Parents have so many worries:
Will Tyler make friends at his new school?
Will Kaitlyn make the soccer team?
How long before people discover Tyler is very, very dumb?
Poor Tyler. You’ve tried to defend him: “Maybe he’s not book smart, but he’s street smart.”
But time has revealed he’s not street smart either, sending you on a frantic search of the Internet, hoping for any hint of a scientific breakthrough discovering a third category of smart. You enter search terms like ‘video game smart,’ ‘staring smart,’ ‘fork misses mouth smart,’ hoping against hope that this third category of smart may reveal itself through symptoms such as petting the family car, walking into screen doors, sniffing the cat’s butt, and living in the same apartment complex for ten years and still pushing the door plainly marked ‘Pull.’
Searching for new definitions of intelligence can be demanding on single parents without a partner to share the load. A second parent can be in charge of asking doctors if book smart could also mean good at driving a bookmobile. Or meeting with real estate agents who will find homes for sale on streets where Tyler may qualify as street smart.
How is your kid going to survive in this world? Get a job? Trick somebody into marriage? (Sigh)…thank goodness Caitlin is good-looking, right?
Uh-oh, not good-looking either?
My solution is to train your kids to assertively make first impressions of intelligence, followed by a vigilant silence that may prevent discovery for months or even a year, certainly long enough for Katelyn to some day ace a job interview and win five to six months of employment.
Or long enough for Tyler to win ten to fifteen first dates, a minimum threshold recommended by scientists to find the ten percent of women willing to take on dumb guy projects.
But you ask, how can my child be assertively smart? The trick is to create opportunities to sound intelligent. I emphasize create because dumb kids can’t afford to wait for the topic to drift to something they understand. Kaitlin might be waiting a long, long time.
Dedicate a night each week to teach them the methods below. I suggest you make a game of it. “Hey kids, ready to create opportunities to sound smart and neutralize those pesky Intelligence Detectives! (Intelligence Detectives = teachers, schoolmates, your competitive siblings who brag about their kids all the time)
Tip # 1:
Kids and adults frequently defend themselves by saying, “She made me sound like such a bad guy. It’s not like I’m Hitler or something.” We always use Hitler as the benchmark of evil, but couldn’t your son memorize the following dialogue and say,
“My baseball coach always says I’m a poor sport…um…also poor at sports. He makes me sound like such a bad guy, but it’s not like I’m Idi Amin or something.”
The Intelligence Detective shakes his head.
Your child continues, “You know Idi Amin, the Ugandan dictator? Killed 500,000 of the Acholi and Lango ethnic tribes?”
The Intelligence Detective shakes his head.
“Okay…well, it’s not like I’m Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia ?”
The Intelligence Detective shakes his head.
“Um…let me think of somebody you would know…it’s not like I’m…Plankton, Spongebob’s arch-enemy.”
A glimmer of comprehension lights up the Intelligence Detective’s eyes.
Intelligence Detective neutralized! Begin vigilant silence now!
The Intelligence Detective will swear your son is a brainiac, and he’ll tell other people, and it will require a year of eating paste to overcome that impression.
Aren’t there hundreds of opportunities where your kid can easily say this?
Job Interview: “My last boss complained because I kept licking all the printer paper, but it’s not like I’m Idi Amin or something…”
First Date: “My last girlfriend made me out to be such a bad guy because I accidentally broke into her email all the time, and after we broke up I was reading her email, and she made me sound like Idi Amin or something…”
Tip #2:
Teach your kid impressive, but efficient vocabulary words. It does no good for Tyler to learn a word like fusuma because he will only encounter a Japanese sliding door once every five years. You don’t have any Japanese friends. Forget it!
But if your kid learns the word bailiwick, meaning a person’s area of skill, knowledge, authority, or work, he can use it all the time.
“No, I didn’t bring the ball. It wasn’t my bailiwick.”
“My arm is stuck in the soda machine, whose bailwick is it to get me out?”
Tyler’s use of bailiwick will be met with looks of confusion, and he can say, “You know bailwick? A person’s area of skill, knowledge, authority, or work? Hmm…I guess vocabulary isn’t your bailiwick. (Snobbish laughter) Get it? Area of skill? A bit of irony for you, old sport. Do you want me to explain what irony means? (More snobbish laughter)”
I admit, the snobbish laughter is not going to make him well-liked, but neither is stupidity.
