Even though I love teaching during the school year, I also love my three months of projects, playing with the grandkids, and the opportunity to read. I try to read four books during the summer. I am a little behind schedule, but I choose some pretty lengthy books this time around.
I have been reading
The Preacher and The Presidents by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy,
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien,
A Place of Healing by Joni Eareckson Tada and lastly,
Brain Rules by John Medina. That is quite a variety of books!
Brain Rules is a book my daughter had to read for one of her courses in college. She thought I would benefit from the suggestions the book makes on keeping people's attention during a training session. I have appreciated the lessons on visual stimuli and how our brains respond to it.
What captured my attention the most, however, was the very first paragraph in the Introduction. This paragraph made the book for me!
Go ahead and multiply the number 8,388,628 x 2 in your head. Can you do it in a few seconds? There is a young man who can double that number 24 times in the space of a few seconds. He gets it right every time. There is a boy who can tell you the precise time of day at any moment, even in his sleep. There is a girl who can correctly determine the exact dimensions of an object 20 feet away. There is a child who at age 6 drew such vivid and complex pictures, some people ranked her version of a galloping horse over one drawn by da Vinci. Yet none of these children have an IQ greater than 70.
This is amazing! As a society we try to think we are so smart by developing tests and formulas and based on those results, put children in a "category" of intelligence. We have the potential of missing out on so much when we do this. I will never forget a little boy in my life that could not communicate in a conventional way and as a society we could make all kinds of assumptions based on that. However, he could recite ALL of the credits at the end of a movie just by seeing it one time!
For me, there are two lessons to be learned. One, never underestimate the capabilities of the brain and two, don't put people in a box! You just never know what someone has the ability to do, as well as the potential to do. We just need to throw away the boxes and look for the unexpected gifts.
Brain Rules by John Medina. Published in 2014 by Pear Press.
