The Genius In Me

The Genius In Me


Every student is a genius according to Thomas Armstrong in his passage titled "Awakening Genius". A genius is someone who has exceptional intellectual ability and originality. Armstrong explains how there are 12 qualities of a genius, basically meaning there are 12 behaviors to determine a genius. The 12 qualities are curiosity, playfulness, imagination, creativity, wonder, inventiveness, vitality, sensitivity, flexibility, humor, and joy. I've read them each one by one and the one that matches me and the genius in me the most is curiosity and creativity.

In Armstrong's explanation of curiosity he said "The most curious thing is that often educators do not see the student's curiosity when it appears. Instead, they may regard it as "off-task" behavior, irrelevancies, silliness, and even rudeness." This explains why my mom always yelled at me for asking so many questions that she didn't have all the answers for. My curiosity made me want answers and since she was my educator at home my questions about everything were to her. In school I used to ask my teachers the strangest questions like what was it like back when they were children, the question having nothing to do with the lesson plan in class led for the teacher to feel frustrated towards me. Armstrong explained how an educator could use my curiosity to serve the need of the lesson plan and educators need to recognize that these kinds of innocent questions emerge out of students' genius-their often insatiable need to find out everything they can about the world. He means that children are innocent minded and they might not know what they are saying can be off topic but there are ways to make it part of the topic that can even make the student more interested in it.

I think that all teacher's should read Armstrong's ideas and opinions on the way a child's mind works and how it makes them genius' in the own way, because it could show them how they can use the way the children think to teach them better. Basically the point of this essay was to prove to myself that there is a genius in me.


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© Edwin Diaz 2009