Should a person with a low IQ even bother going to college?

In my opinion, no. You should certainly take care to understand which passages that come to you easily could pose difficulties to other people; but having some special insight into the subject is certainly no handicap.

There have been plenty of cases of people with low IQ's performing tasks that most average people cannot.

It is if you don't know how to convey that special insight to other people.

Teaching is not about how good you did in a school subject. It is about making other people, yes, even the ones so stupid you want to hit them with a brick and end their misery, good at that thing.

Stuff like History and whatnot are probably okay to teach, since it's mostly just memorizing facts. It's not a skill that you have to learn how to do, like math or drawing is.

edited 30th Aug '12 4:31:01 PM by DrunkGirlfriend

According to at least one professor, there are at least eight kinds of intelligence. IQ only measures a few of them.

@ the topic of genii teachers: Actually, I'll still say that it is a generalization. A good teacher, regardless of talent in the subject, should always be patient and find out what part the students are not getting and figure out why they are not getting it. A good teacher will always find out that they have skipped step B when they did A -> C and figure out how to explain the "B" that they subconsciously do. A sign of bad teacher: calling anything trivial and "no need to explain". It is part of the job. This is what they should be trained to do.

Any teacher would have some talent in their subject, or otherwise they would not be good enough to teach it. And that means there will always be students who are less talented/dumber than they are.

edited 30th Aug '12 5:16:38 PM by IraTheSquire

Half a tangent here: I've had a couple of computer people that I respect recommend codeacademy.com for learning programming. It's not a textbook, but a step by step set of exercises. My eldest is working his way through it now, and I don't really understand it so he's on his own.

On IQ tests, they also don't seem to me to take into account disabilities such as dyslexia that can interfere with the ability to accurately answer the questions while not actually affecting intelligence.

The teachers who I enjoyed the most were those who passionately loved their subjects; and usually it was because they showed why it moved them and they knew all the wonderful ways it linked to other areas. Bored teachers made their subjects boring.

edited 1st Sep '12 9:02:51 AM by Lightningnettle

Just necoing this thread to see how the OP is going.

...The person hasn't been here since those posts.

Isn't it really bad that it sucks to be a genius because you think everyone else around you is stupid?

I take it you're a "right proper genius'' then?

Used to, but I stooped myself too low because I thought being too intelligent sucks. Now I realize I simply have ridiculously vague interests that most people don't have.

edited 19th Oct '12 6:27:27 PM by judasmartel

I think we have a term for that.

If you think you're a genius, you probably aren't. Dunning-Kruger effect and all that.

On the other hand, I do not think that I am a genius. Clearly, this implies that I am, and that I have a twelve-digits IQ

OK, kidding aside: to focus on "genius" as a nebulous intrinsic quality is a ridiculous waste of time. Essentially, "genius" is a title bestowed to people who have obtained exceptional achievements in some intellectual discipline, not to people who believe (or got others to believe) that they could obtain such achievements and have done nothing much so far.

What you think of yourself does not matter. What you think of others does not matter. What others think of you does not matter. How you fared in a pointless test does not matter.

What matters is what you do. Learn things. Create works of art. Increase our knowledge of your chosen field of research. And stop worrying about what you are or are not.

Very well, thank you.

Here's a little something courtesy of Wikipedia that should be looked at.

Now you know the difference between "moron", "imbecile", and "idiot"!

I'm more concerned about the use of terms such as "superior" or "very superior" to describe classes of human beings.

Ultimately, intelligence (insofar as it even is a well-defined concept) is just yet another ability. A very handy one, granted; but being exceptionally intelligent does not make one better than others, no more than being exceptionally strong or resilient would.

edited 20th Oct '12 8:39:29 AM by Carciofus

Those aren't really accepted medical terms anymore.

I find the whole idea of IQ rather silly myself, it reminiscent of role playing game stats. You might as well be saying how you have a +2 to strength.

Technically, IQ isn't measured for the sake of ranking you against other people, and actually comparing them for anything other than reference is useless. It's purpose varies, but for the most part it's seeing where a person's strength lies and where they need help. For example, it's possible to have a great memory, but need more time to think through things (You can hear a list of words and then repeat them, but going through paragraphs of random numbers 0-9 and underlining every three is harder for you than for most people). It's like a diagnostics test, I suppose—seeing what needs to be improved or compensated for; finding what can be safely relied upon.

I have to disagree with this. History isn't about memorizing facts, and if that's all you do you're probably pretty bad at history. History is about looking at a bunch of seemingly unrelated facts and telling a story that connects all of them. I guess it helps that textbooks and whatnot tend to have the stories already storyboarded for you, but the role of the teacher would be to tell that story in a compelling way so the students get it.

Yeah, no. Even my History courses at University were just memorizing facts. Stringing them together is anthropology. There's some overlap, but they're two different courses.

I'll say that analyzing and interpretating the facts is more important. Unless you want to remember things like India used giant ants to mine gold in ancient times. Or King Cambyses II was a rotten ruler.

If you're taking a history course to be done with it, then you can get done with it by memorization.

Really working with history is more about analyzing and relating.