Different Kinds of Smart

If you ever watch a college football game, there are actually two groups of people out there that wouldn't normally be together. No, I don't mean the fans and the players. I mean the band and the players.

The band is made of musicians. Generally, musicians and jocks don't travel in the same circles, except, in this odd case, the two are together.

Football players are "smart" about their physical skills. Some comes from natural athleticism developed over time that allows them to run so fast, jump so high, and coordinate hands and feet. Some come from football smarts that allow them to read the defense, run certain routes, judge tendencies, fake people out.

Musicians, on the other hand, have different skills. Over time, they've learned to move their fingers and blow based on notes written on a sheet of paper. They must learn timing as well, so that the whole band sounds unified, rather than groups of individuals separated ever so slightly by the music they are playing.

You can be book smart, which itself is broken down into book analytical smarts (say, studying history) to a technical smart (more math-y or science-y). These smarts are related to one another, though math smarts, due to its abstraction, seems far away from book smarts, which is about words, and analyzing cause and effect.

College students can be book smart, but lack, say physical awareness. Their brains can even tell them what they should do, and yet the body does not react. It's strange, isn't it? These different kinds of smart.