are you smart or stupid?

Let's look at these cases. Which student are you?

Case 1:

If I teach you A, B, C, D, and E, then quiz you a day later, and you manage to remember A, B, and C, that doesn't make you stupid. If anything, that makes you pretty normal. Second round: You review A, B, C, D, and E, maybe with my help. I quiz you again, two days later, after you're done reviewing. Now, you remember A, B, C, and D. Better. You're improving. Still not there yet, but you're obviously getting there, and you're trending upward. Third round: After more studying, you're now able to recall A, B, C, D, and E. You've made the effort. A day or two later, I quiz a third time, and you nail all five elements: A, B, C, D, and E. Congratulations. This is hard-earned learning. I ask you, a month later, about what you'd learned. You say A, B, C, D, and E. You've truly internalized the learning.

Case 2:

I teach you A, B, C, D, and E. A day later, I quiz you, and you manage to get A, B, and C. So far, normal. I encourage you to study harder and to try again. Second round: You lazily, cursorily review. I quiz you again, and you again get only A, B, and C. No progress. I'm not ready to give up on you yet; people have bad hair days, and they can stumble. Maybe this was just a bad day; maybe something is gong on in your life. I encourage you to study again. You do the same piss-poor, lazy-ass job of studying, and I quiz you two days after you've studied. You once again get A, B, and C, but not D and E. You whine that you're stuck, that this is difficult, that you hate the subject. You blame everyone but yourself. Circumstances, life is hard, etc. At this point I, as a teacher, am wondering whether you're lazy, stupid, or some combination.

Case 3:

I teach you A, B, C, D, and E. A day or two later, I quiz you, and you successfully regurgitate A, B, C, D, and E. I wait a week, then ask you about that material. You regurgitate A, B, C, and D but forget E. I'd say not bad. Many people who get everything right the first time have crammed; they normally want to be quizzed right away before the knowledge leaks back out of their heads. Someone who retains 80% of the knowledge a week later has internalized the material at least a little bit. I can respect that.

Case 4:

I teach you A, B, C, D, and E. A day or two later, I quiz you, and you successfully regurgitate A, B, C, D, and E. I ask again a week later, and you're still at 100%. I ask you a month later, and you're still at 100%. I'd call that kind of mind close to being a genius. (Of course, I realize that different types of knowledge are easier to retain.)

Case 5:

I teach you A, B, C, D, and E. A day or two later, I quiz you. You give me A and B. Not good, but not the end of the world. I let you study again, then a day or two later, I quiz you. Just C and D this time. We do the study/quiz thing a third time—just D and E. I'm beginning to wonder whether you're genuinely stupid. We try again, and during the review, you hit on all five points, but only because I'm right in front of you. You go home and forget almost everything. Quiz time comes around a day or two later, and this time, you give me just A and E. It's always two things each time—never three, never four, and never five. By this point, I'm convinced you're genuinely stupid. Your brain seems unable to hold more than two pieces of information at a time. Something is always dropping out of your consciousness. How do people like this manage to get through the day in such a fog of unawareness?

Case 6:

I teach you A, B, C, D, and E. A day or two later, I quiz you. You get everything but E. So we work on E. A week later, I quiz you again. And again, you give me A through D, but flub on E. E is a sticking point; you're having a lot of trouble with it. We practice E exclusively, then we practice it in tandem with A through D. I wait a week, then quiz you again. You really ought to know E by now; any normal person would. But you flub E. What am I supposed to think? Are you stupid? Lazy? Are you wired weirdly, such that E is a square peg that can't fit into your mind's round holes? After the quiz, I give you a hint about E. As I'm halfway through the hint, you suddenly remember the rest of the information about E—verbatim. I quiz you again, a week later (no real teacher would re-quiz this many times). You still flub it. It's as though you remembered it for that one moment, then forgot it again, but in fact, the information is lying just beneath the surface of your consciousness, waiting for me to give you a hint—just enough of a clue to evoke it. I begin to wonder if I'm looking at a very specific species of stupidity. You can't seem to remember anything unless you're prompted. Or could it be that you're lazy, deliberately waiting for me to prompt you so that I do your thinking for you? That could mean you're a specific kind of smart—the kind of intellect who's mastering the art of manipulating others, i.e., a particular kind of evil in my book (I realize that benign manipulation may also be possible, but to be honest, I see a large proportion of manipulation as evil—at least at the adult-to-adult level; there can be good reasons to manipulate kids; ask any parent).

