It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.
That expression is one of those apparently understood universally. But just in case, it simply means the subject matter is within the grasp of us mortals.
Notice that the expression is phrased in the negative. You don’t hear people say, “It IS rocket science,” or “It TAKES a rocket scientist. . . “
To many of us, the notion of “smart” involves a glasses-wearing, nerdish person in a white coat spouting off a formula known by heart: E=MC2 or “the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle . . .” or “Newton’s third law of motion . . .”
Movies perpetuate the stereotype. In one movie, a female rocket scientist was responsible for providing instructions for defusing a bomb about to wipe out a city. She allowed a man to implement the instructions, but the real knowledge came from her.
She spoke something like, “You must cut the basal metabolistic auditory conscription wire lengthwise.” Done. Then the fumbling male, realizing he has 30 seconds to save the city, asked the genius scientist, “Is it okay to touch the yellow wire?”
Rather than providing a quick yes or no, the scientist responded, “That’s the quantum defibrillator oscillation command segway. You must not touch that.” In the time it took for the scientist to identify the no-no procedure, the mechanic could have gone to Carnegie Library and gotten the information himself.
It’s great that she took the time to tell us, from memory, the name of the part. With less than a second remaining, the scientist talked the man though it, and because she was able to identify the cerebral contusion fibromyalgia circuit, western civilization survived.
That lesson, then, is that intelligent people not only know things, but know them by heart.
Intelligence implies the ability to retain a lot of information without resorting to outside aids. Those who can memorize poetry and scripture appear to have the advantage. In fact, in most cases, the notion of assessing intelligence is based on holding things in memory. “For this examination, you may use no notes, no dictionaries, no calculators.”
A long-time big name in intelligence assessment is Stanford-Binet, whose index attempts to assign an intelligence quotient or I.Q. Because people being tested must rely solely on memory, those with the better memories invariably do better.
So what is intelligence? Who are the smart people? At Immaculate Conception School in the late ’40s, the answer was simple: whichever girl was fastest to respond to Sister Mary Edith’s questions.
I went for years convinced that a student in my room (actually a grade ahead; we often had combined classrooms), Mary Quintana, was smarter than all the rest because she unflinchingly answered “transubstantiation,” all six syllables, correctly, when asked a specific eucharistic question. She was the envy of her peers, and that fame lasted through at least three recesses. My admiration lasted through eighth grade.
My dad and his brother never hesitated to proclaim that girls are smarter. The fact that I had three older sisters willing to put it to a vote may have put pressure on Dad and Uncle Juan. One of my sisters had the habit of “proving” her point by coming up with a declarative interrogative like this: “Wichita is the capital of Kansas, isn’t it?” Dad and Uncle often heard no more than “isn’t it?” and usually agreed.
Both of them would tell about how much faster girls answered questions when THEY were in elementary school. As much of the instruction was “catechism,” having a ready response to the teacher’s questions was a plus. “Catechism” is a grammar school subject concerning religion, but the secular term also means question-and-answer instruction.
It didn’t matter that some of us had a general drift of the subject but needed a few seconds to find the answer in the book. No, that wouldn’t cut it: extra credit went only to those who had the right answer in their head.
In a recent issue of Parade Magazine, Marilyn vos Savant fielded a question about a teacher thought to be brilliant even though his thoughts were “scattered and confusing and his students performed poorly.”
Marilyn, listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the highest I.Q., responded that some people “are more easily misled into believing that mysterious people are highly intelligent: when listeners hear material they don’t grasp, they assume the fault is with them, not the speaker. So if the listeners consider themselves fairly intelligent, why, that speaker must be brilliant!”
Marilyn is brilliant for having answered the question I’d had for years. When I taught at Cuba High School, a student unwittingly paid me a compliment. She said I was the best English teacher she’d ever had. She could have stopped there, but as girls are quick to speak up, she added, “I hardly ever understand what you’re saying.”
That’s exactly the point Marilyn made, 30 years after my teaching days in Cuba. Having been “complimented” because I was abstruse, I learned a painful lesson: simplify.
A person’s intelligence is not a matter of being able confound others. Nor is a teacher’s worth determined by how far the lectures are above students’ heads.
All of us have come across great teachers and smart ones too. The two aren’t necessarily one in the same, nor are they mutually exclusive.
As for me, I admire those who have a fount of information in their heads, but I especially identify with those, like me, who know where to find the answers promptly–no matter how long it takes.