the learning disabled/cognitively disabled (LD and CD, respectively) classrooms were the size of my art teacher's storage room. Honestly, closets. With probably 15 kids in each.

The word 'genius' is always a touchy one... seems exclusionary and pretentious at the same time, when it applies to people. It's just another label. Perhaps it would be better to be 'in possession of genius'? I guess it's no longer politically correct to speak of intelligence level... just as other subjects like race and weight have become taboo in the past. Harvard University doesn't even award merit scholarships anymore. (Granted, perhaps this is because they give huge scholarships to all students at the school.) Someday it will be wrong to compare one person to another.
Congratulations on your individuality! Caring about intellect is a certain way to stand out in this modern world.

I think with a truer understanding of what being human really means, instead of trimming the round peg to fit in the square hole, intelligence will become meaningless.
If you truly care about the people you are dealing with, you work with them until the task is completed. Gifted and Talented is a matter of perception. Teachers don't like to perceive. The school is a factory.

I think we've encountered a few occasions recently where home-schooling parents and teachers alike were possessed of an arrogance based on the fact that they are adults.

I lost my adult suit somewhere. I hope I never find it.

Children can help teach each other, if left to it. The natural tendency of the young is to be curious and to find things out, take them apart. I think a book-based curriculum flattens and kicks away that curiousity and produces a willingness to just get it over with so they can get on with their lives.

Books don't necessarily discourage learning! Personally, I prefer to use textbooks - but a lot of other methods (dissections, for instance, when one is studying biology) are also really helpful. I suppose it depends on the book. People, children especially, learn in different ways, and one of the greatest challenges of a teacher is to figure out how a classroom of thirty-five children, often including learning disabled students (who are required, by US law, to be mainstreamed into 'regular' classes as much as possible), can be educated in four or five subjects over a day (in elementary school) or one subject in fifty minutes (in middle/high school). This while the teacher maintains his or her sanity.

I think that the reason teachers, parents, and adults in general often try to set a border between adulthood and childhood is that they are ashamed of what they did in the past, perhaps, and would like to pass it off as being 'just a stupid kid'. Drives me nuts, since there's no definite line between an adult and a child (a few legal barriers, yes, but that's about it) and you probably don't notice it when you 'become' an adult, being that the process is gradual. (I haven't gotten there yet, though, so I wouldn't know.)

Adult suits, are those like one's right mind? I keep my right mind in a closet, and only take it out... actually, it hasn't seen the light of day in a long time. Congratulations on your loss.

I think that when you surround children with information, they will probably absorb it on their own. Most teachers, however, have to guide children along the process of absorbing, perhaps because the information doesn't interest them, or because they don't want to learn in the manner that they are being taught. Can you tell I'm a fan of independent study? (It means I don't have to deal with loud people inside the classroom. But I think that's just me being arrogant.)

Some homeschooling parent told me that in the state of Texas, you have to schedule 175 days of curriculum. When and how you do it is not specified.

I haven't checked his facts, yet.

The teachers, on the other hand, have to submit or follow lesson plans, in many cases modified from those provided by the manufacturers of the textbooks.

The daughter brought her science textbook home a couple of weeks ago and I was just skimming through it when a paragraph caught my eye.
This is from page 44 of the Holt 'Science & Technology, Texas Edition, Grade 7' copyright 2002:

"Compounds Cannot Be Broken Down Through Physical Changes:
The only way to break down a compound is through a chemical change.If your pour water through a filter, the water passes through it without changing. That's because filtration is a physical change. A compound cannot be broken down by any physical process. A chemical process is needed to break down a compound. For example, water can be broken down using an electrical current."

I showed that paragraph to the science teacher when we had Meet-the-teacher night. She glanced at it, then read it and looked at me and said,"I can't believe they put that in there. Which chapter is that?"
She said," We just use that as a supplemental text...."

One paragraph above, on the same page, it says:
"Some compounds can be broken down into elements through chemical changes. .... Heating the compound mercury(II) oxide breaks it down into the elements mercury and oxygen..."

I wonder about their definitions of "physical" and "chemical".

