That didn’t last forever. I started to care less about school. It was not an intelligent decision, but I let my laziness beat me instead of fighting back. By the end of 11th grade, my grades were so low that only a special project for each class could help me pass. I spent the last weeks of school working harder than ever. I made up credits from classes that I did not do well in before. I was proud of myself. That experience taught me that it’s never too late to step up. You don’t get intelligent by watching others do the job for you. If you don’t get it right the first time, do it again.

Can one who abandons everything he has and ventures into a foreign land with little more than hope in mankind be considered intelligent? Now, say that he did it because he realized that he could provide better for his family that way, and that the nothing he started with in that new country became a house where his family is now living with him. Would you consider him intelligent? What about a second one who was left behind with three children to raise by herself, and did it so well that none of them chose a dark path? Would you say that she is intelligent? Now take a look at one who aspires to become a soccer player. One whose grade point average doesn’t meet the requirement that his high school imposes on students for them to be part of sports teams. Can he, whose GPA is not even high enough to practice a sport, be considered intelligent? Let us fast-forward a couple of months to find out that he realized what he had to do. He then worked relentlessly to raise his GPA and not only became part of the team that he previously couldn’t join, but also became its vice-captain.

Can we now assume that he is intelligent?

People think intelligence is that you know everything and you can do anything. I think that you can be very good at one thing and awful at something else and you can still be smart. My cousin back home in Senegal, when we were little his mother never let him go outside and play. She would always make him do his homework, read a book, and then clean the house. He was one of the top students in the whole school. But he never knew what the real world was. He didn’t have any friends besides me. Other boys always bullied him and he never knew how to react. I got into so much trouble helping him but I always knew it was worth it because he also had my back on school work. He knew what life was from the inside but never from the outside. This means that he was book smart not street smart. Another example: My grandmother never went to school. She doesn’t know how to read or write. But she was the one who took care of my family. She was the one who looked for food on the farm to feed us. She was the one who managed the money and paid the bills.

For my aunt, intelligence is: “To have an intellectual under- standing of things. It can also be to succeed without education.” She was living in the Dominican Republic and studied there. Never went to college, though. Later on in life, my aunt decided to move to the United States because she wanted a better life. Struggling through hard jobs and low wages, she decided to quit and use her talent, which is baking -- making cakes and other desserts and selling them to get money. She succeeded. Almost any Hispanic in Boston was her client. She didn’t attend college, but is she smart? Street smart is when you have common sense. When you look at something from another perspective, as if you have another mind. You can answer questions without consulting a book. My dad was born in the Dominican Republic, in Bani. His family was poor. My dad did farm work. They had a couple of cows and they sold the milk. Sometimes he missed school because he had to wake up early to go to work to get money for the family. My dad was tired of working hard like a mule and getting nothing. He decided to finish school and graduated from college with an engineering degree. My dad came to the United States thinking he was going to live a good life here. He cleaned toilets and offices because they did not accept his college diploma since it was from another country. He got tired and went back to the DR and made his own busi- ness -- an electronics store -- and was making way more money than he expected. He succeeded. Is he smart?

In my opinion, everyone is intelligent. Intelligence doesn’t mean knowing everything; it means knowing something. Not everybody can score an A in their classes, or understand a book, or even know how to cook. However, that doesn’t mean that they cannot play soccer or even write a good story. President Barack Obama is a very smart man. I have never seen someone who can give such an effective speech. Still, I’d like to see him play FIFA 13 against me on Playstation 3. One day, after receiving a high honors diploma, I met an illiterate man, a friend of my parents. “Good job” the man said. “I know that you are very smart. However, I have two questions for you. One is a mathematical problem, and the other one you must think about many times before you answer.” It didn’t take me more than two minutes to figure out the math problem. However, I couldn’t find an answer to the other question, which was: How would a mute man ask a blind and deaf man for a cigarette? Everyone has intelligence. No matter the situation, there is always someone who can figure out the solution. And this person can be a president, a professional, a student, or even an illiterate.