Posted on 02/14/2007 10:56:17 PM PST by TigerLikesRooster
How Not to Talk to Your Kids
The Inverse Power of Praise.
By Po Bronson
(Photo: Phillip Toledano; styling by Marie Blomquist for I Group; prop styling by Anne Koch; hair by Kristan Serafino for L'Oreal Professionnel; makeup by Viktorija Bowers for City Artists; clothing by Petit Bateau [shirt and pants])
What do we make of a boy like Thomas?
Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber). Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa. Thomas hangs out with five friends from the Anderson School. They are “the smart kids.” Thomas’s one of them, and he likes belonging.
Since Thomas could walk, he has heard constantly that he’s smart. Not just from his parents but from any adult who has come in contact with this precocious child. When he applied to Anderson for kindergarten, his intelligence was statistically confirmed. The school is reserved for the top one percent of all applicants, and an IQ test is required. Thomas didn’t just score in the top one percent. He scored in the top one percent of the top one percent.
But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says.
(Excerpt) Read more at nymag.com ...
Boy, my middle son was just like that. He was one of only 25 in a elite EE program at Pitt on scholarship. He had trouble second year dropped it for Math(easy for him. He know owns a company and has been very successful. Go figure. Amen.
Cool! Show of hands -- how many freepers have used emacs? Hmmmm... pretty lonely in here.
My gifted one gives up a hard task in a fit of tears. It is unreal. I have asked the school repeatedly to keep her out of gifted programs because I intuitively felt it could eventually hurt her. I just want ordinary, happy children who work hard and do not feel inclined to be better, smarter, cuter... etc. Just ordinary kids who will love living life, not competing in every arena.
I suspect that CS majors would know emacs, and there are not a small number of CS majors in FR. Am I wrong?
Good grief.
Let me tell you one extreme case. It was not even about GPA. There was this guy in a college who got A+, and had the top score in his class. Later, he showed up at his instructor's office, pretty pissed, and loudly complained. What was he unhappy about? His score of final exam was 80. He insisted that he never got anything below 90 in his life. His instructor told him that the second best in his class was 60 and most of students were bunched up below 50. Besides, the grade was given based on student's relative standing in the class, not the absolute score. Still he was not happy. It took a while for his instructor to convince him that everything is OK, actually spectacular.
Students who went through public school system for most of their life are used to test scores with nice normal distribution, with the upper end close to 100. Top students from such school apparently go through a crisis of confidence if they see that their score is 80. They don't even care what the second best student scored.
Dunno -- guess we'll find out. Curiously, I'm getting ready to retire and just tossed my emacs 'manual' the other day...
You can always download the manual from Internet in case you bother to play with it again.
Me! Me! And I'm proficient in vi as well.
This is a very interesting article. I am going to print it and give it to my son and DIL. My three grandkids are very smart, but I think that especially the oldest one suffers from not liking to fail.
Reminds me of what I read about Richard Nixon. While he was growing up, he was always the smartest kid in his class/school. He earned a scholarship at Duke and suddenly for the first time, he is competing against hundreds of kids like him. In his case, he did not fold but worked harder.
I learned vi on the fly in a Sun Admin course. I hated it at the time. "At the heart of 'evil', lies 'vi'." :-)
At the heart of 'evil', lies 'vi'.
LOL
Find later & read
I have a different take on this. I have a son who might be considered a gifted learner. I observed him in the process of learning something new and while he is doing it all of his senses seem to be hyper-focused on what he is learning. A bomb could go off and his attention would not be diverted.
The kind of concentration I observe him doing must be very exhausting. An analogy would be that if he were a runner, he is a fast sprinter that would have no energy left to run a mile after that. Take the analogy further and assume he only knows how to sprint when learning something new and cannot walk or jog like most of us.
If that is what is happening then it leads to two possibilities. One is that beyond a certain point of learning time the child is too exhausted to apply himself. He would naturally shut down. Most of us could say walk a little farther after a run but the gifted child may only know how to sprint and therefore be too tired to take something on.
The second is the child may understand the amount of energy that his mind will put into something new and because his cost is so draining and therefore higher than what we experience, the child learns to chose to apply it sparingly and only to things that the child wants to.
I often thought my child didn't do some things because of the fear of failure but I am beginning to think that is only a small part of the total equation. The fear of failure may be the reason the child can focus so intently to begin with.
However, another component that enters into it is perfectionism. I have seen my grandson throw a fit because he has misspelled a word on an essay type question and rather than erase and correct, he gets so angry at himself that he wants to quit.
I also note that my son, who was quite gifted, when presented with material which he couldn't master easily, became convinced that he had a learning disability. (Gifted kids are also quite good at making excuses...LOL.)
I do think this is an important study which can help both teachers and parents. It may not be the entire answer, and probably isn't, but it certainly explains a lot of mysterious behavior.
There are many different grades of gifted kids. Some of them have a tendency to focus on pretty narrow range of things. Sometimes it goes to extreme. They can be crazy about Math, but absolutely hate Computer Science.
However, in the field of Math, they can keep their focus and interest for a long span of time, and able to solve really complicated and time-consuming problems.
On the other hand, many so-called gifted kids are not in truly exceptional or unusual category. They are honor student material but not in such an extreme. These kids could show problems described in the article.
Maybe your kid belongs to a subset of these kids. I am not sure that he can be a typical sample of the kids mentioned in the article. He sounds more like a kid with some 'geek syndrome.'
We've been telling our kids ever since kindergarten: everything starts out hard and gets easier with practice. If it doesn't start out hard, you're not challenging yourself enough. That kind of thinking has definitely gotten us over a few frustration humps.
I also believe that mathematical understanding may reach some people later in life. I use myself as an example. When I was in high school, I absolutely struggled to get "B's" in algebra and geometry. I did not take higher math (because I was convinced I couldn't do it.) I was going to major in journalism anyway and so figured I didn't need it.
I went to college, dropped out and got married, then went back to college after a divorce. This was 5 years after I graduated from high school.
I had not intended to take any sciences, but a kindly geology professor encouraged me to sign up for an introductory class as my elected science. I discovered I liked it, was good at it, and went on to take chemistry plus physics,advanced algebra, trigonometry , and organic chemistry, none of which I had had in high school. I got A's or B's in all of them, and the algebra didn't seem at all as hard as it had in high school, even though I was five years out from having had ANY math classes.
I have often wondered if brains mature at different rates for different types of skills.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.