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This is related to the Curse of the Gifted. When I was a kid, I could grasp concepts easily and I understood maths very quickly so I didn't really bother doing

This is related to the Curse of the Gifted. When I was a kid, I could grasp concepts easily and I understood maths very quickly so I didn't really bother doing things like homework or actually studying. I then went to a decent university (a French Grande Ecole) and for the first year, I was still doing okish but I went from being a student who always had good results to doing average. Then, the second year came, and just understanding the concepts without cultivating fluency by practicing wasn't enough anymore and I failed hard. I hadn't learned how to learn and while I understood the concepts and could easily follow when the teacher solved a problem together with us, I had difficulties doing it on my own. I worked doing exercises and was able to pass but time and time again in my professional life, I've had the same issue where I tend to rely too much on my intuitive understanding until it fails. I'm not sure how to help kids not to go down this path. As a kid, I would avoid any rote memorization and would probably not do any non graded exercise since I knew that I understood (and also since as a geek wanting to fit in, I tried to be more accepted by my peers by purposefully not doing my homework). In the end, I think the key is play and giving maybe challenging exercises that forces the kid to use his newly found understanding would be a way to get them used to not just rely on their intuition understanding.

goodells 10y ago
I'm a student in university now, and I can relate to your experience. What helped me a lot as a kid was being motivated to learn things when it didn't seem like "learning". For example, I was able to get the hang of programming by playing a game that incorporated it, and it succeeded because it got me excited about doing cool things. Maybe this kind of "gamification" could be more useful than just adding points and rules to things to make people compete.
camerintinbun 10y ago
I had a similar path as yours. Never had to work all that hard through school, did a degree at a university in the sciences which was somewhat the same (had to try a little harder after the reality settled in from freshman year...), but I had always just assumed that was the next step. This was just something I had to do to move on, so a high mark was the end result. I was thrilled to graduate, took a job out in a semi-related field for about 5-6 years, then slowly began to get this feeling of "being dumbed down". Day by day, doing the same or similar things, not having to learn new stuff; it took a toll. I started listening to podcasts, and learning about all of the advances in science was enough to get me back into school and apply for a graduate degree. Here is where I think this is something that people have to recognize they want for themselves. Starting my grad classes with other students, mostly fresh from undergrad, I could see a change in the value I took from the classes compared to undergrads. I saw my old mentality in them ("Ugh why do we have to learn this, it won't be useful, just have to get this out of the way to checkmark a box..."). Whereas I spent time in a career, and had to force myself to make a major life-altering decision. I wanted what they had to say, whether it was relevant or not, because these ideas could be weaved together in the future. The properties that dictate the science of one is not fully independent from the other. This really became infectious. Everything I see, I try to learn beyond just memorization, but to a solid understanding and application level. "I'm running this test, the process isn't working, where is the most likely error? How can I optmize?" Unfortunately, I don't think you can just teach this. It has to be something that someone actively decides they want to commit to.
Philipp__ 10y ago
This! This happened to me, and good thing that came out of it was that my ego was crushed to pieces. Otherwise I asked myself where did I go wrong, or I lacked motivation to actually sit down, heat the chair and do the heavy lifting. I found it pretty boring and it repelled me in many aspects, so i struggled but eventually made it through. I always like learning on my own, playing and tweaking with stuff, thinking about problems around me, understanding how things were working on their core level. But with simple "chair and book" studying I suffered a lot. Sadly I don't know any solution and can't give any advice to others...
jeremy_b9000 10y ago
I'm a computer science student and have the exact same problem. I was diagnosed with ~150 points in IQ tests when I was in the 8/9th grade (I was forced to do it to get a seat in a special class - I don't think IQ is relevant for anything that constitutes a wonderful life) and I can imagine that this is one of the reasons I never developed serious perseverance (only exception: software eng) - in school and elsewhere, there was no reason to work hard. Now in university, it's completely different - if you don't work hard, you're gonna lose. I've learned the hard way that it's not about raw intelligence - which is really nice, because it means that genetic factors can be minimized - but pure diligence. I've met a couple of people who have average intelligence, but hustle like they're betting their lives (which is not so far-fetched, I admit). And I've found it very interesting that they sometimes don't need a real reason to hustle - they don't even know if computer science is what gets them excited, but they do it nevertheless. Unfortunately I don't have any mechanisms to utilize my potential in academic settings, although I succeed in my narrow software eng scope. I would like to hear your tips and how you succeeded anyways.
- dboreham 10y ago
  fwiw I had the opposite experience : in school I felt I had to work quite hard (harder than I wanted to for sure) to do well, but in university (EE + CS) life seemed to get easier and easier, I think because the work relied more on intuition and "getting" the material than raw effort, and also because I was interested in the field and so found it more pleasurable to study.
drakonka 10y ago
This is exactly what happened to me as a kid, but in my case it wasn't curse of the "gifted" but curse of the pushed. In my younger years growing up in Ukraine my parents and granparents pushed us hard to learn math, and so did my school. Endless repetition, hours of homework, Saturday classes, etc. I didn't have any sort of gift for math, this is just how children were taught there. Moving to the US and going into 5th grade, the first several years were just repetition of things I'd already learned in Ukraine. They were so easy. My grandmother wasn't there anymore and to my parents it looked like I was doing _great_ so they also loosened up and didn't really push me further. When we finally got to substantially new material I started to struggle. I got too used to everything being so easy and built on concepts I'd already had drilled into me. I failed a math test once - even my teacher was surprised. I ended up falling from perfect score As to Cs, then scraping back up to Bs by the end of high school. Now I regret not taking math as seriously as I should have after leaving Ukraine, and am now taking time at home to learn on my own. Thankfully I'm used to self-learning in other areas, so I think it's going pretty OK.
