You probably know how Einstein was a horrible student, was forced to wear a dunce cap, failed at math and was repeatedly told by teachers that he was hopeless.
All wrong.
In a new biography, “Einstein: His Life and Universe,” Walter Isaacson explains how good a student Einstein actually was. He was a good student, did not fail math and in fact had mastered differential and integral calculus before he was fifteen.
But he did not like the mechanical regimentation and mechanical learning of the German schools, comparing elementary school teachers to “drill sergeants” and high school teachers to “lieutenants.”
When he moved from Germany to Switzerland at the age of sixteen, Einstein spent a year at a school that emphasized independent thought, free action and personal responsibility. He thrived in a learning environment without rote drills, memorization and force-fed facts.
Based on the philosophy of a Swiss educator named Pestalozzi, the school helped students move through a series of steps from hands-on observations to intuition, conceptualization, imagination and visual imagery.
“Visual understanding is the essential and only true means of teaching how to judge things correctly,” wrote Pestaslozzi, and “the learning of numbers and language must be definitely subordinated.”
Spatial intelligence has been defined as “the ability to think in pictures and to perceive the visual world.” Dr. Branton Shearer, a member of the Sparks of Genius Community, explains it as using the imagination to think in three-dimensions, transform one’s perceptions and re-create aspects of one’s visual experience.
One with high spatial awareness can solve problems of spatial orientation and moving objects through space.
http://miresearch.org/mitheory.php
Remind you of anyone? It was at this school that Einstein, age sixteen, started picturing what it would be like to ride along a beam of light.
To learn more about the 9 intelligences in our 5-4-9 formula, visit http://sparksofgenius.com/sparks.html
-Dr. Rohn Kessler
