The many intelligences of kids

It is always a great pleasure to look at a five years old you meet in a store and try to guess what they will be. Every kid is different: there is the little engineer who gets his fingers in everything and tries to see how it works, and there is the linguist who speaks all the time, and the diplomat who meets your eyes and smiles, the hyperactive and the one in a daze.
So yes, I believe that there are multiple intelligences, a theory presented a generation ago by Howard Gardner. You can read a little bit more on this here.
What does this mean? That we are all born with various regions of the brain that are lit up more than others. It is true for everybody, even the most retarded children. My neigbour had a kid who was profoundly retarded: he could not even be fed by mouth. That kid always laughed when I called his name because I have an accent, and somehow he knew that the way I said his name was not "right"; I can't pronounce r correctly (my native language is French), I always marveled at that kid. There are treasures in the most damaged brain. My mother had large damages of the brain after a stroke. Her memory was affected, she could hardly speak, she had bizarre delusions; but in the middle of it all she baffled me. She could not remember that her father was dead long ago, but she could try to discuss with me that it was a rather obscure Frenchman, Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de La Rivière, who first advocated international travel for students.

Sometimes, these bright regions are so strong that the kids have an early vocation. For instance, the Belgian composer Boesmans was the son of people who worked in agriculture and never had an interest in music; he knew as long as he could remember that he would become a composer. I knew three sons of a shepherd who became physicists. The mathematician Melvin Stern was born poor and sold newspapers in the streets of New York when he was a kid; he got a lot of abuse for covering the margins of the papers with equations...

But most of the time, if we do not, as parents, notice and encourage the bright spots, they disappear in time. A lot of parents are doting on their kids, but still they do not observe them at all. I know a teenager in the neighborhood who is always plunged in a car: mechanics is a passion of his rather than school. Nobody in his family pushes him to explore this further: they act as if they did not know it can lead to a valuable profession. Ah, he likes cars, they tell me dismissively. His parents, like himself, tell me that they do not know what he should do, because he is "not good of school." What kind of attitude is that?
I am not saying that the kid should necessarily work in a garage or go to technical college: I am just saying that it is a shame to see something bright left unexplored, After all, the kid could be happy in a lot of jobs, from car racing to welding to becoming a metal artist to being an inventor.
Look at your kids with new eyes: notice the bright spots. There are always bright spots, it is a law of nature, or rather: a law of statistics: so many things happen in the brain that there is a huge probability that some spots are very bright.