- ciaranm 10y ago
  This reads like the _exact_ opposite problem to what the parent described, to me.
  - drakonka 10y ago
    This part in the original comment resonated with my experience: "When I was a kid, I could grasp concepts easily and I understood maths very quickly so I didn't really bother doing things like homework or actually studying." This was exactly the case for me after moving from Ukraine. Concepts were easy because I'd already known them, or they were just starting to be built on top of stuff I'd already drilled and knew before. So I did not put any effort into homework or studying. When entirely new concepts came along they crept up on me and my bad habits and I failed hard.
- arvinsim 10y ago
  I have the same experience. For context, I live in a third world country. I was lucky in the sense that I was enrolled in a prestigious school from kindergarten to grade 4. The school has a great curriculum that doesn't dumb down math and science while also emphasizing the arts. Arts and Sciences were equally interesting to me. I made no distinction with my enjoyment of solving arithmetic with creating poems or painting. Unfortunately, my family went into hard times and I had to transfer to our public school. In contrast to my previous school, teachers can't personally help each student because there were 50+ students per class. I also found out that the lessons they taught are already covered in my earlier years. I coasted through Grades 5 and 6 using my stock knowledge. When I got to high school, I was used to leaning back on what I learned. This is where I first tasted difficulty in learning the advanced math subjects. Sure, I got good grades in algebra but when it came to calculus, I was stumped. I could not care less about it because "math should be about calculation, not this symbolic mumbo jumbo". My boredom and inability to deal with the challenges resulted in my delinquency. I often cut classes and plagiarism homework. I still can't remember how I manage to graduate from high school. Now I deeply regret that I didn't apply myself back then.I am now a software developer and a lot of interesting stuff are closed to me because I can't understand the math behind them. I resolved to return studying high school algebra last year. Armed with experience and a new perspective, I realized how much I have missed and how useful math is.
morbidhawk 10y ago
> I'm not sure how to help kids not to go down this path Now that I'm no longer in school I've found way more progress in learning things by learning through curiosity. My best guess for a teacher to successfully facilitate a curiosity-based approach would require using the soctratic method and more importantly encouraging students to use that technique and give them opportunities to come up with their own good questions they seek answers to. None of my teachers or professors ever did this and usually just overloaded everyone with an extreme amount of busy work. It would also require a professor to let go of their own ego in support of a better teaching method. I actually learned about the soctratic method from a good therapist. I've been using it to prepare for coding interviews and it's been working really well so far
jessermeyer 10y ago
The Japanese learned early on that practice is at the heart of expertise. What you cannot do reliably, you do not understand. Western culture has almost completely forgotten about practice, unless you're a musician.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  And in reading. We teach reading by consistent, laborious repetition. Most parents are engaged in this almost every day. We don't do this for math as standard because most parents don't value math as much as reading. We know it works, we just don't care enough as a population.
  - sonabinu 10y ago
    Most Asian parents focus on math mechanics but forget that math is essentially problem solving. As a child I had the concepts down solid, which helped me when I went back to University to do math classes but doing applied math had been a hard mountain to climb. Learn to build DE models etc. has been v challenging.
- hackermailman 10y ago
  Or a magician, a few years ago I watched an interview with a magician who just said his only key to success was daily practice, hard work, forcing himself to get up early every morning and just grind through it for years until he was good enough to invent his own tricks. This is what I use The Art of Computer Programming books for. I'll watch a lecture in basic computer science I'd forgotten long ago to get the intuition being explained of concepts like generating functions, then look up the subject in TAOCP series to read Knuth's explanation, and do all the exercises possible. Most universities I've found with open calendars or lectures have been locking down their assignments to prevent students from cheating and looking up answers like 15-251 at CMU. They have public lectures but no tests or exercises available so TAOCP complements these lectures for anybody self-learning by giving you hard problems to reason about so you remember the material. https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx#folderID=%22bcf8243e-cf18-481f-960f-3c5b26fbb69b%22&page=0 https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.a...
justavoice 10y ago
Anecdotal, but - me too! (by the way, how many times does it have to be anecdotal before it's no longer anecdotal?) Anyways - my personal opinion (for what it's worth) is to teach them in multiple activities, not only learning math/science/English/whatever, but also learning physical skills. I think that if you can show them progress through repetition in physical skills you can help them generalize that to more mental pursuits. Everyone knows that if you skip leg day you end up with matchsticks. Same with the mental muscle.
lawn 10y ago
Mirrors my university experience quite well and also sometimes in my professional life. I still rely a lot on my intuitive understanding, which works great in mos cases, but leaves me lacking when it fails.
improvemewrong 10y ago
I was never "gifted" but I went down this exact route. I did great in high school and then poorly in college even though I feel like I understood all the material.
fatalogic 10y ago
Read Mindset by Carol Dweck. She talks about what you experienced and how to overcome it. She also talks about how to shield children from that fixed mentality.

