10 ms·

I grew up gifted, but my life didn’t turn out the way I expected (2019)

47 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

dang 4y ago
Discussed at the time: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20059589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20059589 - May 2019 (408 comments)
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
For people who have had experiences similar to what is described in the article - I enjoyed the book Mindset by Carol Dweck.
- Planktonne 4y ago
  It's worth bearing in mind that Dweck's theories have faced significant criticism [1] and should be evaluated carefully. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism
  - digisign 4y ago
    Sounds like folks taking the idea farther than is warranted and trying to replicate in a lab without success. "...to claim that your performance in a cognitive task is entirely dictated by how hard you try" This one in particular is silly. I personally lived the experience she describes in her book and reading it was quite useful. Never took it to mean, "I could be Einstein, if I just tried harder." You can't teach a dog calculus, no matter how hard both of you try. But we can improve through practice, it's pretty simple.
    - Planktonne 4y ago
      > But we can improve through practice, it's pretty simple. So simple as to be trivial. As applied to education (it was all the rage a couple of years back), Dweck's work is either unfalsifiable or just truisms.
      - digisign 4y ago
        Sounds like you believe "common sense" is common, but it is often not. A lot of "truisms" need better publicity. A pertinent example. Every single job thread here has dozens of folks complaining that no interviewing company has a lick of interest in training. It causes untold harm to everyone involved. It certainly has negatively affected me. An incredibly-wide industry thinking that folks are unable to learn; it boggles the mind.
        Planktonne 4y ago
        The belief that students are capable of learning is universally accepted in education. To the extent that Dweck's ideas are testable and worth publicising, they're already embedded in every school. Dweck's growth mindset is just another Brain Gym [1] - it's shaky pseudoscience building on top of a couple of inoffensive claims that can't be refuted (and shouldn't be), using them to push unsupported assertions and expensive training on schools. Industry's lack of focus on training is deplorable, but it's a separate problem. Growth mindset is already the kind of thing that recruiters and internal L&D love - it looks good on a slide, but it involves no practical improvement. Corporate L&D needs fixing, but more pseudoscience isn't the answer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Gym_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Gym_International
        infpeace 4y ago
        This might mean nothing to you, but I will tell my story regardless. Last year I started learning maths again, 15 years after leaving school. Part of me wasn’t sure if I can do it. “I’m not a maths person” was my mindset (a fixed mindset). Listening to Carol Dweck helped me understand the difference between helplessness (fixed mindset) and hopefulness (growth mindset). Her ideas gave me courage. I changed how I viewed myself. I’m not “a maths person”, but I’m working hard at growing my maths ability. I’m not static, I can change. It might sound simple and obvious to you, but it changed my world, especially after being raised in an abusive household. I wasn’t taught how to believe in myself, but Carol Dweck’s lessons in growth mindset replaced poor parenting with insights that actually help. I’m now further down the line in my studying and I’m enjoying maths, which I can’t believe. I wouldn’t have done this without her.
Planktonne 4y ago
"Gifted" is an expectation rather than a diagnosis. We're not good at objectively measuring potential. We're definitely not good enough to make a lifelong judgement based on a cursory examination. Children grow, and change an awful lot - any such judgement is premature. Identification of gifted children is unavoidably filtered through cultural/societal/personal bias & baggage. The 'best' case scenario here is that it only entrenches existing inequality, but in practice it both does that and causes a lot of dissatisfaction amongst former 'gifted' children like the author.
- georgeburdell 4y ago
  Your third paragraph does not follow. So what if programs don’t elevate all possible gifted children? And, we do have evidence that we can identify high potential students early. Please look into Duke TIP and similar programs that involve administering the SAT to middle schoolers. High scorers are significantly more likely to earn advanced degrees and create intellectual property such as patents.
  - gorjusborg 4y ago
    > So what if programs don’t elevate all possible gifted children? Well, that depends on who is being excluded and why. If the process is run by human selection, politics are inevitably involved. Assuming there is a positive net outcome for selected students, there is even more pressure to 'lobby' and 'influence' the decision. Also, if the number of slots is small, but the cutoff isn't in line with percentiles of children in the population, there could potentially be more children on the cusp that aren't selected than those that were selected. This could mean that the assumed net positive effect of 'elevating' the small group is outweighed by a net negative effect of not elevating those on the edge, even though they were arbitrarily cut off. Those are just a few reasons.
  - Planktonne 4y ago
    It's not that programs don't elevate all possible gifted children. It's that their definition of 'gifted' is not reliable, and it's likely to be conflating 'gifted' with 'advantaged'. Are you actually identifying gifted children, or just well-fed ones with supportive parents who have the same cultural background as you? Duke's TIP program (and similar) don't limit themselves to just identification of gifted children. > Duke has a long history of providing opportunities for talented middle and high school students to gain exposure to rigorous academic coursework and to communities of talented peers. Many of these opportunities were facilitated by Duke TIP, which was established in 1980 and provided valuable academic enrichment opportunities for several generations of pre-college students. Duke Youth Programs has also provided a range of engaging summer programs for more than 20 years. [1] Again, that's not rigorously identifying gifted children so much as it is asserting that some children are gifted and then doing a lot of work to ensure that they get better advantages/opportunities than others. We don't have anything like enough evidence to claim that they are successful in their identification, or that the students would have achieved similarly on their own. [1] https://tip.duke.edu/ https://tip.duke.edu/
