What's in a number? (Module II)

Week two of class was a tough one for me, not because of the content but because of the surrounding external situations of everybody's favorite feasting holiday; Thanksgiving! I write to you from Lexington, KY. Surrounded by my family, it was tough to find time to do all my work in but nonetheless, here it is!

This week's four-chapter-reading, though time consuming, was very interesting. Chapter 4 was titled Learner Differences and Learning Needs. It covered the bases on IQ, gifted students and students with disabilities. Chapter 5 was Learning Development, Diversity and Immigrant Education, where I read about the development of language in people. Everything from the when and how of development, bilingual students and teaching ELL students with disabilities in this chapter. Chapter 6 was called Culture and Diversity and did a good job of covering the different types of diversity: ethnic, social and economic, and gender. While reading this, it gave me flashbacks of sitting in class with Professor Caparelli-Ruff in AEDU 203: Intro to Education, when we covered the same topic. To cap off the reading, Chapter 7 was about Learning and Motivation. This is a chapter that had me reminiscing of topics that I learned in entry level psychology as a high school and undergraduate student. Topics like classic and operant conditioning and reinforcement both positive and negative. It also covered topics, new to me, like dealing with bad behavior, methods for enforcing good behaviors and the ethical issues that may come up with conditioning. 

The chapter that most captured my attention was Learner Differences and Learning Needs, more specifically, the section on intelligence, IQ and multiple intelligences. The topic and idea of IQ has always been one that has made me wonder. I was taught that people are born with a certain IQ, and barring extenuating circumstances like injury, that stays relatively the same for your lifetime. 100, I was told, was average. Anything below that denoted a mental disability and illness and anything above a 150 meant you were a gifted student. I never liked the idea, to me it was just too limiting. To say that a number determined what your potential is never sat well with me. The idea of multiple intelligences has always been something that snagged my attention. Taking a look at Table 4.1 on page 124, I often think about myself and my strengths and weaknesses. My strengths, in my opinion, would be linguistic, interpersonal and intrapersonal. According to the chart, good ideas for careers would be journalism, therapist or mediator, among other similar jobs. Funny enough, my current career is one in the "Logical-Mathematical" category (scientist). In my own assessment, mathematics are, by far, my greatest weakness. It could be argued that my shift into the teaching profession is a step toward a career in the interpersonal category, so maybe there is some truth to this highly contested theory.