Blog #4

Asimov thinks of himself as “highly intelligent” because he scores so well on aptitude tests. He doesn’t consider that fact that he may be good at academic test but if there was a test other then academic, such as hands, he would probably do badly. He makes an example of his auto- repair man. Asimov states that he wouldn’t touch his car if there was a problem with it because he knows he does not know what he is doing but he would bring it directly to his auto-repair man who could fix it without a problem, and this man happens to score rather low on the academic tests. Perhaps the test has to do something with cars I’m sure he would do a whole lot better where as Asimov would not. The auto-repair man also tells a joke to Asimov, that he of course falls for even those the joke is all common sense. He follows the joke by saying “Because you’re so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn’t be very smart” (2). He is basically saying that academically smart people do not have much common sense.

Sedaris on the other hand tells of his experience of going back to school to learn the beautiful language of French. His ideas are similar to Asimov but are expressed in a different way. Sedaris is in for a lot of trouble when he enters the class. The teacher is the main problem; she refuses to let anyone speak anything but French, she makes her feels very obvious and doesn’t care about hurting her student’s feelings. He makes a point of saying that “understanding doesn’t mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Which I agree with completely, it’s one thing to understand a language but, it’s a whole other story to be able to communicate in that language which is what he is trying to express. Sedaris’ teacher tells him “You exhaust me with your foolishness and reward my efforts with nothing but pain…” (295). Sedaris understand this and wants the teacher to talk to him more. There are different ways to teach a language and there are different kinds of intelligence among people, but either way we all communicate to each other every day.