Intelligence Detective neutralized! Begin vigilant silence now!
Tips 3, 4, and 5 next week! Practice tips 1 and 2 this week and let me know your results in the Comments section.
If you like this post and/our The Good Greatsby, why not share it with 150 of your closest friends?
The Good Greatsby 
tinkerbelle86
March 15, 2011
ha i need this. in fact i need tips on if you are smart how to make people actually believe it. smart + accident prone makes people think you are missing a few vital brain cells 🙂
marryin'thelibrarian
March 15, 2011
Why not try planning a few “smart accidents.” For example, you could try the old “falling into money” ploy by planting a tenner on the stairs then hiding in the bathroom until you spot a friend to impress by tripping up the stairs into that juicy ten dollar bill. Or you could try stumbling upon a good idea–invite a colleague for lunch and steer the conversation to alternative transportation methods, then trip over a parked bike. The smart part comes in when you point out how you are always accident prone when it comes to cliches.
modestypress
March 15, 2011
Given the current situation of the human race, “smartness” provides even less of an evolutionary advantage to us then size did for dinosaurs.
Harvey Millican
March 15, 2011
Oh my God… You are an awesomely funny guy. Considering you recently commented on my blog (which aims at humor of a sort) i’m taking that as a compliment. I’ll take you up on your “share with 100-150 people” idea if you subscribe to my blog and share with your peeps. Thanks for the laugh!
ajg
March 15, 2011
These are great tips, Goodsby, but what if I have a dumb baby?? Like, SO dumb.
spilledinkguy
March 16, 2011
My personal motto remains:
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”
I’m a bit hazy on who that is attributed to … Lincoln, Twain, Einstein?
Not knowing doesn’t mean I lack street smarts, though. Really. Honest. 🙂
The Good Greatsby
March 16, 2011
If someone gives me a quote and they can’t quite remember who said it first, either Lincoln or Twain or Einstein, I usually interject that it was I who first said it.
Amy
March 16, 2011
First, you need to give your kid a name that’s easy to spell. Like Aimee. I mean, Amy. Damn.
The Good Greatsby
March 16, 2011
How can you expect a kid to develop confidence in her own intelligence if you give her a name she can’t spell? She thinks she can spell it until her first day of school and she meets five girls in her class with the same name, but different spelling.
Hippie Cahier
March 16, 2011
I love words like “bailiwick.” I am probably in that 10 percent of women who would unwittingly take on a dumb guy project if said guy used “bailiwick.”
In fact, I know I’m in that 10 percent. The word was “cache.” Augh. NOW I figure it out.
Very clever and helpful post. 🙂
Ahmnodt Heare
March 16, 2011
When I was growing up there was a kid who was dumb as rocks. She used phrases like, “He hasn’t tapped his intellectual potential, yet.” and say things like “He knows things you don’t know.”
lifeintheboomerlane
March 16, 2011
Completely hysterical. I keep looking at the little kid putting a knife into an outlet. When I was little, this was a normal pastime for us, along with playing with matches. Our parents thought the mark of unusal intelligence was if we didn’t eat our boogers in front of company.
The Good Greatsby
March 16, 2011
If a kid puts a knife into an electric outlet, at least he’s curious about electricity, right? Isn’t that a sign of intelligence?
frigginloon
March 16, 2011
Don’t worry, natural selection sorts them out eventually 🙂
Binky
March 17, 2011
Sometimes natural selection needs help.
fnkybee
March 17, 2011
“misses mouth smart” Oh my goodness, that is funny. I’m in the clear *I think*, at least with my son, he’s 8 and uses words that make me turn my head and say ‘huh, how in the hell do you know that word!’
Binky
March 19, 2011
Perhaps you shouldn’t let him hang out with sailors.
abbycdiddy
March 28, 2011
HAHA- binky, you’re so right about natural selection and about sailors.
theultimateoutcast
March 29, 2011
Ha! Funny and smart site. I just found you. You covered some very clever brands of smart. Here is one actually in use today: “Eistein didn’t talk until he was 4 either, smart”.
savesprinkles1234
March 29, 2011
As a former “Intelligence Detective” of the teachering kind, I give this post a huge thumbs up! I’m still laughing, in a hyena-like fashion, over “sniffing the car’s butt!”