goodells 10y ago

I'm a student in university now, and I can relate to your experience. What helped me a lot as a kid was being motivated to learn things when it didn't seem like "learning". For example, I was able to get the hang of programming by playing a game that incorporated it, and it succeeded because it got me excited about doing cool things. Maybe this kind of "gamification" could be more useful than just adding points and rules to things to make people compete.

camerintinbun 10y ago

I had a similar path as yours. Never had to work all that hard through school, did a degree at a university in the sciences which was somewhat the same (had to try a little harder after the reality settled in from freshman year...), but I had always just assumed that was the next step. This was just something I had to do to move on, so a high mark was the end result. I was thrilled to graduate, took a job out in a semi-related field for about 5-6 years, then slowly began to get this feeling of "being dumbed down". Day by day, doing the same or similar things, not having to learn new stuff; it took a toll. I started listening to podcasts, and learning about all of the advances in science was enough to get me back into school and apply for a graduate degree. Here is where I think this is something that people have to recognize they want for themselves. Starting my grad classes with other students, mostly fresh from undergrad, I could see a change in the value I took from the classes compared to undergrads. I saw my old mentality in them ("Ugh why do we have to learn this, it won't be useful, just have to get this out of the way to checkmark a box..."). Whereas I spent time in a career, and had to force myself to make a major life-altering decision. I wanted what they had to say, whether it was relevant or not, because these ideas could be weaved together in the future. The properties that dictate the science of one is not fully independent from the other. This really became infectious. Everything I see, I try to learn beyond just memorization, but to a solid understanding and application level. "I'm running this test, the process isn't working, where is the most likely error? How can I optmize?" Unfortunately, I don't think you can just teach this. It has to be something that someone actively decides they want to commit to.

