Synthesized Ch. 2

Ryan Nickerson
9/13/07
Multiple Intelligences
Chapter 2

Write a brief abstract of the chapter.
This chapter was really broken down into two sections. The first part discussed discovering your own intelligences as a teacher. This will help you understand yourself and how you learned best as a child. Also it will help you realize you need to teach to the other types of intelligences in your classroom. You may have one or two kids in your class that are the same as you were as a kid and you’ll be more apt to teach the way you liked to learn best. This chapter reminds you to teach to all intelligences, and by discovering your own you’ll be able to do that well. The second part of the chapter talked about past experiences in peoples’ lives that may have influenced them to fall into the intelligences they do. These were referred to as crystallizing and paralyzing experiences. Crystallizing experiences are often positive experiences that may have turned a person on to a certain intelligence while paralyzing experiences are often events that may have discouraged that person to dislike certain things about an intelligence. By knowing about your students experiences you may be able to help them realize these factors from their past and may be able to help them get past paralyzing experiences. It may also help you personally to understand why you learn a certain way.

How did you connect to the reading and briefly reflect on your thoughts?
We all thought this chapter was especially helpful to us as teachers. By giving us ways to identify different intelligences in the classroom (including our own) and then also giving us ways to obtain help/insight about our students’ intelligences was beneficial. Also, we all thought it was interesting how at such a young age kids can be “turned off” and “turned on” to certain intelligences. We all agreed that it is also our responsibility to teach to all intelligences and to help kids become interested in new intelligences.