You're smart!

[kbadr]

Interesting article on the danger of praising children for being smart. The basic idea is that it teaches them to never attempt something that may result in failure. I wonder how creative and explorative a kid would turn out if you praised them just as much when they tried and failed at something.

http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

[Jules]

We are very cognizant of that dynamic. I think risk and failure should be praised in a slightly different "keep going, lets look at what we could have done to make it better" kind of way.
Its important to teach process and critical thinking both in how we succeed and how we fail.

[deroosisonfire]

thanks for posting this, it's really interesting.

i have an 8 year old sister, who is always complimented for being pretty. i consciously compliment her intelligence so she'll feel value in more than just her looks. looks like i'm not helping as much as i thought. :-/

[kaci_beeler]

I had several friends in high school that suffered from "smart praise" as children. They were the kind of kids who were seen as extra bright in elementary school and put into Talented and Gifted classes. From there they were continually told and shown how special they were in comparison to everyone and given special classes and privileges.

The high school I went to was highly competitive, they had an International Bacclauriate (IB) Acadamy where high school students take college level courses and even have to pass special examinations, oral presentations, and thesis presentations to graduate with IB honors.

Like heck I was going to do that. But I was in the Fine Arts Academy there anyway and decided to just try my best at everything and if something came too easy to me then I was going to take honors classes for it...which only really happened for art, english, and theatre. I was so average in math and science. Blah.
So, even though I had around a 3.89 by graduation, I wasn't even in the top ten percent. That gives you an idea of the competition.

I had several friends who entered high school thinking the honors program was for them. They shoved themselves into heavy coursework and for the most part made it through the first year. Then came the major burn-out. I can't tell you how many of them flunked out of courses and then just stopped trying.

Soon my friends, who were shocked by their failure (it didn't come easily to them anymore), who had never really had good study habits, failed failed failed. Some of them dropped down to the regular level and still made poor grades.
I would always yell at one of them, "Just do your homework, just sit down and do it!." But they lacked motivation and they didn't care.
They didn't graduate with honors, they wore no medal around their necks come graduation, and they were poor students...some even into college (still dealing with motivation and failure). Of course they were still good people and very artistic, but they were rarely good students.
I think it was because they were told they were smart so much they thought that if they had to try too much, it wasn't them being smart anymore...or they were just tired of trying.

Some of them who were praised as geniuses as children soon became just a little above average, especially for Westwood HS standards.
One friend cried to me, "Kaci, you don't understand! I've been so smart all of my life. People loved me when I was a little girl, I was a genius. Now I'm just average? What happened? I'm supposed to be valedictorian!"
At the time I was in the mind set of "shut the fuck up, stop bragging about yourself", but looking back it was kinda true and maybe even a little sad.
Of course, I am no perfect student, though I do try hard.

I think good study habits and interest can more than make up for "pure genius" any day.

[kbadr]

I think I have a bit of that. It might be the source of my mental/creative block. I somehow developed this idea that brilliant writers/artists/musicians are just born that way and either you have it or you don't. Even though I know that's a load of crap, and you've got to work hard and fail a lot before anything good happens, there's still that little voice in my head. Damn voice. Maybe I can stab at it with a q-tip.

[beardedlamb]

schools need to be more general when dealing with intelligence. this whole idea of a 50s era standardized test to discover who is worthy is bullshit. there are many different types of intelligence and kids should be encouraged to work in things that interest them. the world is becoming less standardized. as things get away from conformity, kids who've studied music their whole lives will find work or a balance between work and practice more accessible. the establishment is just making safe calls cuz they don't want to be the one to stir the pot. they'd rather fight a battle of atrition and point to their IB scholars and summa cums as proof that it works. let the prisons and weak social services take care of the fat that we've cut off our upper 50%.
boo.

just like improv, the most important thing you can give a child is support. if that is never ending, they shall never want and even if they get in sticky spots, they know you're there.

did i mention i have a child in chicago that i left there?

[Jules]

I think our culture likes to idealize the "mad creative visionary" artist that was born that way. Some of it has to do with charisma or hijinks too. We love our creative trainwrecks. Regardless of how you feel about their music, Kurt Cobain will go down in history and Dave Grohl might not. But Dave is still alive, producing music and hopefully enjoying life. I can see why we pay more attention to the Kurt's because they are wild, on fire, dangerous and inspiring, but I'd rather live my life for a long time and produce art/whathaveyou in a more sane way personally. That's just me coming from a family where my dad was a composer and conductor and musician and was sane and loving and productive and also from a family where mom's family had creative people with actual mental illness in it. Me no like mental illness.
There are all kinds of artists and creative people but whether they were born with that spark or worked hard at it I think the some things in common they all have is the ability to be brave and risk failure, dust off and try again, get supportive people to help, and just put the idea out there.
My big failing is to be scared of trying things for fear I'll fuck it up or to hide in the "easy" things I'm pretty good at but not trying to really reveal myself.

[Miggy]

I had that exact situation happen to me that you described, Kaci, except it was from High School into college. I went to a small, supposedly elite, elementary and high school and graduated at or near the top of my class at both. Leaving that cloistered environment for a very large public university (Penn State) where most of my starting classes were in large lecture halls or where the teacher seemed unapproachable compared to my previous standards was a big shock. It wasn't just that I was confronting some of my own mediocrity...but even when I was doing very well in my classes - there was no one there who cared including, seemingly, the teacher. Due to that same cloistered upbringing I was very emotionally and socially immature relative to yourself and probably most people I'm guessing. I needed that feedback of someone telling me I was smart.

I ended up having a rocky semester or two. I then switched majors, made some friends, did a study abroad in France, lived on my own, interned at two different places and in the process, somewhere, I grew up. I recovered my overall GPA (more or less) and got a more grounded sense of self-worth that depended less on the approbation of others and less on grades as a proxy for intelligence.

