I won't be surprised if you had been told growing up that if you aren't good at arithmetic/maths and english, then you are not smart because many of us growing up were told that except your parents are millenials who have come to understand that those aren't the yardstick for measuring intelligence.
20 years ago, Howard Gardner wrote a book titled Frames of Mind : The Theory of Multiple Intelligences in which he stated that there are various types of intelligences and each play different roles in individuals.
20 years after Gardener’s book came out, there is still a debate whether talents other than math and language are indeed types of intelligence or just skills. What do you think?
Challenging a millenia-old notion that intelligence is a single kind of human capacity does not necessarily win one friends among the intelligent. Gardener’s book is still controversial. If you find it describes exactly what you have suspected to be true since you first went to school, it still isn’t an easy pill to swallow. This book questions what we consider a good education, what we consider talent, and how much control one has to acquire them. The insights are there as long as you are willing to follow Gardener’s scholarly style – he admits he writes for fellow psychologists.
If you prefer a more entertaining but no less profound style, read Ken Robinson’s The Element. Just as upbeat as his famously animated talk at Ted, the book starts with exploring what went wrong or rather what was so right about your childhood self, what school did to it and why, and how now it’s not too late to rediscover your talents and intelligence.
Listed below are the various types of intelligence as proposed by Howard :
Naturalist Intelligence (nature smart)
Musical Intelligence (sound smart)
Logical-mathematical Intelligence (number/reasoning smart)
Existential Intelligence (life smart)
Interpersonal Intelligence (people smart)
Bodily-kinesthetic Intelligence (body smart)
Linguistic Intelligence (word smart)
Intra-personal Intelligence (self smart)
Spatial Intelligence (picture smart)