Book Learning and Common Sense

My son is extremely gifted in the ability to learn from books. He reads something once and he has memorized it. He reads books about whales and dinosaurs and can rattle of names and facts about 100’s of these creatures that you have probably never heard of before.

In general, he is gifted academically. He does well in all subjects.

However, my son seems curiously deficient in common sense. This became painfully obvious when I observed him yesterday play a game of basketball. As my wife put it, “He just doesn’t get it yet.” If we gave him a book on basketball, he would probably be an expert in the strategy in no time. But in just playing the game, he is not picking it up at all. He lacks the ability to see the world around him and make some sense out of what he sees.

Let me give some examples:
1. No one would ever pass the ball to him because he would never make much effort to be “open”- free of a defender; and he was always in a faraway corner too far from the other player to pass to him.
2. He would never get a rebound even though he is the tallest child there because he wouldn’t get up close to the basket. Also he wouldn’t jump up as the ball fell to get above the other kids who were jumping.
3. He never seemed to figure out that if he simply threw the ball in the air, the chance that the other team would get it was better than 50-50.
4. He didn’t figure out that if he spread out his arms, he would make it harder for other kids to pass the ball.

Surely he will learn over time. He isn’t stupid and he can learn easily. But what I thought was odd is that he would need to be taught all of these things. I would have thought that he could pick some of this up from seeing what other kids were doing and what things were working for the other team.

It occurred to me that there might be two kinds of intelligence going on here. One kind of intelligence helps you learn in a formal setting but another helps you learn in an informal setting. A person who is excellent at extracting information from books could be a great academic but a person who is gifted with the ability to simply observe and make reasonable inferences might be better at running a business. I also would guess that a pure book-learning academic would probably never win any major prizes since that spark of genius seems to start with a great intuitive hunch.

I hope that over time my son begins developing the kind of common sense that will aid him in situations in which his book learning doesn’t help. I think common sense is something you can probably learn over time. But maybe one has to have a bit of natural ability in this area to be truly gifted.

Well, in any case, I will love my son just as much.