Intelligence is about more than getting into the “smart people math class”

By Alyssa Zhang ‘20

“Wow, you’re in the smart people math class!” is something that has followed me around since the first time I placed into Findley Elementary’s “Challenge Math Program,” a math class that met five times a week. During “math time,” a handful of kids from each class in the grade would stand up from their desks, collect their things, and quietly leave to a different classroom. 

For me, this separation continued through middle school as well, though on a much larger scale and based off IQ testing in addition to standardized math and reading tests. Approximately 400 kids were separated into four halls and later three math classes of increasing “advancement.” After gaining hall placement, the students in my hall were further sorted into three math classes: Pre-Algebra, Algebra I, and Advanced Algebra I. 

The pressure of being in the “smart people math class,” as my peers labeled it, followed me like a thundercloud. I was constantly worried about getting questions wrong and appearing dumb, especially since I loved the arts as well. I knew drawing and playing piano were not considered as respectable to my classmates, and I worried it lowered how smart I was in their eyes. 

Coming into the Catlin Gabel School (CGS) as a ninth grader, I expected a shift in the way my peers defined “intelligence.” In previous schools, my peers exclusively used the word “smart” to describe someone that achieved accelerated math placement in comparison to their peers. However, after testing into Advanced Precalculus and Accelerated Science I at CGS, I realized this was still the case (with the added “smart people science class”) even though, unlike elementary and middle school, there was a wider variety of advanced courses.

Despite there being honors-level courses in non-STEM subjects at CGS, I have never heard anyone say, “Wow, you’re in the smart people art class,” or “Wow, you’re in the smart kids’ English class.” 

Growing increasingly frustrated with my experience with such one-dimensional peer-to-peer characterization of academic and intellectual ability, I wondered if others around me felt the same, if this was a greater problem with CGS’s student culture, and why we associate intelligence so closely with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

Dr. Thomas Armstrong, Executive Director of the American Institute for Learning and Human Development, says that everyone is smart, just in different ways. Some of his publications focus on synthesizing Harvard University’s Dr. Howard Gardner’s research about “multiple intelligences.” 

“When we use the word ‘intelligence,’ too many people think of it in a unitary way, that we are born with the intelligence we are given and not much changes over time,”  Armstrong said. 

However, looking at how people actually function in the world, there are many ways of being “smart.” According to Gardner’s research, which was initially published in his 1983 book “Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences,” there are eight kinds of intelligence ranging from “word smart” to “number smart” to “music smart”. 

“8 Kinds of Smart” by Alyssa Zhang, created on Canva.

Armstrong views Gardner’s concept of “multiple intelligences” as a good way of representing human potential, especially in classroom settings. 

“School tends to focus on the ‘number smart’ and does not take [the other kinds of ‘smart’] seriously,” Armstrong commented. “The idea of putting science above literature is a problem we have in society.”

Elizabeth A. Gunderson, an associate professor at the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University, and her collaborators explored this theory in a research study published in “Developmental Psychology.” Their study on students of various ages gave evidence that “even [first and second graders] believed that success in an adult job requires more fixed ability in math than reading and writing.” 

Their article brought to light that students begin to believe in the relationship between math-based “smarts” and success much earlier than high school, and their research provided evidence that this assumption tends to carry on into higher education. 

Armstrong relates this societal problem that he has observed back to the classroom, stating that every person has all eight of these intelligences and that people’s capacity has a lot to do with the environment around them.

“Someone has the potential to be a Mozart, but if they’ve never had exposure to music, and if they’ve suppressed their attraction to music, they’re not going to become a great musician,” Armstrong said.

The idea of being “dumb” or “smart” stems from what we see and hear as children. We see that some people get high scores in school and some do not. From this, Armstrong concludes that we start making judgements about who is smart and measure ourselves based on how we perceive others who are considered as “smart.”

In order to see if this was applicable to CGS students, CatlinSpeak sent out a survey, crafted with help from math teacher Kenny Nguyen, to the Upper School student body on Nov. 14. Data was collected for six days. The survey was anonymous and voluntary, containing questions aimed at determining whether there was a correlation between performance in science and math classes and self-confidence in these learning environments. In total, 47 students responded.

When asked about a time in which the student felt bad in science or math and how it made them feel, one female student described how she felt “when one of my peers who I thought [was] at about the same [intelligence] level as me got a better score on a test.”

“I’m not even a try hard in class or an overachiever (I like to casually do well without being loud about it), I didn’t say anything except praise, but I suddenly felt like I was not doing well enough and needed to put in more work,” she continued.

The most common adjectives used to describe moments of struggle were “stupid,” “dumb,” and “sad.” Contrarily, the most common description of when students have felt confident in math or science were “smart,” “intelligent,” and “proud.” Students seemed to use moments of success and moments of failure in these classes to quantify their own “smartness,” whether that be in the moment or longer term. 

Gunderson’s article gives a possible explanation for this quantification. “When asked about students in their own grade, only high school and college students reported that math involves more fixed ability than reading and writing,” she claimed.

Armstrong offers an alternative explanation. “You’re smarter than you think because kids internalize the values that our culture has and if our culture has the value that STEM is more important than the humanities, then [students who are better at the humanities] are going to begin thinking they don’t count,” said Armstrong. 

His statement in conjunction with the data gathered from the survey suggests the way that students are comparing themselves enforces the idea that STEM ability is associated with intelligence and academic confidence.

Armstrong identifies that the later stages of education (like high school) could be a place where a solution could be enacted. 

He noted that high school tends to focus on STEM, “hitting the books, lots of homework, and the pressure of testing.” He disagrees with this way of evaluating performance, especially since it puts students in a position where they can easily associate high achievement in these subjects with quantifying intelligence. 

“[Instead of this], you should be thinking about developing your abilities and what’s out there in the world that you could tap into and do your best,” he argued. 

“I would reconfigure the whole high school structure so we could have these tools to think about ourselves in a more balanced way and in a way that’s more backed up by research that suggests that there are [multiple intelligences] and these mindsets do make a difference in how you [approach the real world].”

Armstrong hopes that reconfiguring curricular structure will treat each subject equally and, therefore, high school students will be able to get a better sense of themselves and what they may want to pursue later on. Without this, he feels that some students may have a lowered self-esteem since they may be thinking that “not being good at the right things” is a setback.

Coming into CGS, I sought to be labeled among my peers as “smart,” which led me to gradually give up exploring the arts completely in favor of picking up more STEM-based classes. Though I have started making art again and am currently taking Honors Portfolio, my work in those classes is still not received in the same way that high marks in math or science are.

Even though CGS already incorporates a liberal arts education model with its graduation requirements and offers a wide variety of classes in each discipline, I still struggle with feeling inadequate due to a lack of self-perceived confidence in STEM, the pressure of the “smart kid STEM class” label, and having a greater affinity towards “soft subjects” such as humanities and arts classes. 

Although students say, “Wow, you’re in the smart people math class” with nothing but the best of intentions, comments like these are a potentially hurtful and one-dimensional way of describing the final outcome of what was likely a history of practice and hard work.