ALittleLight 4y ago
Our personal mythology can attribute great significance to qualities, like being good at school, and use that significance to explain life outcomes even if that's not a particularly reasonable conclusion. Just like mythology uses simple ideas to explain complex natural phenomenon (e.g. Apollo's chariot pulls the sun across the sky) our personal mythology can use a simple idea to explain more complicated ones (because I was gifted I never tried hard and so I am not X). Without knowing more about the author's life and what she presumes her alternate life would be, it's hard to really make sense of her position in this article. If she had been challenged more and learned the value of hard work she would be... what? What would be different? From her "About" page we see she has an English degree, is a mother of two, and writes articles like this one. If she had been challenged as a child would she have three kids? Write more articles? STEM degree? I've watched bits of the Johnny Depp trial and one thing that has stood out to me is how miserable his life seems. On the outside he's a super-famous movie star with tons of money and a beautiful wife - and on the inside... On Lex Fridman's podcast Kevin Systrom said something about becoming a billionaire that was along the lines of life being similarly hard as it was before. The author of this article seems to have an average life. Most people have average lives. Even people at the margins, your billionaires and movie stars, only have superficially extraordinarily lives that are, at core, fundamentally similar to the average person's life. So, in what sense does this author think her life would have been different had she been challenged more? Suppose the author couldn't play music well and her parents forced her to confront her weakness and learn to play the piano. My intuition is that she would be in the same place in life but would remember, kind of, how to play a couple songs on the piano. The article strikes me as dodging responsibility - "I was not challenged and therefore am not a hard worker." If you want to work hard, then do that. Challenge yourself. And, if you can't do it now, why do you think you could have done it back then?
- julianlam 4y ago
  That's the exact takeaway I got from the article as well. "I was told I was gifted as a child, and so now I use it as a crutch to justify being average. Woe are we, the gifted."
- Phyanak 4y ago
achenatx 4y ago
My life turned out great and I wouldnt trade being gifted for not being gifted. We do focus our kids on working hard. They get praise for trying hard, incremental improvements, focus, advance preparation, and leadership. We never praise them for being smart. We talk a lot about what happiness means and how to be truly happy.
chaostheory 4y ago
”They weren’t afraid to try new things, whereas my fear of failure – something I didn’t have a lot of experience with as a child – held me back from making the attempt. This fear prompted me to stay in what had been my summer job for over a decade past university graduation. I had the education to land a higher-paying, high-prestige job, but I didn’t have the drive or the courage that benefitted my former peers.” This is classic “curse of the gifted”. To counteract it, praise your children on hard work and tackling hard, risky problems instead of correct solutions.
- tomhallett 4y ago
  This is the parenting approach we take with our kids. Focus on the inputs instead of the outputs. Instead of “wow, you’re smart - you got an a”, say “wow, it looks like you worked really hard. I can tell you took your time and focused hard on the problem”. With sports, where the focus is on results even at a very young age, we always say “I love watching you try”.
devrimbaris 4y ago
The author still focusing on "gifted" rather than problem solving. Give kids the means for finding their "purpose".
8bitsrule 4y ago
Gifted or not, nothing's wrong about being good at academics. That might be one's only gift. But the academy is not what it once was, and there's a lot of highly-motivated people seeking academic professions (which very often - as I learned from talking to professors - involve a lot more than teaching and research). Outside of full-time opportunities in that ideal environment then, there are lots of yearners. Surprise, surprise, colleges don't worry much about such people. There's another crop moving in behind them, more grants to apply for. The outide world looks right past specialized outsiders. A lucky few become great writers.
contingencies 4y ago
Giftedness is a crutch for the recognition of strong performance in educational systems styled from the industrial revolution on a production-line mentality. What is needed is not a continuation of the crutch but an overhaul of the mentality. All students can benefit from more responsive and personalized educational environments, opportunities and support, whether they are struggling, baseline bell-curve, or academically excelling. Technology offers this potential, but we are yet to realise it fully. Alan Kay often discusses the failed potential for technology with respect to education. He has some great quotes like: By far the best way to invent a healthy future is to invent the children who will invent it. - Alan Kay Children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century. - Alan Kay With a good programming language and interface, one - even children - can create from scratch important simulations of complex non-linear systems that can help one's thinking about them. - Alan Kay ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
- gowld 4y ago
  The mentality isn't the problem, the budget is. Assembly-line is a cost saving strategy, not a pedagogical strategy. Most good ideas in education are ruined upon deployment because they cost more than sociey is willing to spend (on average), except for the few who have wealthy private patrons (parents or "scholarship aid" / "gifted" programs). And most bad-looking ideas are attempts to make the best of the limited budget, or good ideas were ruined by lack of budget. "Individualized instruction" is the current one -- we can't afford good individualized instruction, so everyone hates the bad individualized instruction we get. Gifted kids especially, have complex talents that don't always fit inside a software program in a 2-D screen. Technology can be cost effective, but that's not the same as giving best results.
