Dioehemied resoarch, tesohing, and writing have filled tho career of ROGERJ. WILLIAMS,1957 President of the A.C.S. Born of missionary parents in India, his chemical training nns received in this country, climaxed by a Chicago Ph.D. Oregou and Oregon State were home until 1939 when he began to do things in the Texas fashion as Profesmr of Chemistry and Director of the Bioehemioal Institute s t Austin. Organic and biochemistrv classes have been enriched hv the te~thookshe has :mthoroi His earlier research result& in the discovery of pantothenic acid; more recently his pioneering has been in biochemical investigation of alcoholism and in the evaluation of individual metabolic patterns. We know that readers of this page will enjoy Dr. Willimns' comments. The nuances of the succes~fulteacher as well as are enjoyably those of thc author of "Biochemiral Individ~~alit,y" nppnrent.
FORTY WAYS TO BE DUMB In more years of chemistry teaching than I like to admit,, I have repeatedly been surprised how students have exhibited different patterns of mind. "Good" student,^ goof badly when you least expect it, aud what appear to he weak students sometimes ring the hell on some point which you do not expect them to get. Even more surprising, perhaps, is what happens vhen you watch st,udents over a period of years after they finish t,heir formal schooling. Some "classy" students malie less than a mediocre success, while others who had to plug away to keep up with the class, develop into outstanding men in the workaday world. These "mind patterns" mould be even more striking if we were dealing vith a random sample of the populat,ion. As st,udents progress through academic work, there is a large amount of selection. Sometimes I think we are guilty of requiring that our students be like-minded (if they are not, they become academic discards) and t,hen after we have put them through the paces and have selected for uniformity me say "See, how much alike they are!" J. P. Guilford, a psychologist, gave before the Sational Academy of Sciences in the fall of 1955, a paper based upon multiple factor analysis, in which he indicated that there are at least 40 ways in which human minds can excel. There are, he says, a small group of memory factors and four groups of thinking factors, the latter involving abilities relating t,o discovering, evaluating, and generating ideas. If there are 40 ways of being "smart," there are correspondingly 40 mays of being "dumb" and one of t,he facts which makes life interesting is that everyone of us-however smart we may appear to be-is probably dumb in at least a few of these ways. Every problem involving selection of teachers, grading of st,udent,s, selecting employees, promotion of
employees, selecting officials (governmental or otherwise) should take iuto account these mind patterns, concerning which me knom solittle except on a trial and error basis. The most successfui chemistry teacher (especially at the high-school or undergraduate level) is not necessarily the one who knows the most chemistry. A happy selection of an elementary chemistry teacher should take into account the extreme variability in capabilities and mental patterns that exist among realnot hypothetical-people. A student who is good at memorization, aud at substituting into cookbook equations, may he good for nothing, or nearly so, when problems confront him that, cannot be solved in the prescribed manner. A student who is poor a t memorization may be a vhiz at thinking out difficult problems or at generating ne\v ideas. Einstein and Edison, vastly different as they were, had this in common: they were poor at memory ~vorkand showed it in their elementary schooling. A broad aud scientific consideration of the manpower problem must involve a realistic consideration of the facts which me have been discussing; othervise we may be discarding an important percentage of our potential brainpower. If there were some individuals who could he relied upon to he smart in every way and the rest of us could be relied upon to he dumb (or relatively so) in every way, the problems of leadership vrould be entirely diflerent from what they are. The fact is that the smartnesses and the dnmbnesses are intertwined in all of us. I state this to be a fact, and I believe it is, yet we have s3 little definitive information on which to base such a statement. Here I come back again to my favorite theme: it's high time for us to begin working seriously on t,he problem of nnderst,anding ourselves.
