“Engineers,” stated Professor Scheller with a smile on his face, “can kill people in the matter of seconds,” He explained the importance of an engineer’s responsibility to design projects right the first time. As he continued his monotonous lecture, I drifted off into the building he tried to describe.

Plants grew in colorful pots, people in flashy suits walked hastily around me, and phones rang with the utmost urgency. Although Professor Scheller neglected to mention the living details of the building, I saw them clearly. I continued my tour by boarding the elevator and riding up to the roof. I climbed out and strolled to the edge of the building. Looking up, I saw the stars that gracefully acted like a blanket to the engineer’s magnificent structure.

Interrupted, I came back from my daydream and heard the professor talking about our hands-on assignment. Our assignment was to prove that engineers were the most useful and important profession. I believe he had an inflated ego, but I had to agree with him about engineers. As a future engineer, I felt that one of my strongest intelligences is spatial. Spatial intelligence is “the ability to form a mental model of a spatial world and to be able to maneuver and operate using that model” (Gardner 329). By using spatial intelligence, I planned on helping those with highly developed bodily-kinesthetic intelligence by focusing on swimming techniques.

Having swimming and teaching swimming lessons experience, I felt confident in my task of helping swimmers perfect the back crawl. Gaining entrance into my class required the ability to swim because I was not teaching how to swim, but how to swim well. I modified lesson plans to allow for set-backs because “not all of us learn in the same way” (Gardner 330). Most people learned how to swim by demonstration and then practice, which I found to be quite effective. Few taught themselves how to swim.

One of the most crucial techniques in swimming was the start. A false start would disqualify an eager swimmer and a late start would put a swimmer behind. An excellent start would give a swimmer an edge over the others. When I taught starts, I told the swimmers about the dolphin kick, not just to do, but to be it. I know when I swam back crawl, I imagined myself as the dolphin powerfully thrusting my tail, not my feet, through the water. I instructed the swimmers to do the same; one swimmer beat her personal record by three seconds using the dolphin technique. After the start, the swimmer then focused on his or her arms and legs. The flutter kick worked best when the legs were kept perfectly straight. I told the swimmers to pretend that their legs were scissors. Scissors did not bend; scissors cut. Swimmers learned how to make their legs cut through the water as if each individual foot were a blade cutting the depths of the water. Two of the swimmers broke pool records after practicing and using this method. Informing swimmers how to use their arms properly was the hardest technique.

I organized the arm technique into three different parts. The first part was the hand; a hand must be cupped to be useful. To get the swimmers interested and excited about another day of swimming laps, I informed them that they were going to play leap frog. I wanted them to jump and sound like a frog; I wanted them to believe that they were frogs. Being a frog was helpful, because the swimmers pointed out that frogs have webbed feet; webbed feet were more powerful. An open, uncupped hand allowed water to get through fingers, and the hand motion was less powerful. The next part was the windmill; the arm of the swimmer remained straight and kept the same rhythm. The third part was the plow. When I taught to plow through the water, I thought of a tractor plowing through the fields. I imagined myself ripping through the fields, and although a tractor was not fast, it was powerful. The swimmers were to tilt their shoulders up and down to allow themselves to cut through the water. For those who did not want to be a tractor, I suggested being a bull. Towards the end of the class, I requested the students to draw themselves as the swimmer they thought they were. Many drew creative pictures of all the techniques combined; none drew a human. I then timed the swimmers as they imagined themselves swimming. I made the swimmers describe themselves as they swam through the water. Overall, I wanted them to visual swimming without physically swimming. Some swam faster in their head than in the water, but many were within a quarter of a second of their normal swimming time.

Within two weeks, I helped improved many swimmers techniques and four swimmers beat pool records and placed first in their event. All of the swimmers improved their time. As a civil engineer, I will not interact with swimmers. I agreed with Gardner when he wrote, “It is of the utmost importance that we recognize and nurture all of the varied human intelligences, and all of the combinations of intelligences” (Gardner 332). Without my willingness to share my spatial intelligence, the swimmers would not have had the chance to be able to improve their swimming techniques. I smiled when the swimmers ran up to me to share the joy of their improvement, especially when they won first place. Overall, I found another reason why engineers are great; spatial intelligence helped put a smile on a child’s face.