  - contingencies 4y ago
    Well that's a cop-out. Homeschooling is an option for many of us. Furthermore, the global market for an individual, first-world teacher, online is currently about $20/hr. There is a vast array of resources available immediately at no charge. It has never been easier to seek external instruction. Gamification of learning has created kids with sophisticated understanding of space, time, networks, etc. free of human teachers. The trend is clear. We can push further.
xyzzy123 4y ago
Most of the really smart kids (and the ones I knew in high school who ended up the most successful in life terms) did "terribly" in school. It's hard to initially distinguish future successful dropouts but there were a few things they had in common. Firstly they usually came from at least "ok" families - they were confident enough in their social supports and knew they had "options" and second chances if they needed them. Usually it was clear that they could do the work (and had no trouble in later in life learning independently). But instead of believing what "the system" told them or following its rules, they either ignored or actively explored and exploited the rules and behaviour of the system itself. This looks a lot like skipping class, acting out and not caring... But now that I look back it looks a lot like learning the "meta" game, which turned out to be much more important in life than what was being taught academically at the time.
smeagull 4y ago
1. She has an ADHD child 2. She claims to have not lived up to expectations, something commonly attributed to people with ADHD 3. ADHD has a significant (70%) genetic component. 4. "if I wasn’t good at it, I simply didn’t do it." 5. "I didn’t have the drive or the courage" Probably worth an evaluation, though it might well have already been done if her child has a diagnosis.
- jasonladuke0311 4y ago
  Me to a T
- deusum 4y ago
  Diagnosed and now treated ADD here: 100% Didn't find out till I was 40. Half a life wasted.
xorvoid 4y ago
I was “gifted” as a child. As a result I never studied for school and didn’t take it seriously. Then I failed out of my first year of college and had a breakdown about how I was gonna be a complete failure in life. That changed everything. It taught me that in a competitive world, intellect and “gifted” doesn’t go very far if your also not willing to put in hard sustained effort. In retrospect, I was very very lucky. Lucky to learn the lesson at a young enough age. And lucky to grow up in a society (USA) that believes in second chances. I’ve met others who weren’t so lucky. I’ve met people that still thought they were “gifted” and “special” after reaching the workplace and then were utterly confused why no one agreed with them and nothing went their way. They never learned humility or how to work within an organization’s culture. Surprising how damaging a few little words can be..
edmcnulty101 4y ago
Being successful is not about being smart or competent. Most jobs in modern society require an average I.Q. and with most jobs, the skills can be taught. So people hire for likability instead. Most people have average likability, including people with Mensa I.Q.s. As a person with genius I.Q. and average likability and average success, I think that being successful is less about intelligence and more about schmoozing and selling and personality and being hyper-likable. I wish there was a test to measure how good one is at schmoozing. The Schmooze Quotient. I bet that would be a much greater predictor of success.
- 4lp 4y ago
  > Being successful is not about being smart or competent. An interesting perspective, but I suspect that you're using "likeability" as a cynical proxy for how well a person works in a team. A person with an exceptional personality that motivates their entire team to work harder is likely infinitely more valuable to the employer than a more individualistic employee that might be exceptional when compared to any individual employee but still severely underperforms compared to a motivated team. Should the employer be compelled to pick the later just because they are smarter and more competent?
  - edmcnulty101 4y ago
    Not necessarily. It can be I guess, but my last position the lead dev was very likable but totally incompetent. He wasn't a motivator or anything either. He actually hurt morale because of his inconpetence. He just had a likable personality. The project itself was millions of dollars and several years behind. But the business people with the purse strings liked the guy and he knew enough to bullshit them. I've seen this pattern repeated alot throughout my many years. Most jobs aren't really that hard so the real way to keep the job and thrive is to just be likable.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mathgladiator 4y ago
I grew up retarded, but my life didn't turn out the way I expected. I had speech problems. I was in the learning center. My best friend in elementary had down syndrome. Many of my friends took the short bus. I'm absolutely serious about the retarded bit as I did not do well on the IQ test... at all. Somehow, me, an idiot became a principal engineer and is retired at 40. I spent the last couple of days playing with legos. Life is strange and wonderful. You are not going to survive life, so don't expect anything just do your best and play the game.
- strikelaserclaw 4y ago
  Maybe you had an undiagnosed learning disability.
- tedmiston 4y ago
  Did you have any tendencies to suggest you may be twice exceptional? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional
  - mathgladiator 4y ago
    I have never even heard of this before. As an adult, I have learned that I may be on the spectrum from a few psychologists interactions. I was always on the computer either playing games, making stuff, or installing linux for the 37th time trying to deal with WinModem. Honestly, for most of my education, I just felt like people were disappointed in me and just didn't bother. Paradoxically, I did amazing in university (and it was kind of easy, but I did go to a state school). Reading this wiki page is blowing my mind.