Philipp__ 10y ago

This! This happened to me, and good thing that came out of it was that my ego was crushed to pieces. Otherwise I asked myself where did I go wrong, or I lacked motivation to actually sit down, heat the chair and do the heavy lifting. I found it pretty boring and it repelled me in many aspects, so i struggled but eventually made it through. I always like learning on my own, playing and tweaking with stuff, thinking about problems around me, understanding how things were working on their core level. But with simple "chair and book" studying I suffered a lot. Sadly I don't know any solution and can't give any advice to others...

jeremy_b9000 10y ago

I'm a computer science student and have the exact same problem. I was diagnosed with ~150 points in IQ tests when I was in the 8/9th grade (I was forced to do it to get a seat in a special class - I don't think IQ is relevant for anything that constitutes a wonderful life) and I can imagine that this is one of the reasons I never developed serious perseverance (only exception: software eng) - in school and elsewhere, there was no reason to work hard. Now in university, it's completely different - if you don't work hard, you're gonna lose. I've learned the hard way that it's not about raw intelligence - which is really nice, because it means that genetic factors can be minimized - but pure diligence. I've met a couple of people who have average intelligence, but hustle like they're betting their lives (which is not so far-fetched, I admit). And I've found it very interesting that they sometimes don't need a real reason to hustle - they don't even know if computer science is what gets them excited, but they do it nevertheless. Unfortunately I don't have any mechanisms to utilize my potential in academic settings, although I succeed in my narrow software eng scope. I would like to hear your tips and how you succeeded anyways.

dboreham 10y ago
fwiw I had the opposite experience : in school I felt I had to work quite hard (harder than I wanted to for sure) to do well, but in university (EE + CS) life seemed to get easier and easier, I think because the work relied more on intuition and "getting" the material than raw effort, and also because I was interested in the field and so found it more pleasurable to study.

drakonka 10y ago

This is exactly what happened to me as a kid, but in my case it wasn't curse of the "gifted" but curse of the pushed. In my younger years growing up in Ukraine my parents and granparents pushed us hard to learn math, and so did my school. Endless repetition, hours of homework, Saturday classes, etc. I didn't have any sort of gift for math, this is just how children were taught there. Moving to the US and going into 5th grade, the first several years were just repetition of things I'd already learned in Ukraine. They were so easy. My grandmother wasn't there anymore and to my parents it looked like I was doing _great_ so they also loosened up and didn't really push me further. When we finally got to substantially new material I started to struggle. I got too used to everything being so easy and built on concepts I'd already had drilled into me. I failed a math test once - even my teacher was surprised. I ended up falling from perfect score As to Cs, then scraping back up to Bs by the end of high school. Now I regret not taking math as seriously as I should have after leaving Ukraine, and am now taking time at home to learn on my own. Thankfully I'm used to self-learning in other areas, so I think it's going pretty OK.

