The problem with smart people is that they like
to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death
rather than admit they’re wrong. This is bad.
Worse, if they got away with it when they were young
(say, because they were smarter than their parents,
their friends, and their parent’s friends)
they’ve probably built an ego around being right,
and will therefore defend their perfect record of
invented righteousness to the death. Smart people often
fall into the trap of preferring to be right even if
it’s based in delusion, or results in them,
or their loved ones, becoming miserable. (Somewhere in
your town there is a row of graves at the cemetery,
called smartypants lane, filled with people who were
buried at poorly attended funerals, whose headstones say
“Well, at least I was right.”)
I found this post both amusing and intriguing for several reasons. One, it is reflective thinking in action. Two, it ties nicely with a well-linked post from Anne Davis that considers how we, as educators, need to model how we make connections and discover relevancies, i.e., explaining what we have learned in our own words. Anne suggests that this is yet another beauty of weblogs -- how they allow us to truly engage in our own learning.
Keywords: blogs, discovery, persuasion, reflection, reflective thinking, relevance, weblogs
Comments
"Smart people, or at least those whose brains have good first gears, use their speed in thought to overpower others. They’ll jump between assumptions quickly, throwing out jargon, bits of logic, or rules of thumb at a rate of fire fast enough to cause most people to become rattled, and give in."
That smart people can do this is self-evident; that such are the actions of smart people is less evidently so.
It is my observation know that reason is only a part of the motivation for believing something to be true, that persuasion though intimidation or trickery is fleeting, and that most ideas are not as self-evidently bad as opponents may make them out to be. We do not all start from the same first principles, but as first principles are necessary for survival, we hold to them, and what may seem like a bad idea from one
point of view may be a good idea from another.
A smart person begins by respecting another's point of view, even if not in agreement with it, and will tend to advance his or her cause not by argumentation but by example where possible and by explanation where
necessary. Argumentation, as Descartes once observed, is most useful for deducing what you already believe, but is very unlikely to lead to new beliefs.
However, I had two students who recognized the concept of reflection and quickly did something with it. They discovered what they didn't know (through their reflections) and then took action to fill the void in their knowledge. Then when the project-related work began to hover over them, they were positioned with a process that helped them quickly learn what they needed to in order to carry out the tasks of the project.
The majority of students (75%-80%) in the class tried to learn the material the old fashioned-way (they waited for someone to tell them what they needed to know). Unfortunately, they waited for a while and then discovered "I need to know "this" and "that" in order to complete the project (authentic problem-based course). I'm not sure if these students "grasped" the full concept and/or process of reflection. I need a better assessment at the end of the course to figure out the answer to that question.
Unfortunately, there were a couple students (10%-12%) who never did grasp the power of reflecting on what (and how) one knows/can do.
I can clearly see how the proactive students positioned themselves to create new beliefs about the subject (program evaluation), while the complainers positioned themselves to be frustrated because I didn't "teach them more subject matter." My future work will focus on the majority of the students and how I can get them to discover the power of reflection earlier in the term.
To bring this all back to reflection and being smart, I can clearly see how some students are better positioned for learning in the future than others. I would call that being "smart."