by Deborah Young

Deb recently shared this exercise with our CD group after using it successfully in her 112 class. She designed the activity after she read her students’ first drafts of their unit 3 essay. Deb had the sense that her students hadn’t really absorbed the information they had read. She wanted to slow the research down by giving them an exercise that would help them to engage more with their research. Below is the assignment Deb gave to her class. Copies of the poem “Two Kinds of Intelligence” are available in the WRiting Program Office. Deb claims that their discussion of the poem allowed students to understand that they must draw on more than one “kind of intelligence” when they research.

The poet Rumi was born on September 30, 1207 in Balkh, Afghanistan, which was then part of the Persian Empire. He was a religious scholar who taught, meditated and helped the poor. According to Annamarie Schimmel, a Rumi scholar, He began his transformation into a mystical artist around 1244 when he “turned into a poet, began to listen to music, and sang, whirling around, hour after hour.”

After listening to the poem “Two Kinds of Intelligence,” read it silently to yourself.

What kind of intelligence is the poet describing in the first stanza?

What is the effect of the second stanza as that form of intelligence is further described? What do you think he means by “fields of knowledge”?

Can you begin to think of these “fields of knowledge” as the academic conversation of established texts? How is your essay like “getting more marks on your preserving tablets”? Does the poet mean your mind itself, or literally writing tablets? Can he mean both?

In the third stanza, Rumi introduces a second form of intelligence. How does he differentiate between the two?

Now that you are in the process of absorbing your source material and adding your voice to the ongoing conversation on your topic, how can you access your “spring overflowing its springbox”?

How do you think these two forms of intelligence that Rumi is discussing in his poem merge to create a deeper understanding of how the academic world works? What does he mean when he says this second knowing “is a fountainhead/from within you, moving out.”? Do you feel as though your knowledge of and ideas about your topic are fluid enough to merge comfortably with what has already been written about your topic?