EGL 102 is the first class that ever asked me to reflect on my learning style. I am familiar with the concept of “everybody learning differently,” but I have never contemplated this concept to myself. When I first saw this assignment, I immediately thought that I was a visual learner. I watched a lot of shows and movies on my laptop. I learn a lot from the caricature characters like Tina Belcher from Bob’s Burger, as well as Steven Avery from docuseries Making a Murderer. For a while, I also thought that I am good at logic and math. After all, I used to win math competitions when I was younger. Yet, there were times where I felt stupid beyond help.

I took the test from D2L, and it showed that my intelligence is self, social, and language. People with intrapersonal intelligence (self), as the D2L cites, learn better through their feelings, dreams, and relationship with others. To me, it makes sense. This revelation of me being stronger with intrapersonal intelligence – at least according to the quiz – brings me back to my middle school age.

I remember how heartbroken I was when I get rejected by the most favorite public middle school in Makassar, Indonesia. In Indonesia, we called the middle school “Sekolah Menengah Pertama” (SMP), which translates as “First Middle School.” SMP contains students from seventh to ninth grade. It was my first experience to get rejected from a school. I found it hard to believe. So did my parents. I was a superstar, straight-A student. I was the one who always be the class leader. My school sent me to multiple competitions, both math and craft competitions. Often, teachers asked me to give math exercises for my classmates on the blackboard while they were gone in a meeting or a smoking break. Additionally, my math score for the national exam was perfect 10. Thus, I was so ashamed that I did not make it to the city’s favorite school.

To cheer me up, my parents enrolled me in a prestigious private middle school, SMP Nusantara. On my first day of school, the term already started. I was a new kid. There were three things that I noticed right away the first time I walked into my new classroom. First, was how radiant and clean it was. I am used to a broken-white paint on the wall, yellowish tiles floor, along with dirty brown desks. This classroom, however, painted true-white, squeaky white tiles floor, and fresh-looking light gray desks. The ambiance of the room was so bright that I need to squinch. It was so new that I could smell the paint. Second, the room, which was probably only half of the size of my previous one, had two air conditioning. We did not have air conditioning in public school. Last, I noticed the class had fewer students. I am used to more than sixty students crammed into a classroom, but this one only had thirty.

SMP Nusantara had a system of segregating their students based on their exam scores. The ‘smartest’ kids got into the A-class, the ‘average’ got into the B-class, and the rest got into the C-class. I managed to get into the A-class. However, among the students of the A-class, I always sat among the students with the lowest rankings. In this school, teachers openly showed everybody’s exam scores for every subject on a sheet of paper for every parent-teacher meeting. The sole purpose was, of course, to make it easier to compare between students.

Those were the times when I felt like I was stupid beyond help. I was disappearing. I believe that was because confidence, self-esteem, is vital for someone with intrapersonal intelligence. I realized now that I was a ‘superstar student’ at my elementary school because I had better self-esteem. When I enrolled in SMP Nusantara, my father was just recently opted to be retired early from his job. Every morning, lines of shiny cars of students with their drivers jamming the traffic in front of my tiny school while I was one of the few students who took public transportations. While I was walking, I was ashamed and tried not to be seen by my friends. Then, I saw myself as inferior compared to my friends.

In contrast, my classmates’ parents were at the peak of their careers. It was no surprise if the students from A-class were coming from the more affluent families compare to the students from the B and C class. Unlike me, they got money to spend on extra lessons such as math, English, Mandarin, swimming, even local language. I was once like them too, when I was in elementary school. When a foreign company still employed my father, I attended ballet class, karate class, and modeling class. These extracurricular activities built my determination and eventually pushed me to be the number one in school.

Accordingly, the thing that helped me be me again in middle school was also an extracurricular activity. I was lucky enough that my path led me to a radio station. I worked as an announcer for four years while picking myself up and rebuilt my fragile youth-confidence.

In the studio, I found my purpose. Before, my goal was to be number one at school. As my confidence ruined and my grade declined, I found a new goal: to find my voice.

Seana Moran, in her article “Purpose: Giftedness in Intrapersonal Intelligence,” explains that ‘purpose’ can be an indicator of one’s intrapersonal intelligence. Furthermore, she explains that strong intrapersonal intelligence is essential for those who aim to “make a moral contribution to the world.” This theory applied to me. My experience in middle school where I felt inferior and different, not to mention getting bullied by seniors, shaped me to resent inequality and injustice to the core. I understood how hurtful it was to feel different, to feel rejected and humiliated. Thus, I continued to work as an announcer, and later in my adult life, I built my carrier as a journalist to productively channel my frustration.

Walking down the memory lane, I also realized that SMP Nusantara’s practice of segregating their students based on their “intelligence” resonates with Robert Atwan’s introduction piece from Convergences. Atwan argues that the author always needs to consider the audience when producing messages. I think SMP Nusantara believes that by dividing the students (audience) based on their level of intelligence, they would receive the courses (message) more effectively. It was also apparent that by dividing students based on their intelligence SMP Nusantara intentionally or unintentionally also classified students based on their socioeconomic status. For me, as I was an anomaly in the A-class, this classification was not a successful way of communication. I was behind from other students because I hesitated to ask and interrupt the class.

Yet, my teachers did not immediately receive the signal I was giving in the class. My declining grades and increasing absences spoke loudly. However, they failed to hear them. As Murray Schafer said, my teachers’ ears were probably not open. They rather translated my struggle for catching up with my classmates as an act of ‘laziness’. My teachers failed to realize that as someone with intrapersonal intelligence, I had lost my purpose when I failed to be number one in the class. Moran states that ‘purpose’ is an internal self-motivating beacon, something that has vanished during the first few years of my middle school era. As I am now aware of this type of intelligence, I always have to remind myself to see a clear purpose in everything, including in academic writing.

Works Cited Entries

Atwan, Robert. Convergences: Message, method, medium. Macmillan, 2005.

Moran, Seana. “Purpose: Giftedness in Intrapersonal Intelligence.” High Ability Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, Dec. 2009, pp. 143–159. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/13598130903358501.

Schafer, R. Murray. “Open ears.” The auditory culture reader (2003): 25-39.