Flash forward six years to this past November and I was at my high school reunion. Despite everything, I had never stopped regretting not going to an Ivy like many of my classmates. Well...what did I learn from seeing my classmates 10 years hence? I learned it didn't matter. Smart people were smart people regardless of the school they went to. Driven people were driven people regardless of their starting circumstances. I wouldn't steer anyone away from such fine institutions, but what I realized then is that not going there doesn't make you something less than you are. You can be a very smart person without going to college at all. You can be very successful without the well connected parents I was jealous of as a kid. In the end it depends on you as a person and what you do with this life.

That sounds all motivational-talk-like. Apologies.

[beardedlamb]

I learned it didn't matter. Smart people were smart people regardless of the school they went to. Driven people were driven people regardless of their starting circumstances...You can be a very smart person without going to college at all.

yes! this is what i was trying to say, but it came out different.

[nadine]

I think it's a pretty common experience for someone to be a big fish in a small pond.. and then go to college where everyone else were top 1% of their classes, and discover that they weren't really smart after all.

i had a self-esteem issue problem going from my tiny school in a third world country, to the college i went to. it doesn't matter if i'm still getting better grades then most of the other students. it's just that i was used to being the best, to having a few brilliant computer science students (usually russian) that comprehended honors level math and algorithms much faster then i could.

I'm still trying to get over it.

there's always going to be people better then you or worse then you. i'm just going to be content that i'm a unique combination of things (computer scientist, renaissance re-enactor, improvisor, musician, asian, tactless) that makes me special ;-)

[andrea]

i've had similar experiences to those mentioned. i was always (and probably still am) ridiculously good at school. i don't mean to brag. i don't think this means i am any smarter than other people. i'm just very good at learning things quickly and figuring out how to succeed in classrooms. lets just say that well into college, if i didn't get a 100% on a test or assignment, much drama and self-loathing would ensue.

fast forward to my third year of grad school. the first two years in the math phd program are exclusively class work and big long scary exams. so i was in my element. i didn't excel as much as i did in earlier schooling, but i had no real trouble either. however, i was still operating under the idea that i should succeed. then i gave my oral, was admitted to candidacy, and was faced with my dissertation problem. a problem i didn't even understand the wording of.

since i had never learned how to be ok with trying things that didn't work, i really struggled for about a year and a half. those who know me know what i mean. i am still reaping the benefits of frequent panic attacks and general malaise when my research is not going as planned. however, over two years later, i am finally starting to realize that solving hard problems is HARD and that sometimes useful things can be learned from mistakes.

but ultimately i think i have the confidence to keep going bc deep down i believe that being smart (whatever that means) is at the core of who i am...my belief in that surpasses just about anything i know to be true about myself. i wonder if i would have this confidence if it weren't for people telling me from an early age that i was smart.

i'm curious what chris lucas, as a scholar, has to say on this matter.

[Jules]

The scholarly one is helping Owen with homework, but will comment later I am told.

[Christoph]

scholar shmscholar.
that didn't work very well.
I found the NYMag article pretty convicing. I agree a lot with what Andrea said about being a skillful operator in the institution of school - or most any institution, actually - that does rigorous hierarchy and testing. A few days ago I livejournaled:
http://dakwallah.livejournal.com/2873.html?mode=reply
...a bit on the topic of moving from student to professor which has a lot to do with growing past this fear of risk, work, and self-definition. Not that I'm claiming to have *done* that, mind you...

I was definitely an overpraised kid, but it feels lame to seem to 'complain' about it. I think I was pretty bright from an early age, and my mom was praising me like crazy just to keep me afloat in a really crazy time of our lives that happened to be formative years. So, good for her. When we came out the other side I was adept at being the smartest kid in the class and never really stopped. On the other hand I had great role models around me for what hard work can do, too.

I also had the good fortune to go to an undergrad school (Evergreen) that put almost zero premium on grades and traditional measures...so, that has helped a lot in grad school, I think. It forced me to become a more rounded person, more curious, more independent. I don't think elite society is really going to reward me for it (ruined for corporate work, ruined for the Ivy League...).

I think the psychology of scholarship, at the PhD level anyway, is especially screwed up because it taps into both side of this. I wasn't going to get to this level unless I had some kind of persistence and self-correction, obviously. But it's also necessarily very 'other-directed' because I can perform for mentors, GREs, GPAs and all that. So, there's this transition point where you have to apply that persistence and self-correction to yourself exclusively in what feels like a vacuum. And many many people hit a wall right there. There's like a 10:1 acceptance rate in my department's PhD program, and then something like 70% of that group never even finish. That's ugly, and has to be awfully disappointing.

[Christoph]

It's not fair to put all of this on parents. I was watching Mr. Rogers (r.i.p.) with the kids for a few minutes this morning and that show is a long sloppy kiss of self-esteem talk. I loved Mr. Rogers when I was a kid. Loved. He was my Neighbor. Flattery like that works really well for TV in general - but I'll go farther - it's the whole consumer shebang. Why not pump you up with talk about how special you are, how innately gifted...when it turns out not to be true, well, there's always something to buy to fix it. Or just retail therapy.
Okay, I'm done.

[Jules]

Flattery like that works really well for TV in general - but I'll go farther - it's the whole consumer shebang. Why not pump you up with talk about how special you are, how innately gifted...when it turns out not to be true, well, there's always something to buy to fix it. Or just retail therapy.
Okay, I'm done.

I can agree with you there. Most advertisement I've seen recently is based on a "you are special and you deserve this" model. Whether its candy, or makeup, or cars the message is that we are OK, great even and deserve the best.

Its pretty invasive.