3 ms·

Speaking as someone who has definitely had lazy tendencies in the past and did very well before college while doing almost nothing, this does feel very fitting

Speaking as someone who has definitely had lazy tendencies in the past and did very well before college while doing almost nothing, this does feel very fitting to my personal history. Although I would argue that the failure is one of the educational system - not that I try to avoid taking responsibility, but children in this context are the innocent participants in a system set up for them by adults. Innocent as in that they don't know any better until they're older. The problem is one of understimulation. I do actually like to work hard, and always have. But for topics that bore me, where I don't see the point, why would I invest more than the minimum amount of effort to pass the grade, so that I can focus on things that I do care about? Of course I realise now that I was pubescent ignoramus, but you can't expect a teenager to realise that. That's the responsibility of the adults around them. Again, that is what I mean with teenage innocence. Also, I remember one time another very bright classmate in middle school told me "being gifted is a mental illness of the parents". I don't know if he came up with that or if he stole it from somewhere, but it always stuck with me: a lot of kids (mostly guys, I suspect) who think they're oh so smart are really pampered by their parents - for one, it made me realise my mom praised my abilities way too much (luckily early enough to realise she was wrong quite often). I can't find the article right now, but later I read somewhere that praising children for being gifted - "wow, you must be really smart to get this!" - discourages them from practising hard. Praising them for their accomplishments - "wow, you must have worked really hard to solve this!" - does the opposite.

paulryanrogers 9y ago
Do you mean praising them for effort, not accomplishments?
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  Yes, sorry. It was late when I wrote that
jacobolus 9y ago
> The problem is one of understimulation The problem (for all the students, not just the cleverest ones) is that school curriculum is necessarily insipid, and school pedagogy provides very little direct practice and delayed, often unhelpful feedback. A huge amount of time is wasted on organizational overhead, other students can be tremendously distracting, and meaningful learning is often cut off by scheduled class changes. The primary focus is on memorizing and regurgitating atomized and decontextualized definitions, factoids, and formulas, and students are discouraged from asking and answering their own questions, solving their own problems, or doing their own research. Perhaps worse, there is an excessive focus on getting the “right answers”, which discourages risk taking. Motivated students who have learned some meta-cognitive skills can often learn entirely independently without any human interaction more efficiently than they can from a typical classroom studying a typical school textbook and doing assigned homework. Working 1:1 with an expert tutor/mentor/coach for at least a few hours per week (and then spending the rest of the time on independent practice) is dramatically more effective. Of particular note for clever students, this allows for students to try problems and projects of much larger scope and much greater difficulty than the typical curriculum has room for. But nobody has figured out how to scale this affordably to the whole society. One lucky thing in the software industry is that the tools are very interactive and there are lots of opportunities to get various kinds of feedback even when working independently.

paulryanrogers 9y ago

Do you mean praising them for effort, not accomplishments?

vanderZwan 9y ago
Yes, sorry. It was late when I wrote that

jacobolus 9y ago

> The problem is one of understimulation The problem (for all the students, not just the cleverest ones) is that school curriculum is necessarily insipid, and school pedagogy provides very little direct practice and delayed, often unhelpful feedback. A huge amount of time is wasted on organizational overhead, other students can be tremendously distracting, and meaningful learning is often cut off by scheduled class changes. The primary focus is on memorizing and regurgitating atomized and decontextualized definitions, factoids, and formulas, and students are discouraged from asking and answering their own questions, solving their own problems, or doing their own research. Perhaps worse, there is an excessive focus on getting the “right answers”, which discourages risk taking. Motivated students who have learned some meta-cognitive skills can often learn entirely independently without any human interaction more efficiently than they can from a typical classroom studying a typical school textbook and doing assigned homework. Working 1:1 with an expert tutor/mentor/coach for at least a few hours per week (and then spending the rest of the time on independent practice) is dramatically more effective. Of particular note for clever students, this allows for students to try problems and projects of much larger scope and much greater difficulty than the typical curriculum has room for. But nobody has figured out how to scale this affordably to the whole society. One lucky thing in the software industry is that the tools are very interactive and there are lots of opportunities to get various kinds of feedback even when working independently.