47 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

dang 4y ago

Discussed at the time: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20059589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20059589 - May 2019 (408 comments)

f0e4c2f7 4y ago

For people who have had experiences similar to what is described in the article - I enjoyed the book Mindset by Carol Dweck.

Planktonne 4y ago
It's worth bearing in mind that Dweck's theories have faced significant criticism [1] and should be evaluated carefully. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism
- digisign 4y ago
  Sounds like folks taking the idea farther than is warranted and trying to replicate in a lab without success. "...to claim that your performance in a cognitive task is entirely dictated by how hard you try" This one in particular is silly. I personally lived the experience she describes in her book and reading it was quite useful. Never took it to mean, "I could be Einstein, if I just tried harder." You can't teach a dog calculus, no matter how hard both of you try. But we can improve through practice, it's pretty simple.
  - Planktonne 4y ago
    > But we can improve through practice, it's pretty simple. So simple as to be trivial. As applied to education (it was all the rage a couple of years back), Dweck's work is either unfalsifiable or just truisms.
    - digisign 4y ago
      Sounds like you believe "common sense" is common, but it is often not. A lot of "truisms" need better publicity. A pertinent example. Every single job thread here has dozens of folks complaining that no interviewing company has a lick of interest in training. It causes untold harm to everyone involved. It certainly has negatively affected me. An incredibly-wide industry thinking that folks are unable to learn; it boggles the mind.
      - Planktonne 4y ago
        The belief that students are capable of learning is universally accepted in education. To the extent that Dweck's ideas are testable and worth publicising, they're already embedded in every school. Dweck's growth mindset is just another Brain Gym [1] - it's shaky pseudoscience building on top of a couple of inoffensive claims that can't be refuted (and shouldn't be), using them to push unsupported assertions and expensive training on schools. Industry's lack of focus on training is deplorable, but it's a separate problem. Growth mindset is already the kind of thing that recruiters and internal L&D love - it looks good on a slide, but it involves no practical improvement. Corporate L&D needs fixing, but more pseudoscience isn't the answer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Gym_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Gym_International
        infpeace 4y ago
        This might mean nothing to you, but I will tell my story regardless. Last year I started learning maths again, 15 years after leaving school. Part of me wasn’t sure if I can do it. “I’m not a maths person” was my mindset (a fixed mindset). Listening to Carol Dweck helped me understand the difference between helplessness (fixed mindset) and hopefulness (growth mindset). Her ideas gave me courage. I changed how I viewed myself. I’m not “a maths person”, but I’m working hard at growing my maths ability. I’m not static, I can change. It might sound simple and obvious to you, but it changed my world, especially after being raised in an abusive household. I wasn’t taught how to believe in myself, but Carol Dweck’s lessons in growth mindset replaced poor parenting with insights that actually help. I’m now further down the line in my studying and I’m enjoying maths, which I can’t believe. I wouldn’t have done this without her.

