Week 3: Chapters 6-9

Lots of information has been shoved into my brain this last week and I am still processing quite a bit of it. So many things from this week interest me and I am having a hard time choosing a topic for the special project.

In chapter six much was discussed concerning mental development in middle childhood. Was caught my attention most was the theories of intelligence, specifically Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. A lot of times people are labeled as "smart" or "dumb" when in reality that is not the case. Many people are intelligent in certain aspects of life but not so much in others. Our cultural values tend to pick out people that are more intelligent in things we hold in high regard while people who may be geniuses in other aspects of life may be considered dumb because we don’t see those things as much as an importance in our society. For example Gardener refers to nine different intelligences; linguistic, logic, mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic and essential. You can see how many of us value a select amount of these over the other. Someone who may not be very linguistically talented and has a stutter or other speech impediment, but may have amazing logic skills would not be as highly valued as someone who had amazing linguistic skills and not that great of logic skills (these people make excellent politicians in my opinion...) since our society we have many different cultures and languages and being able to communicate effectively is a huge importance. In chapter seven there was a short section on prejudice and I think that besides the cultural and race aspect these different intelligences can have a major impact on that too. Maybe in early childhood someone who had a speech impediment was picked on by another child that was very linguistically talented and from then on any one who had a knack for languages and a way with words that others admired, the bullied child would automatically hate throughout life. This can cause some serious losses in connections with others that may have greatly benefited the child.

A huge issue in our society is teenage drinking and drug use. Since our brains are still developing until our early twenties, substance abuse has a huge impact on how we make connections and our learning abilities. I considered myself to be quite old compared to my peers when I took my first sip of alcohol, but I was still in high school. I wonder now how different my brain might be if I had waited another four years. If maybe I would be more intelligent or my goals would be different. It opens a lot of questions about my peers too, for I know quite a few who started years before me and many that have experimented with harmful drugs. I wonder how much different many peoples’ lives would be, or even  what our society would be like if no one indulged in these things until there early twenties regardless if they were illegal or not. What if alcohol and street drugs did not exist? Would our society be smarter and more well rounded? I would always complain about how the drinking age was so old compared to other countries, but if you are going off science it all makes sense now.