In my teaching career, whenever I posed the question, "How smart are you?" baldy. Most students reacted in a negative way even though I introduced the discussion fully as a point of discussion not as an actual question for which I required an answer. Frankly, most of them told me unequivocally they hated the question and feared the question partly because it answers itself. Students reported that the question made them feel defensive and judged even before they answered. They felt that the question showed the questioner assumed a certain level of dumb rather than assumed smart. Besides, the person asking the question clearly is going to make the judgment about the level of the other's smart, and that level will inevitably fall below the level of the questioner. The questioner holds all the power to decide the answer, makes all the judgments about the answer. For many students, the question immediately converted into, "How dumb are you?" Even as that question reaffirmed what students feared, it offered them a cause to feel worse. Most took the offer. Every time I asked the question, "How smart are you?" they heard "How dumb are you?" Inevitably, their level of self-doubt increased, and their belief in self-smart decreased.
The "I am dumb" meaning perspective grows under such subtle nurturing. The meaning perspective of essential dumbness haunts many if not almost all students as it does many if not all of us before and after our student time. "How dumb are you" as a meaning perspective puts out its weed runners to all kinds of places within the garden of our hearts and minds. It can choke off the growth of our healthiest and most productive elements of self. It can take the life enhancing part of our selves and make it life denying. How can anyone escape from the deadening effect of such feelings, such a meaning perspective?
That's quite a punch for a single, four-word question. But it's not about the number of words spoken. It's about the feelings those words engender. It's about how words cause us to feel.
If we take the same number of words and the same words themselves and place them in a transformed order, the feelings it produces shifts radically to the good—if challenging. We can ask, "How are you smart?"[5]
In the first version, we feel that question assumes our dumb. In the second version, the question assumes our smart. It just doesn't know how. In that way, students felt that the "smart" question in the second form gave them the power to decide for themselves about their level of smart. It assumed they were smart, and the questioner simply didn't know in what ways, only the students did. The students then felt they had the power to determine their smart level based on all the smart they had shown in their lives thus far. Everyone in every class I taught had a great deal of smart just because they were sitting there. They had survived, and they still wanted more out of life and themselves.
One thing that life can show us, whatever positive and negative things have happened to us, whatever the quality of choices we have made, it takes a good deal of smart to survive, to live, and to continue to aspire in life. As battered by life and circumstance as many of my students were, they came to me with aspirations. Otherwise they would not have walked in the door. In our shared search for their smartness, we knew for a fact that they were smart enough and strong enough to keep trying to learn. That's was just for starters.
Still, for many students and others, discovering the smart within took some doing and discussing.