I received this comment from an online student:
Hi Magister,
This was triggered by “If you come to Latin class every day for 30 minutes you will learn Latin…”
I heard an interesting quote on a different definition of intelligence. The speaker did not believe in a fixed level of intelligence, but rather defined intelligence as the relative rate of learning a given subject. This means of course that one could have different intelligence across different subjects. We see this. In high school I had a scary french horn tutor. She was a known genius in music and mathematics, but just those. Also the famous quote by Einstein (I love Einstein) comes to mind:
“It is not that I am smarter than you are, I just stay with a problem longer (MUCH longer).”
And while I am on Einstein quotes, there is also this one:
“Do not be troubled by your problems with mathematics. I assure you mine are far greater.” This from the father of calculus.
Hope this is of interest to you. I find that new definition at the top inspiring, hope you do as well.
Here is my reply:
Hi, Brad!
Thanks very much for sending this my way! I appreciate your words and the quotes.
It’s funny. I barely scraped through high school and college. Then, I taught myself a bunch of languages. This puts me in an odd place.
People think I am really smart. Mark Twain summed it up perfectly. “By all means, learn another language. It will not make you any smarter. But, everyone will think you are smarter.”
I experience this all the time. I cannot convince people otherwise. When it comes to languages, I can relate to Einstein’s quote. “It’s not that I am smarter than you are, I just stay with the problem (language, in my case) longer.
