Creativity

One of the topics we debate in this class is whether or not creativity should be considered in admissions decisions. This week in my Professional Writing class we had a guest speaker who graduated from Elizabethtown. She now works as a graphic designer and is involved in hiring new employees at her company. When she was describing to us the hiring process she told us one of their favorite questions to ask employees is "If you could take down any animal with only your bare hands what would it be?" This sounds like a bizarre interview question. She explained that they use this question so often because it gives them a feel for their potential employee's creativity and personality.

This got me thinking about the upcoming topic in our class. Obviously, creativity is an attractive quality in employees not just for art or design but for problem solving as well. If employers are looking at creativity it would make sense that college admissions would consider it as well. Since the point of college is to educate us to get a good job it would make sense to emphasize the same thing as employers. 

However, I do think this would get very complicated. It would be hard to actually implement a certain creativity component to all the things admissions considers. For example, would creativity majors such as art and music take creativity into consideration more than other majors? If a student has mediocre grades but it extremely talented in terms of creativity what does that mean? I think it would be challenging to find a good balance between the things expected from students when applying to colleges. 

Savants

This is not something we have discussed in class but lately I have been considering savants and what they mean to the debate of multiple intelligences. Savant Syndrome is characterized by a person demonstrating abilities that far exceed normality, usually in one of five areas: art, musical abilities, calender calculations, mathematics, and spatial skills. 50% of savants are autistic and the other 50% have some other type of central nervous system injury or disease. Some savants score extremely low on IQ tests and then exhibit these extraordinary abilities in another area.

This, to me, is very strong evidence towards the belief in multiple intelligences. How else could such a phenomenon be explained. Savants exhibit such incredible abilities and struggle in other areas. For example, a calendrical savant, also known as a human calender, is able to calculate the day of the week on a specific date far in the past or future at an extremely quick pace. However, they would struggle in other areas as all savants do. This confirms that intelligence is not one quality. It can not be assigned as a characteristic one simply has or does not have. Intelligence can be present in some areas and completely absent in others.

The Jim Twins

This week in class we watched a video focusing on the Jim Twins, a bizarre occurrence of identical twins who were separated shortly after birth. When reunited, the Jim's found out they had a huge number of similarities, down to the names of the women they married.

These uncanny resemblances provide serious evidence for nature in the debate of nature vs.nurture. The first time I saw this video I was convinced that this proved our personalities were formed far more through genetics than environment. However, watching it this second time I was far more skeptical. So many of the things the Jim's share in common can only be coincidence. For example, while it makes a great story, genetics had no role in the fact that both twins were named Jim. Similarly, nature could never influence the women that both Jim's married who shared the same name. I do believe that some of the Jim's shared traits come from their similar genetics as identical twins. However, I think this is another case that proves further the deepest connection between nature and nurture that can never truly be separated.

The first thing that came to mind when hearing the Jim's story was what their environments would reveal. Although the Jim twins share a great deal of DNA, this does not mean their environments were so different. If further examination showed that the Jim's lives growing up were similar as well, this would somewhat lessen the connection their story suggests between nature and development.

The video states that this is the only case that shares as many extreme similarities between separated identical twins. If a wider selection of twins that experiences this same situation shared so much in common that would help support the idea that nature is the true predictor of development. However, the fact that the Jim's alone have these identical lives further suggests that they are simply a coincidence.