According to Dr. Howard Gardner, a well renowned cognitive psychologist, every individual has 8 intelligence’s which he later called multiple intelligence’s. What makes life interesting, he further says, is that, we don’t have the same strength in each intelligence area. Just as we look different from one another and have different kinds of personalities, we also have different kinds of minds.
Most teachers are knowledgeable of these intelligence’s name, linguistic, mathematics, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, musical interpersonal and naturalist intelligence.
They are very much aware of individual differences that’s why they can deal effectively even with 50-60 pupils that they have in a classroom. But sad to say that because of too many responsibilities and activities shouldered by teachers plus the pressures of carpet supervisions and observations and personal problems that they tend to forget their pupils hidden assets. Teachers are even hauled with too many paper works to accomplish that they forget to think of other teaching strategies and techniques that would develop the use of higher order thinking skills and independence among the pupils. The tendency is only one of two areas of intelligence’s are developed and the rest are neglected. Thus, the result is more on negative rather on positive such as boring class hours and poor pupils performance. But positively, we have to salute the teachers for the stand still and devotedly performing their duties and task in spite of problems they encounter.
Teachers have the noblest task among all professionals and we are the most talented ones but these would be more worthy if we take individual differences of our pupils seriously and nurture their individual minds well and eventually make them proud of what they are and what they have. With the time and efforts that we exert everyday in performing our noblest duties we can still make A BIG DIFFERENCE.
By: Julieta D. Vicente | Teacher I | Samal South Elementary School | Samal, Bataan
