First Person
Getting a sense of your own intellect is basically an exercise in relativity. Educated in public schools, I knew all too well the oppressive weight of the infamous bell curve. For every kid who already knew how to pronounce Goethe in the seventh grade, there was another who couldn’t diagram a sentence to save his life. I usually languished somewhere in the middle along with everybody else, just smart enough to know when to play dumb. But I wanted smarts like most kids wanted cool. To me, intelligence was just as complex a phenomenon, equally fleeting and immeasurable, and I never knew precisely where I stood.
I had my moments. A particularly stellar analysis of The Red Badge of Courage comes to mind. (The noted Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner calls sensitivity to language linguistic intelligence. I call it Good at English.) I would traipse away from a literature class, smugly satisfied with my superiority, only to be made aware of my inferior place in geometry, where students’ hands shot up fearlessly under the death pallor of fluorescent light, long before I could even locate last night’s half-attempted homework.
I took a class on intelligence theories and learned that IQ tests measure general intelligence, or g. Gardner figured there were actually seven different kinds of problem solving abilities, five more than the two—linguistic or logical-mathematical—that schools typically value. One, for example, called bodily kinesthetic, the ability to coordinate body movements gracefully, explains what athletes like Michael Jordan have in spades, and what I have in deficit.
I understood osmosis, though, and that’s how my apathetic adolescent mind fantasized learning new things. I’d trudge through Heidegger, convinced if I held the book closely enough, it would eventually make sense. Or if I listened to French WWII love songs over and over, surely I could grasp exactly what Edith Piaf was so forlorn about—without ever having to conjugate aimer.
It didn’t happen. Some things just wouldn’t stick. Wanting desperately to learn about something didn’t necessarily translate into that eureka moment. I could memorize note card after note card about the Meiosis Dance, but I couldn’t tell you today why one of my eyes is blue and the other is green. Not that this is the sort of thing people expect you to know. No one has ever asked me why one of my eyes is blue and the other green, and yet I’m convinced that day will come, and I will seem a fool. “She can’t grasp the concept of dimensions in space and time,” they’ll say, head shaking in disappointment, “but at the very least she could learn the nuances of her own genetic structure.”
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My intelligence, I had always deduced, was average. Better than some, clearly inferior to others. Mostly because there were things I simply couldn’t get my mind around—mental brick walls I hit when faced with certain ideas, like Superstring Theory or covalent bonds. In my mind’s eye, my own intelligence was like a partially drawn city map. There were the streets I knew and navigated with ease, but everything beyond those familiar roads was a pit of blackness. One false turn and I’d careen off a cliff into nothingness. Empty space.
Most children are tested for IQ unbeknownst to them in elementary school. It’s the day they haul you into the library and watch you fit oddly shaped pieces into their coordinating slots. You can find out your score from your high school once you’re 18. I knew kids from gifted classes who were told their IQ was off the charts, and some of them were the laziest people I’d ever met. They assumed that because they were smart, they didn’t have to try and life would simply work out for them. Boy, were they great at parties. I didn’t want a reason not to try harder, but I didn’t want an excuse for failing to accomplish more, either.
So I drove back to Cookeville, and my guidance counselor—a perennially cheerful woman I’d greatly offended senior year when I admitted I’d started thinking about maybe going to college, that day—was still there. She happily agreed to look up my records while I debated the merits of Knowing My Number. If my IQ were low, sure, it was gonna hurt, but the upside was that it would finally explain away all the mental brick walls of my life in one fell swoop: wormholes, probability questions, swing dancing. If it were high, I would rush home, dizzy with a sense of newfound freedom, and learn physics.
Scores range widely depending on anything from how much sleep you got the night before to whether you ate a decent breakfast. Average IQ is 100, but that’s 15 points in either direction, meaning an IQ of 100 is really an IQ in the range of 85 to 115. And IQ tends to most closely correlate with that of the mother, just so you know whom to thank or blame for all your successes and failures.
Just as I imagined the joys of bending my mind around particle theory and my subsequent acceptance into Mensa, my guidance counselor returned, a frown interrupting her usually sunny countenance. “I’m sorry, but there was no record of you ever taking an IQ test,” she said. “You missed that day.”