Have you ever been in a situation where you feel completely and utterly inadequate around the people you’re with? Of course, everyone has. It’s human nature to compare yourself to others. Whether it be that you’re not as “in shape” as the other people in the gym, your car isn’t as nice as the person next to you at the stop light, or we don’t feel as intelligent as the graduate students in our labs. We live in a society where we seek the attention and acceptance from others. The thing is though, there is a huge…HUGE… difference between the words “Intelligent” and “Smart”.

To me, the term “intelligent” refers to the amount of knowledge you have at your disposal. For my fellow Jeopardy fans, James Holzhauer is a very intelligent man. He has the ability to retain a copious amount of information and access it with lightning speed. On the other hand, the term “smart” means that you are able to adapt to situations around you and know how to effectively react to them. It’s the age old debate between “Book Smart” (Intelligence) and “Street Smart” (Smarts).

Someone can have all of the book smarts, but no street smarts where they are a genius, but they struggle in most new situations. Or vice versa, someone can have all of the street smarts where they feel comfortable going into most situations, but none of the book smarts to explain how they’re doing what they’re doing. Then we have people who are a good combination of both of them. Someone who has the ability to explain what they’re doing while at the same time, juggling 25 things at a time…and by 25 things, I mean 25 students in a classroom. You guessed it, teachers have to have a good balance of both in order to actively relay information while simultaneously putting out fires in their classroom (metaphorical fires…unless this is chemistry then maybe some literal fires).

Working in this lab, I first started to have that little anxiety monster on my back whispering in my ear as I’m talking with the professors, post-docs, grad students, and even the undergrads.

“You’re not as smart as them.”

“They’re a decade younger than you and look what they’re doing.”

“They’re changing the world, what are you doing with your life?”

All of these thoughts and feelings are what brings us down. We feel like we can’t measure up to people. We feel like why should we bother, these people are doing better things then we ever will. But then, taking a step back (and a couple of panic attacks later), I had to look at this from a different viewpoint.

Intelligence ≠ Smarts

Sure these people are incredibly intelligent, I have to give them credit for this. They are sacrificing their free time to continue to read and better understand their very niche topic. I doubt I will ever meet anyone as smart as some of the people in this lab, but at the same time, what if they were put in my shoes? What if you put one of these grad students in front of 25 inner-city, hormonal high school students who are forced to sit for 90 minutes while you are explaining something brand new to them. As teachers, we know that we have classes that make us want to cry, but we’ve developed the ability to think on our feet to defuse situations before they escalate. We know how to watch body language to see if a students are agitated, upset, in distress, etc.

The first time I ever had a fight in my classroom was also the first time I ever cried in school. There was an activity where the teachers had to host different classes (of students we’ve never taught or met) for a school event. These students that I’ve never seen before come into my classroom and it’s going smoothly. Then a social worker comes into my classroom bringing in a student who I can tell is still visibly upset. Deep down, I knew this wasn’t going to go well. Within 15 seconds of the social worker dropping off the student, she had already grabbed my meter stick from the front of my room and had broken it over another girls back. I was already next to them by the time that happened because I could see what was happening. I saw this student’s eyes and the way she walked and I knew…”this is going to be bad”. I had to jump between them while actively being punched in the face as they tried to fight each other. This was (and still is) one of the most terrifying experiences I ever had as a teacher, but thanks to my quick thinking, I was able to stop it before it escalated further than it could have if I didn’t have the foresight to get up when I did.

I imagine, “what would any of these soft spoken grad students do in this situation?” Would they have known what was going to happen? Would they have been able to react in time? Would they know have known what to do? Who knows? Maybe they grew up in these kinds of conditions and have been working their entire lives to try and make it so their children wouldn’t have to live like they did. But I like to think that they would have gone full “deer in the headlights” in this situation. Just because the people in this lab can understand and conceptualize NANOSCOPIC THINGS, things that are 1,000,000 times smaller than a grain of sand, doesn’t make them the smartest people in a room. Being smart means you know how to see all of the possible scenarios and know what outcomes are likely to happen. Teachers need to have both of the book smarts to not only explain our material, but be able to break it down to explain to students of all levels. We need to be able to differentiate for the students who are the higher achievers and also for the students who need more scaffolding. Teachers also need to have the street smarts to know how their lessons will run and what sort of speed bumps we may have along the way. At what part of my lesson do the students have enough down time that a situation may arise? Do I have enough material in my lesson plan that the students will be engaged so I don’t have any runaway trains?

We all still have that anxiety monster on our backs, whispering in our ear, but we can’t let that dissuade us from trying new things. No one is an expert right off the bat. Everyone has to put in the blood, sweat, and tears to get better in their fields. This is the mindset I’ve been holding on to for the past month. Their area of expertise could be using nanoparticles to help treat contaminated water and my area of expertise is teaching my students while maintaining a healthy level of classroom management. Just because I’m not as intelligent as the people sitting across from me right now in the office, doesn’t mean I’m not as smart as them. It just means that they’ve put their focus on their field, and I did for mine.

 

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk. I’ll be here all month.