What is Intelligence?

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Frequently, working class or blue-collar jobs like many of those described in Hidden America are dismissed as being mindless. Yet in his essay “The Intelligence of the Waitress in Motion,” Mike Rose praises “the thinking involved in physical work.” Similarly, the people in Hidden America demonstrate how jobs like trash disposal and cattle ranching demand varied and specific kinds of problem-solving and innovation. In the play After. several of the characters display great skill and insight in their various jobs or avocations.

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            Explore the intelligence(s) necessary for work often dismissed as being blue-collar or “neck down.”

Medium suggestions: short story or film, essay, portrait, journalism, documentary, script, theater

 

            Define different kinds of intelligence, as Howard Gardner does in his “Theory of Multiple Intelligences,” (you do not have to use his intelligence categories!) This could take the form of creative representation or analytical categorization and description.

Medium suggestions: any visual arts, dance, music, theater, creative prose or poem, essay

 

            We sometimes approach the notion of intelligence from an exclusionary, binary perspective. Some of the groups in Hidden America could experience this: cheerleaders too pretty to be smart, migrant workers whose lack of English surely betrays unintelligence, cowboys and coalminers who must be “hicks.”  Further, Shaka Senghor challenges bias about what ex-convicts have to offer intellectual discourse in Writing My Wrongs. 

Examine the assumptions we make about what traits are incompatible with intelligence, considering the reasons and repercussions of such views.

Medium suggestions: short memoir, film, dance, visual art, theater

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           How might the characters in After.—Monty the ex-convict, Susie the CVS clerk, Warren the frustrated video game designer—encounter assumptions about their intellectual capabilities? In what ways do they demonstrate great intelligence?

Medium suggestions: monologue from a character’s perspective or “cut” scene, essay, film, multimedia presentation

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