\u00c2\u00a0I\u00c2\u00a0saw a\u00c2\u00a0link on Metafilter\u00c2\u00a0titled “the secret to raising smart kids”, so\u00c2\u00a0I was of course interested immediately.\u00c2\u00a0It was a great read, and is something that I can identify with in my own rather erratic scholastic career. Basically the idea is that there are two ways kids can think of intelligence; something that is like a talent, fixed and something you either have or you don’t, or you can think of it as something you can develop with hard work, which is therefore limitless.\u00c2\u00a0 Kids that have been told they are smart when they do something well (or when they succeed without expending any effort) eventually become averse to hard work and attempting something difficult (which they inevitably run into at some point)\u00c2\u00a0because they value looking smart over actually working hard to achieve something.\u00c2\u00a0Good marks are similarly valued, instead of actually learning how to work through a problem, regardless of getting the correct answer.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00c2\u00a0This is a fundamental difference of course, and the article refers to some studies\u00c2\u00a0that actually support these theories.\u00c2\u00a0 They took kids and told some of them that intelligence is something that can be developed like a muscle, and these kids turned their school year around.\u00c2\u00a0 They displayed much more persistence and resilience to failure on a hard problem than the rest of their class.\u00c2\u00a0 For these\u00c2\u00a0kids, failure is a sign of a lack of effort, not because you are dumb.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s amazing such a seemingly simple tactic can have such an effect, but there you go.<\/p>\n
\u00c2\u00a0I highly recommend the read, it resonated strongly with me.\u00c2\u00a0 I definitely walked right through high school with hardly any effort at all and as a result sucked pretty bad when a real challenge came around in university.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Secret to Raising Smart Kids<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00c2\u00a0I\u00c2\u00a0saw a\u00c2\u00a0link on Metafilter\u00c2\u00a0titled “the secret to raising smart kids”, so\u00c2\u00a0I was of course interested immediately.\u00c2\u00a0It was a great read, and is something that I can identify with in my own rather erratic scholastic career. Basically the idea is that … Continue reading