This week’s Summer Challenge books were Death Comes for the Archbishop and Bones to Pick. I will finish A Blush with Death today.
We were playing chess last night. Only two can play at a time, of course, so there was some spectating. I was knitting and hemming and cleaning the kitchen in the interstices.
I never win at chess. When I play with #2 son, we often get down to the stage of his chasing my king around the board until I give up, but I never actually win. This is because, out of all my family, I have the least visual/spatial intelligence.
I expect you are familiar with the idea of multiple intelligences. Howard Gardner, in 1983, proposed that there were eight different forms of intelligence, eight ways that people could be smart, eight ways to approach teaching and learning tasks.
Other people have proposed more divisions, too.
I don’t know that the divisions matter much. As long as we get the idea that there are different ways to approach the world and they all have value, we have probably gotten the most out of the theory.
I had proposed playing Scrabble. I completely dominate in Scrabble. We rarely play it at our house.
Mostly we play more even games. Why play a game in which you know who is going to win ahead of time?
#1 daughter gave us a video trivial pursuit game which I always lose. #1 son pretty much always wins. While I am generally a good person to have on your team for trivia games, this one is all about stuff on TV, and I just don’t know that stuff. When they ask sports questions, I answer “Kobe Bryant,” because he seems to be the answer a lot of the time.
Like little kids in the children’s message at church. If the person doing the message is one of those who asks questions to which there is an expected answer, there will always be some kids who call out “Jesus” because Jesus is so often the right answer.
I’m like that with Kobe Bryant in that game. Occasionally I mix it up by saying “Michael Jordan.”
My husband and #2 daughter are the visual/spatial people in our family. I mean, I am the lowest, but then comes #1 daughter, then the boys, then #2 daughter, and then my husband. This is why he has pool-playing trophies. And let me just give you a friendly warning never to play cards with him for money. He remembers them all. He can also fix cars.
But he dares not play Scrabble with me, let me tell you.
We usually know who will win at our house based on which game it is too. My grandpa also remembers each card that has been played. I can remember trying to keep track as a child, and then making myself stop because it felt like cheating. Perhaps it’s a skill I should have cultivated. Paul won against me in Scrabble once, and immediately retired. He will never play with me again. LOL
No one will play Scrabble with me either!
Granted, no one will play board games with me at all, but that just serves to weaken my point.
I have read a bit about Gardner’s work…
In my courses, I use Holland’s Code Model in order to help students build teams. One of my students asked me why I didn’t use Gardner. I explained that I would in an Education course where people had the same (relatively) background, but with an interdisciplinary group, I prefer the user-friendly Holland. I have the Pop Culture 2 Trivial Pursuit with DVD – we play in teams because it makes it more “fair.” The other day, we were playing and my dad (who is Popular Culture deprived) came up with the winning answer. Go figure.
and the number 2 answer in children’s church Pray! I applaud you, I abhor board games, I would rather clean the house then play I board game.
I can’t get anybody to play Book Lover’s Trivial Pursuit with me. In the original Trivial Pursuit my dad used to answer every question about an English monarch with “George,” figuring there had been so many Georges he had good odds of being right.
RYC: My mother would never have made any remarks that included the phrase “come-hither gleam”!