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I could go on and on, varying the mental "types" and changing the intervals between quizzes and tests. The above is by no means a complete spectrum, which is really a continuum with infinite variations (e.g., what about the low-ability kid who does much better when encouraged?). I can tell you, too, that there are some teachers who prefer students at the slow, dull, lazy, unaware end of the spectrum while other teachers prefer the hard chargers who are mentally sharp, intrinsically motivated, and always spot-on, soaking up information with their steel-trap minds. I've always preferred the more gifted end of the spectrum, but perhaps ironically, the grammar-related material I'm generating for Substack is more for (or maybe in response to) the duller end, e.g., the godawful meme writers—the people who are too dumb to realize they even need help. When I say "dumb," I'm not saying these people are inarticulate: if anything, they think they're plenty articulate, and they can't see their own need for help (as I'm sure is true with me, too, frankly). In fact, a lot of stupid people are quite eloquent.*

But in saying the above, I have to recognize that, even as I judge, I'm among the judged. There's a Greek parable (found it) about the man who travels with a stick balanced on his shoulder. On the long, forward end is a small sack; on the short, rearward end is a huge, heavy sack. The small sack contains the faults and flaws of others; the huge sack, which the traveler can't see, contains the traveler's own flaws. We are all the traveler in that sense. And no one who remains unaware of this reality truly has a right to judge anyone else. I'm not saying this to virtue-signal how oh-so-humble I am; I merely acknowledge this as a pragmatic reality.

That said, we are also in a removed position from others, allowing us to see what they can't. If this weren't the case, there would be no teachers.

But what do you think? Would you say you were a fairly normal student? Would you argue that assessments of "normal" and "dull" and "genius" really depend on a multitude of factors, e.g., how interesting the subject is to the student, how gifted/capable the student is, how motivated the student is to learn the subject, how inherently difficult/complex/subtle the subject itself is, etc. (that "etc." is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this discussion)?

If I think back to my high-school self, I recall having the world's easiest time learning French. I would always get 99% or 100% on all of my quizzes and tests; I would finish those quizzes and tests two to three times faster than the second person to finish (something that also happened when I took my Georgetown University French placement exam—it was a breeze); I had a great mind for grammar, and as I mentioned elsewhere recently, I learned more about grammar and grammatical terms in French class (and, later, in university Korean class) than I ever learned in any of my English classes.

Partly, this is because the curricular push against grammar in English classes—with its charts and unrealistic examples and seeming irrelevance to real life—was gathering momentum in the 1980s. Language-in-context became far more important—first in English, then eventually in foreign languages—but I still had old-school English teachers who would trot out the terminology to help us identify various structures, elements, and turns of phrase. Terms like anapest and tetrameter and metaphor and tricolon and consonance and dramatic irony were important to learn for how they helped us navigate prose, recognize the devices used by ancient and modern authors, and build our own creative works, armed with the knowledge that such terminology provides.

But as M. Scott Peck famously argued in The Road Less Traveled, the basic human sin, the original sin, is laziness, and most of us, being easily self-satisfied, paddle around in our kiddie pools of shallowness, content with our lives and our routines, growing steadily less and less curious about the world, less motivated to learn, less willing to push ourselves to understand and improve. The mind, like the body, grows stiffer and more inflexible as it bumbles toward death, and whatever potential we had to produce—to actively contribute to the culture around us—curdles into a lazy desire merely to consume the products of others. I'm not saying production is purely good and consumption is purely bad; I'll never create a musical hit, but I see no sin in appreciating music made by others. But a culture's tapestry is enriched when people stretch beyond themselves to create, not merely to consume. This is why, especially for the old, the advice to learn new skills comes up frequently. Those skills could involve cooking or sports or dance or visual arts or music or language or God only knows what. This is also why teachers express so much disappointment when they see potential in a student but also notice he never applies himself. There's laziness there, quietly spreading like a cancer.

So whether you see yourself, on the above rough spectrum of "cases," as someone who might be smart or stupid (about different things), make an effort to self-transcend. Seek self-improvement and refuse to bow before the demon of laziness and spiritual entropy. Make projects and set goals for yourself. Don't give in to the fog of unawareness and inertia. Stay alert; train your brain. Learn. Be curious. That's the way of the living.

A living being is tender and flexible;
a corpse is hard and stiff.
It is the same with everything—
leaves and grasses are tender and delicate,
but when they die they become rigid and dry. 

Those who are hard and inflexible
belong to death’s domain;
but the gentle and flexible
belong to life.
—Tao Te Ching 76

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*God forbid that my Substack subscribers should think I'm calling them all stupid! That's not my point at all. These people subscribed to my Substack for various reasons (from politeness to supportive friendship to curiosity), and maybe some few among them were humble enough to feel they could get some small benefit from my publication(s). Frankly, I don't know who most of my subscribers are, so I'm not passing any sort of personal judgment on them.