Planktonne 4y ago

"Gifted" is an expectation rather than a diagnosis. We're not good at objectively measuring potential. We're definitely not good enough to make a lifelong judgement based on a cursory examination. Children grow, and change an awful lot - any such judgement is premature. Identification of gifted children is unavoidably filtered through cultural/societal/personal bias & baggage. The 'best' case scenario here is that it only entrenches existing inequality, but in practice it both does that and causes a lot of dissatisfaction amongst former 'gifted' children like the author.

georgeburdell 4y ago
Your third paragraph does not follow. So what if programs don’t elevate all possible gifted children? And, we do have evidence that we can identify high potential students early. Please look into Duke TIP and similar programs that involve administering the SAT to middle schoolers. High scorers are significantly more likely to earn advanced degrees and create intellectual property such as patents.
- gorjusborg 4y ago
  > So what if programs don’t elevate all possible gifted children? Well, that depends on who is being excluded and why. If the process is run by human selection, politics are inevitably involved. Assuming there is a positive net outcome for selected students, there is even more pressure to 'lobby' and 'influence' the decision. Also, if the number of slots is small, but the cutoff isn't in line with percentiles of children in the population, there could potentially be more children on the cusp that aren't selected than those that were selected. This could mean that the assumed net positive effect of 'elevating' the small group is outweighed by a net negative effect of not elevating those on the edge, even though they were arbitrarily cut off. Those are just a few reasons.
- Planktonne 4y ago
  It's not that programs don't elevate all possible gifted children. It's that their definition of 'gifted' is not reliable, and it's likely to be conflating 'gifted' with 'advantaged'. Are you actually identifying gifted children, or just well-fed ones with supportive parents who have the same cultural background as you? Duke's TIP program (and similar) don't limit themselves to just identification of gifted children. > Duke has a long history of providing opportunities for talented middle and high school students to gain exposure to rigorous academic coursework and to communities of talented peers. Many of these opportunities were facilitated by Duke TIP, which was established in 1980 and provided valuable academic enrichment opportunities for several generations of pre-college students. Duke Youth Programs has also provided a range of engaging summer programs for more than 20 years. [1] Again, that's not rigorously identifying gifted children so much as it is asserting that some children are gifted and then doing a lot of work to ensure that they get better advantages/opportunities than others. We don't have anything like enough evidence to claim that they are successful in their identification, or that the students would have achieved similarly on their own. [1] https://tip.duke.edu/ https://tip.duke.edu/

ALittleLight 4y ago

Our personal mythology can attribute great significance to qualities, like being good at school, and use that significance to explain life outcomes even if that's not a particularly reasonable conclusion. Just like mythology uses simple ideas to explain complex natural phenomenon (e.g. Apollo's chariot pulls the sun across the sky) our personal mythology can use a simple idea to explain more complicated ones (because I was gifted I never tried hard and so I am not X). Without knowing more about the author's life and what she presumes her alternate life would be, it's hard to really make sense of her position in this article. If she had been challenged more and learned the value of hard work she would be... what? What would be different? From her "About" page we see she has an English degree, is a mother of two, and writes articles like this one. If she had been challenged as a child would she have three kids? Write more articles? STEM degree? I've watched bits of the Johnny Depp trial and one thing that has stood out to me is how miserable his life seems. On the outside he's a super-famous movie star with tons of money and a beautiful wife - and on the inside... On Lex Fridman's podcast Kevin Systrom said something about becoming a billionaire that was along the lines of life being similarly hard as it was before. The author of this article seems to have an average life. Most people have average lives. Even people at the margins, your billionaires and movie stars, only have superficially extraordinarily lives that are, at core, fundamentally similar to the average person's life. So, in what sense does this author think her life would have been different had she been challenged more? Suppose the author couldn't play music well and her parents forced her to confront her weakness and learn to play the piano. My intuition is that she would be in the same place in life but would remember, kind of, how to play a couple songs on the piano. The article strikes me as dodging responsibility - "I was not challenged and therefore am not a hard worker." If you want to work hard, then do that. Challenge yourself. And, if you can't do it now, why do you think you could have done it back then?