This book discourages learning by just plain being wrong.

this sort of incompetance is not unusual in school books.

pre-challenger, richard feynman was asked to be on a panel to look at books for schools and help select the ones for his region.

they were universally dreadfull, but some were worse than others.

one of the worse ones didn't even have all of the volumes finished, so they couldn't even check it (but that didn't stop it getting a lot of votes, even for the voluime that wasn't there).

eventually they chose the cheapest three. The next set of books for the next subject were just as bad, so he stopped doing it.

That does not suprise me.
It is an industry, just like porn or greeting cards.

I don't hold out much hope for the Internet, either, with regard to it's impact in schools.
The textbook publishers have been sprinkling the books with links and page graphics that mimic a webpage.

Without a basic knowledge, it doesn't matter what you teach, if you don't know what you are talking about.
If the students don't have a clue, how are they gonna know what kind of load they are being fed?
If the parents came out of the same system...?

I had a pscyh teacher in High School who used a book written by one of her college professors and she used her old class notes (on fading legal paper, yet) to teach the class. When I brought in books and copies of newer studies and evidence, she said that was not in the curriculum...

I had the same history teacher my father had. She was universally disparaging of the textbooks and urged us to read on our own.
Unfortunately, most of the class couldn't be bothered even to read what was on the blackboard.

Because the entire state of Texas buys textbooks in one go, when Texas needs books, publishers essentially write the books to cater to the state because the contract is so huge, and usually sell the same books to other districts in other parts of the US. Just think, the entire US is learning just like Texas!
My school system just went through purchasing new middle school science textbooks... the science resource lab, where I spent most of my time (instead of science class, because I was on independent study for Science Olympiad, a national science competition), was filled with sample textbooks for the last couple months of school. The coach, who was also the science resource teacher, let the team members see if we could use any of them for our events. I thought they were all quite simple.
When a compound is broken down or changed into something of a different atomic makeup. When the physical shape of something is changed, like bread being sliced or ice melting to water, the substance is still made up of the same stuff, but it looks different. Or so the textbooks tell me.
When I was in sixth grade ('99-'00) my social studies textbook still recognized the USSR. My school district just got its fifth or seventh superintendent, if you count acting superintendents, since I started school ten or eleven years ago, in three-year-old kindergarden. I'm reminded of a scene in The Simpsons where Ralph Wiggum is at a brand-new computer, purchased with grant money awarded to the school because of a test grade that Lisa got by cheating, and he says, 'Hi, Supernintendo Chalmers! I'm learnding!'

My quarrel was with their definitions of "physical" and "chemical"

Electricity and heat can be physical, although chemical changes can and do occur under their influence.

There is an experiment I ran across online a couple of days ago, but I can't find now, that had scientists breaking compounds down with intense sound.

The text book industry has three state texts: Texas, California and I believe, but don't quote me, Louisiana. Everybody else has to choose from those.

Books are a trap.
If a teacher or a home-schooling parent is aware of reality and the changing face of the world, then they can intelligently educate themselves and the children.
Unfortunately, it seems that many otherwise normally intelligent people go to college to become institutionally stupid.
It doesn't do any good to follow the rules if the rules are stupid.

50 million people can be wrong.

Voice in the wilderness, calling: Repent, repent! I don't know why you'd want to 'pent' in the first place, but do it again!

Well... back to school I've gone... most of my teachers do not rely on the textbooks, happily... but I still have to carry them around. Health class (a one-semester, state-regulated necessity for freshmen) is the only class I have in which the curriculum is based entirely around the textbook. My biology teacher sent us a book to keep at home for the year, and he says it is possible to get straight A's in the class without opening the book at all. My French homework is usually in a writing or a grammar workbook, and we have a textbook but the class isn't based on it. And so forth. (Nevertheless, my backpack is usually heavy. Ah, well.)

As taught in biology class: Physical change is a change in appearance, chemical change is a change in identity. The definitions of 'physical' and 'chemical' do vary when used outside this context.

Feynmann's name was all over a documentary I was watching the other day about the Tuvan Throat-singers.