You evidently have not known as many math PhDs as I have.
Actually, that is almost certainly true, since I work in academia, and my wife is a CS professors and leads a research institute, which has a lot of mathematic PhDs. We also know socially a good number of math PhDs.
Almost no Math or CS PhD that I have known can write worth a damn. They cannot do decent textual analysis, they cannot do literary analysis. Their verbal skills are far inferior to those of any humanities professor, and their ability to express themselves is also much poorer.
I also have a large number of friends and colleagues who are professors in the humanities.
BTW, since we are on the topic of “Humanities”, and how they supposedly are bad at math, let me tell you about the field of philosophy.
If a person understands philosophy, they understand math.
Unfortunately, many people seem to be under the illusion that math is the same thing as arithmetic.
My wife, with a PhD in CS from one of the top 5 graduate programs in the country, with over 200 publications in CS, who leads an institute (a large, well funded, and well known one) needs me to check her arithmetic.
So you are pretty wrong in your blanket claim above.
As for your claim that intelligence “broken down into three categories: verbal, spatial, and mathematical.”
Tell me, then, where does the ability to create music fit there?
Where does the ability to play music fit there?
Where does the ability to interact with people, including manipulating people, fit there?
As for “mathematical” - what type? There are multiple fields and many people who are amazing with one, are only mediocre with others.
Where does geometry fit, or trigonometry? Spatial or mathematical?
There are also multiple types of spatial skills, an just because a person is good at one, does not mean that they are good at another.
Of course, none of these so-called “intelligence tests” ever test the most important part - originality. There is no difference in score between a person who is really good at memorizing mathematical facts and procedures, and somebody who is able to reason them all out of the fly. These tests would also fail to find a person who has the ability to formulate a new problem and its solution. The “verbal” tests would fail miserable at separating the genius writer and the person who is just good at understanding what they just read. None of those tests can tell us anything at all about the abilities in most of the sciences.
Bottom line, the only thing that these tests which you rely on actually measure is the ability to do well on those tests. I write this as somebody who aced psychometric tests (that’s what they had when and where I did my undergraduate), and whose kid regularly tests in the top 0.1%.
Bottom line, dividing intelligence into three “parts” is ridiculous, and claiming that all human “intelligence” can be measured that way is ridiculous, and all those do is supply jobs for people who create tests for these things, and an ego boost for those people who join MENSA.
Oh, yes, it is also a good gatekeeper to keep all those pesky uppity lower income people from accessing higher level education, which, should, of course, be exclusively for the wealthy, and those chosen few who are so smart that even their terrible situation isn’t enough to mask their intelligence.
Citations and facts, please.
Wow, I cannot even begin to count the ways in which this is messed up. I am glad that your wrote colleagues and neighbors, not “friends”.
They actually do. What they do not want is some wealthy guy coming in and telling them all of the things that they are doing wrong. Look up the term “White Savior Complex”, though it could also be thought of as “Wealthy Savior Complex”.
Again, do you actually know anybody who is not wealthy who attends on of those schools? How many poor people do you know?
So Varsity Blues was done by poor people, eh? Read what these parents wrote, and you can bet that, for each one of those parents, there are 500 more parents who think the same thing, but who will not behave illegally. They believe that their kid is special, and smart, and deserves to be treated like a gifted kid. When the kid graduates that translates to “deserves to attend an elite college”.
I have dealt with these parents as an instructor, and I have enough high school teacher friends who have dealt with them as well. I also have enough friends whose kids attend schools in high income areas, and they report the same thing. It also came up in discussions of gifted services.
So yes, wealthy entitled parents are a huge problem in every school district which has them.
Most wealthy parents are not entitled, but no parent, and I mean no parent, is as entitled as an entitled wealthy parent.
I can promise you that it ain’t poor parents has are asking teachers “do you know who I AM?”
To be more precise, it ain’t poor people who ask “do you know who I AM?”, and expect the teacher to know who they are.