julianlam 4y ago
That's the exact takeaway I got from the article as well. "I was told I was gifted as a child, and so now I use it as a crutch to justify being average. Woe are we, the gifted."
Phyanak 4y ago

achenatx 4y ago

My life turned out great and I wouldnt trade being gifted for not being gifted. We do focus our kids on working hard. They get praise for trying hard, incremental improvements, focus, advance preparation, and leadership. We never praise them for being smart. We talk a lot about what happiness means and how to be truly happy.

chaostheory 4y ago

”They weren’t afraid to try new things, whereas my fear of failure – something I didn’t have a lot of experience with as a child – held me back from making the attempt. This fear prompted me to stay in what had been my summer job for over a decade past university graduation. I had the education to land a higher-paying, high-prestige job, but I didn’t have the drive or the courage that benefitted my former peers.” This is classic “curse of the gifted”. To counteract it, praise your children on hard work and tackling hard, risky problems instead of correct solutions.

tomhallett 4y ago
This is the parenting approach we take with our kids. Focus on the inputs instead of the outputs. Instead of “wow, you’re smart - you got an a”, say “wow, it looks like you worked really hard. I can tell you took your time and focused hard on the problem”. With sports, where the focus is on results even at a very young age, we always say “I love watching you try”.

devrimbaris 4y ago

The author still focusing on "gifted" rather than problem solving. Give kids the means for finding their "purpose".

8bitsrule 4y ago

Gifted or not, nothing's wrong about being good at academics. That might be one's only gift. But the academy is not what it once was, and there's a lot of highly-motivated people seeking academic professions (which very often - as I learned from talking to professors - involve a lot more than teaching and research). Outside of full-time opportunities in that ideal environment then, there are lots of yearners. Surprise, surprise, colleges don't worry much about such people. There's another crop moving in behind them, more grants to apply for. The outide world looks right past specialized outsiders. A lucky few become great writers.

contingencies 4y ago

Giftedness is a crutch for the recognition of strong performance in educational systems styled from the industrial revolution on a production-line mentality. What is needed is not a continuation of the crutch but an overhaul of the mentality. All students can benefit from more responsive and personalized educational environments, opportunities and support, whether they are struggling, baseline bell-curve, or academically excelling. Technology offers this potential, but we are yet to realise it fully. Alan Kay often discusses the failed potential for technology with respect to education. He has some great quotes like: By far the best way to invent a healthy future is to invent the children who will invent it. - Alan Kay Children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century. - Alan Kay With a good programming language and interface, one - even children - can create from scratch important simulations of complex non-linear systems that can help one's thinking about them. - Alan Kay ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

gowld 4y ago
The mentality isn't the problem, the budget is. Assembly-line is a cost saving strategy, not a pedagogical strategy. Most good ideas in education are ruined upon deployment because they cost more than sociey is willing to spend (on average), except for the few who have wealthy private patrons (parents or "scholarship aid" / "gifted" programs). And most bad-looking ideas are attempts to make the best of the limited budget, or good ideas were ruined by lack of budget. "Individualized instruction" is the current one -- we can't afford good individualized instruction, so everyone hates the bad individualized instruction we get. Gifted kids especially, have complex talents that don't always fit inside a software program in a 2-D screen. Technology can be cost effective, but that's not the same as giving best results.
- contingencies 4y ago
  Well that's a cop-out. Homeschooling is an option for many of us. Furthermore, the global market for an individual, first-world teacher, online is currently about $20/hr. There is a vast array of resources available immediately at no charge. It has never been easier to seek external instruction. Gamification of learning has created kids with sophisticated understanding of space, time, networks, etc. free of human teachers. The trend is clear. We can push further.