ciaranm 10y ago
This reads like the _exact_ opposite problem to what the parent described, to me.
- drakonka 10y ago
  This part in the original comment resonated with my experience: "When I was a kid, I could grasp concepts easily and I understood maths very quickly so I didn't really bother doing things like homework or actually studying." This was exactly the case for me after moving from Ukraine. Concepts were easy because I'd already known them, or they were just starting to be built on top of stuff I'd already drilled and knew before. So I did not put any effort into homework or studying. When entirely new concepts came along they crept up on me and my bad habits and I failed hard.
arvinsim 10y ago
I have the same experience. For context, I live in a third world country. I was lucky in the sense that I was enrolled in a prestigious school from kindergarten to grade 4. The school has a great curriculum that doesn't dumb down math and science while also emphasizing the arts. Arts and Sciences were equally interesting to me. I made no distinction with my enjoyment of solving arithmetic with creating poems or painting. Unfortunately, my family went into hard times and I had to transfer to our public school. In contrast to my previous school, teachers can't personally help each student because there were 50+ students per class. I also found out that the lessons they taught are already covered in my earlier years. I coasted through Grades 5 and 6 using my stock knowledge. When I got to high school, I was used to leaning back on what I learned. This is where I first tasted difficulty in learning the advanced math subjects. Sure, I got good grades in algebra but when it came to calculus, I was stumped. I could not care less about it because "math should be about calculation, not this symbolic mumbo jumbo". My boredom and inability to deal with the challenges resulted in my delinquency. I often cut classes and plagiarism homework. I still can't remember how I manage to graduate from high school. Now I deeply regret that I didn't apply myself back then.I am now a software developer and a lot of interesting stuff are closed to me because I can't understand the math behind them. I resolved to return studying high school algebra last year. Armed with experience and a new perspective, I realized how much I have missed and how useful math is.

morbidhawk 10y ago

> I'm not sure how to help kids not to go down this path Now that I'm no longer in school I've found way more progress in learning things by learning through curiosity. My best guess for a teacher to successfully facilitate a curiosity-based approach would require using the soctratic method and more importantly encouraging students to use that technique and give them opportunities to come up with their own good questions they seek answers to. None of my teachers or professors ever did this and usually just overloaded everyone with an extreme amount of busy work. It would also require a professor to let go of their own ego in support of a better teaching method. I actually learned about the soctratic method from a good therapist. I've been using it to prepare for coding interviews and it's been working really well so far

jessermeyer 10y ago

The Japanese learned early on that practice is at the heart of expertise. What you cannot do reliably, you do not understand. Western culture has almost completely forgotten about practice, unless you're a musician.

robotresearcher 10y ago
And in reading. We teach reading by consistent, laborious repetition. Most parents are engaged in this almost every day. We don't do this for math as standard because most parents don't value math as much as reading. We know it works, we just don't care enough as a population.
- sonabinu 10y ago
  Most Asian parents focus on math mechanics but forget that math is essentially problem solving. As a child I had the concepts down solid, which helped me when I went back to University to do math classes but doing applied math had been a hard mountain to climb. Learn to build DE models etc. has been v challenging.
hackermailman 10y ago
Or a magician, a few years ago I watched an interview with a magician who just said his only key to success was daily practice, hard work, forcing himself to get up early every morning and just grind through it for years until he was good enough to invent his own tricks. This is what I use The Art of Computer Programming books for. I'll watch a lecture in basic computer science I'd forgotten long ago to get the intuition being explained of concepts like generating functions, then look up the subject in TAOCP series to read Knuth's explanation, and do all the exercises possible. Most universities I've found with open calendars or lectures have been locking down their assignments to prevent students from cheating and looking up answers like 15-251 at CMU. They have public lectures but no tests or exercises available so TAOCP complements these lectures for anybody self-learning by giving you hard problems to reason about so you remember the material. https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx#folderID=%22bcf8243e-cf18-481f-960f-3c5b26fbb69b%22&page=0 https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.a...

justavoice 10y ago

Anecdotal, but - me too! (by the way, how many times does it have to be anecdotal before it's no longer anecdotal?) Anyways - my personal opinion (for what it's worth) is to teach them in multiple activities, not only learning math/science/English/whatever, but also learning physical skills. I think that if you can show them progress through repetition in physical skills you can help them generalize that to more mental pursuits. Everyone knows that if you skip leg day you end up with matchsticks. Same with the mental muscle.

lawn 10y ago

Mirrors my university experience quite well and also sometimes in my professional life. I still rely a lot on my intuitive understanding, which works great in mos cases, but leaves me lacking when it fails.

improvemewrong 10y ago

I was never "gifted" but I went down this exact route. I did great in high school and then poorly in college even though I feel like I understood all the material.

fatalogic 10y ago

Read Mindset by Carol Dweck. She talks about what you experienced and how to overcome it. She also talks about how to shield children from that fixed mentality.