How Smart Am I?

How smart am I? That is a good question I had never asked myself before. It was in one of our Didactics classes that the teacher asked us: “How intelligent are you?” At the beginning, one of my classmates said: “I am as intelligent as everybody of us.” At that moment, I agree with him, but then the teacher said to my classmate that he was wrong since nobody is as intelligent as other person but capable. That’s why, the teacher had us take a multiple intelligences test to measure how intelligent we are. The results? Continue reading.

What the test basically measures are the eight intelligences that Professor Howard Gardner, together with his team of professionals in various areas at Harvard University, has discovered up to now (musical, linguistic, naturalistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, logical/mathematical, visual/spatial, and bodily/kinesthetic). Even though Professor Howard wants to include the moral and the spiritual intelligences to the list of multiple intelligences, they haven’t been approved by scientists who are experts on the matter. When I took the test, I was almost sure about which the results would be. But, to my surprise, the results weren’t the ones I have thought.

According to the results, my dominant intelligences are the musical, the one I was more than sure that would be there, and the intrapersonal, which surprise me a lot because I didn’t consider myself as a person who prefers to learn alone. But the fact that intrapersonal was one of the dominant intelligences didn’t surprise me a lot; what surprise me a lot is that the interpersonal intelligence was one of the lowest intelligences I possess -- It was the second one, together with the naturalistic intelligence, with less percentage. It surprise me because I consider myself a sociable person, but maybe the test goes beyond that just measure if one is friendly with all the people, and that’s why, I got a lower percentage in that intelligence.

Finally, the other intelligences were in a intermediate level. In the linguistic, logical/mathematical, and bodily/kinesthetic intelligences, for example, I got the same percentage, and in the last intelligence on this list, visual/spatial, I got just some few point less than in the other three above mentioned. Now that I know all those statistics about me, I can say that I am intelligent enough as to reach all the goals, objectives, desires, or dreams that I could propose in my life since I am capable to achieve them, and the most important, I have the correct and suitable attitude to do it.

Undoubtedly, it was nice to know how intelligent I am. Even though the results were slightly different to what I thought, I know that I can improve each of those intelligences and some day to have an equal percentage in all of them. Meanwhile, I will work hard to achieve that as one of my first objectives in life.