This blog was started for Mr. Hughes' English III AP course.
It's full of assigned and freely written journals. Enjoy. <3

Under Construction.

Not smart? Then.. what do we call you? [4] What is intelligence? The dictionary explains it to be the capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity. In my opinion, intelligence is wisdom in book smarts, experience, and common sense and how you use them.
A man can study for years, retaining facts of great importance, but his use of his book smarts is no good if he does not use them in the correct way. You wouldn't add, in the situation of cleaning someone's teeth, that Belgium is the size of Maryland. What good would that do? You would tell them something that goes along the lines of teeth. It's the use of a person's knowledge by fact that is intelligence.
With age, a person goes through many walks of life. They have seen the ups and downs of what it can bring us. They know how to handle, or how not to handle, the situation at hand. It is their experience that is considered intelligence because, in my mind, it is applying what you know by first hand.
Would you put your hand on a hot burning stove? Well, not me anyways. It is because I know the stove is hot and will hurt me. It's common sense. Though we retain it by experience, what people tell us, or what we read/see, it can also be just something the human itself knows already. Let's say you dropped your pen. You know the pen is going to fall to the floor, right? Someone didn't have to explain to you that if you did drop your pen, it would indeed hit the floor. Your mind recognized this, using common sense.
Intelligence is wisdom you collect through reading and comprehending, experiencing, and acknowledging human instincts. It is something that we all have, but some of us don't use it all the time, or in the correct way. Everyone is intelligent, it is just how you use it that makes you smart.