“Every battle is a gamble, Snow. The man who does nothing also takes a risk.”
― A Dance with Dragons
― A Dance with Dragons
“What makes the SAT bad is that it has nothing to do with what kids learn in high school. As a result, it creates a sort of shadow curriculum that furthers the goals of neither educators nor students.… The SAT has been sold as snake oil; it measured intelligence, verified high school GPA, and predicted college grades. In fact, it’s never done the first two at all, nor a particularly good job at the third.” Yet students who don’t test well or who aren’t particularly strong at the kind of reasoning the SAT assesses can find themselves making compromises on their collegiate futures—all because we’ve come to accept that intelligence comes with a number. This notion is pervasive, and it extends well beyond academia. Remember the bell‐shaped curve we discussed earlier? It presents itself every time I ask people how intelligent they think they are because we’ve come to define intelligence far too narrowly. We think we know the answer to the question, “How intelligent are you?” The real answer, though, is that the question itself is the wrong one to ask.”
― The Element - How finding your passion changes everything
― The Element - How finding your passion changes everything
“THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.”
― Welcome to the Monkey House
― Welcome to the Monkey House
“Ironically, Alfred Binet, one of the creators of the IQ test, intended the test to serve precisely the opposite function. In fact, he originally designed it (on commission from the French government) exclusively to identify children with special needs so they could get appropriate forms of schooling. He never intended it to identify degrees of intelligence or “mental worth.” In fact, Binet noted that the scale he created “does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.” Nor did he ever intend it to suggest that a person could not become more intelligent over time. “Some recent thinkers,” he said, “[have affirmed] that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing.”
― The Element - How finding your passion changes everything
― The Element - How finding your passion changes everything
“The people who came to her booth were seeking meaning and control – but they were looking in the wrong place. When they gave themselves over to superstition, they were giving up on shaping their own destiny.”
― The Death of Mrs. Westaway
― The Death of Mrs. Westaway
Goodreads Librarians Group
— 306571 members
— last activity 11 minutes ago
Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more
Danielle’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Danielle’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Danielle
Lists liked by Danielle






