xyzzy123 4y ago

Most of the really smart kids (and the ones I knew in high school who ended up the most successful in life terms) did "terribly" in school. It's hard to initially distinguish future successful dropouts but there were a few things they had in common. Firstly they usually came from at least "ok" families - they were confident enough in their social supports and knew they had "options" and second chances if they needed them. Usually it was clear that they could do the work (and had no trouble in later in life learning independently). But instead of believing what "the system" told them or following its rules, they either ignored or actively explored and exploited the rules and behaviour of the system itself. This looks a lot like skipping class, acting out and not caring... But now that I look back it looks a lot like learning the "meta" game, which turned out to be much more important in life than what was being taught academically at the time.

smeagull 4y ago

1. She has an ADHD child 2. She claims to have not lived up to expectations, something commonly attributed to people with ADHD 3. ADHD has a significant (70%) genetic component. 4. "if I wasn’t good at it, I simply didn’t do it." 5. "I didn’t have the drive or the courage" Probably worth an evaluation, though it might well have already been done if her child has a diagnosis.

jasonladuke0311 4y ago
Me to a T
deusum 4y ago
Diagnosed and now treated ADD here: 100% Didn't find out till I was 40. Half a life wasted.

xorvoid 4y ago

I was “gifted” as a child. As a result I never studied for school and didn’t take it seriously. Then I failed out of my first year of college and had a breakdown about how I was gonna be a complete failure in life. That changed everything. It taught me that in a competitive world, intellect and “gifted” doesn’t go very far if your also not willing to put in hard sustained effort. In retrospect, I was very very lucky. Lucky to learn the lesson at a young enough age. And lucky to grow up in a society (USA) that believes in second chances. I’ve met others who weren’t so lucky. I’ve met people that still thought they were “gifted” and “special” after reaching the workplace and then were utterly confused why no one agreed with them and nothing went their way. They never learned humility or how to work within an organization’s culture. Surprising how damaging a few little words can be..

edmcnulty101 4y ago

Being successful is not about being smart or competent. Most jobs in modern society require an average I.Q. and with most jobs, the skills can be taught. So people hire for likability instead. Most people have average likability, including people with Mensa I.Q.s. As a person with genius I.Q. and average likability and average success, I think that being successful is less about intelligence and more about schmoozing and selling and personality and being hyper-likable. I wish there was a test to measure how good one is at schmoozing. The Schmooze Quotient. I bet that would be a much greater predictor of success.

4lp 4y ago
> Being successful is not about being smart or competent. An interesting perspective, but I suspect that you're using "likeability" as a cynical proxy for how well a person works in a team. A person with an exceptional personality that motivates their entire team to work harder is likely infinitely more valuable to the employer than a more individualistic employee that might be exceptional when compared to any individual employee but still severely underperforms compared to a motivated team. Should the employer be compelled to pick the later just because they are smarter and more competent?
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  Not necessarily. It can be I guess, but my last position the lead dev was very likable but totally incompetent. He wasn't a motivator or anything either. He actually hurt morale because of his inconpetence. He just had a likable personality. The project itself was millions of dollars and several years behind. But the business people with the purse strings liked the guy and he knew enough to bullshit them. I've seen this pattern repeated alot throughout my many years. Most jobs aren't really that hard so the real way to keep the job and thrive is to just be likable.

deleted 4y ago

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mathgladiator 4y ago

I grew up retarded, but my life didn't turn out the way I expected. I had speech problems. I was in the learning center. My best friend in elementary had down syndrome. Many of my friends took the short bus. I'm absolutely serious about the retarded bit as I did not do well on the IQ test... at all. Somehow, me, an idiot became a principal engineer and is retired at 40. I spent the last couple of days playing with legos. Life is strange and wonderful. You are not going to survive life, so don't expect anything just do your best and play the game.

strikelaserclaw 4y ago
Maybe you had an undiagnosed learning disability.
tedmiston 4y ago
Did you have any tendencies to suggest you may be twice exceptional? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional
- mathgladiator 4y ago
  I have never even heard of this before. As an adult, I have learned that I may be on the spectrum from a few psychologists interactions. I was always on the computer either playing games, making stuff, or installing linux for the 37th time trying to deal with WinModem. Honestly, for most of my education, I just felt like people were disappointed in me and just didn't bother. Paradoxically, I did amazing in university (and it was kind of easy, but I did go to a state school). Reading this wiki page is blowing my mind.