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How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

nytimes.com

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Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#101

Post by hueving »

Retric wrote: post #14
CuriouslyC wrote: post #3

My personal theory on this is twofold: 1.) High achievers are used to pushing at things to win. Creativity is like a garden - you have to do some tending, but then you have to back off and let the plants grow. Fiddling doesn't help, in fact you're liable to end up killing the plants. 2.) Smart people actually learn too fast. Creativity requires very broad neural connectivity, and I think fast learning tends to produc…

2) This falls into the just world fallacy. Intelligence does not seem to come with real drawbacks. Highly intelligent people often have upper end reflexes, are unusual attractive, highly creative, social, and or content. They are more often taller and live longer as well. The trappings of intelligence are different, but very high raw intelligence is seen across most walks of life including actors, athletes, and sales…

>are unusual attractive

Source? I've never heard of intelligence being correlated with visual attractiveness.

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#102

Post by houst0n_ »

shouldbworking wrote: post #51
nnfy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your frustration. Unfortunately, public schools are not places where remarkable people tend to congregate, and those near the mean are typically not equipped to teach such technical subjects, or even recognize the value in having young children learn them. There is vast potential wasted in our [U.S.] public school system.

The problem for me, and perhaps many others, is that the "smart" are sorted out early and carted out of regular classrooms. If you miss the boat it gets substantially more difficult, almost impossible, to get back on that track. I remember my parents trying to get me into advanced classes in sixth grade but the school rules said it needed to be done by third grade. I couldn't skip a year either, it was too late. The…

So it's their failure and not yours?

I have a comparable story; dropped out of school at 15 and didn't touch education since (>15 years ago now), then spent a few years high and drunk: but I'd learnt perl from the camel even before then.

What do you think you are owed? If i hadn't read k&r or learning perl by myself I should then blame my teachers who hadn't read them either? Most of the best folk I've worked with found these things on their own too.

You feel you're "a lost diamond that the system left behind?"

Bitch, who are you blaming here? The only job I could get in that situation was as a cleaner, and I worked my way from there to where I am now while definitely fitting into your category of those the so called "system" couldn't deal with..

If I hadn't learnt to do our thing regardless should I blame someone else?

I think not. Work hard or don't; blaming the system for your failure, while there are people around you who demonstrably made it from worse situations than yours is pathetic in the extreme.

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#103

Post by hacknat »

Jimmy wrote: post #85

>What holds them back is that they don’t learn to be original. More than likely, they simply lacked the capacity to be original (as in, world-class historical originality, which is the subject under discussion here), just in the same way that almost all people lack this capacity. It's only particularly surprising that child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses if you confuse genius with the capacity to learn inform…

Excellent point. If anything the anecdotal data points to the opposite being true. Hendrix didn't learn guitar until 17. Einstein showed signs of having a genius for math and science in his education, but not anything above warranting anything, but being accepted to a middling teachers college. Edison didn't graduate high school and invented the phonograph in his spare time in his late 20s as a telegraph operator.

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#104

Post by ThomPete »

conorh wrote: post #100
smackingly wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm biased because I'm a no-name physician at a community hospital, but the "best doctors" in my eyes are the ones with the best outcomes, lowest utilization, highest efficiency and highest patient satisfaction. These measures don't correlate well with the physician's credentials. I learned this in residency, which I did just down the street from a "top" university hospital. We out-performed that place on every…

> "These measures don't correlate well with the physician's credentials." This. I think I've even posted about this here before. This has been my wife's experience too (surgeon). She trained with highly regarded academic surgeons that set the treatment recommendations and standards for her field. Then during her job search she went to a center with, well, surgeons not at all academic and she had a life changing momen…

Great insight.

Being a surgeon is more akin to performing arts. I.e you cant read your way to playing an instrument, you have to practice playing it.

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#105

Post by KyleJune »

bitJericho wrote: post #88

It's so important to let your kid think. I see parents helicoptering and it's very damaging. I had met a couple at a friendly gathering that brought their 2 year old. Not only could he hardly talk, which was surprising to me, he had no chance to make any decision. The child and his parents were paging through a sales flyer, because they didn't think to bring suitable activities, and they were ogling over toys. So I p…

I didn't talk at all till I was 5 years old. I turned out well. But my parents were the opposite of helicopter parents though. I literally just did whatever I wanted all the time. I use to walk around a swamp near by, by myself or with friends, to catch turtles and snakes. Never got in trouble for grades. Got in a fight once when I was in 5th grade. Most my Mom did was ask me if I got any good hits in. lol

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#106

Post by revelation »

paganel wrote: post #19

> When Dr. Bloom’s team interviewed tennis players who were ranked in the top 10 in the world, they were not, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, doing push-ups since they were a fetus. And then you see a clip of 5-year old Messi ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DWZ0fD64Uk ) demolishing the other 5-year old kids who happened to share the same football field as him and realize that "letting your kid be creative" and all t…

It's even more laughable for any sort of endurance sports, where the genetic components are very well known.

The best marathon runner is probably sitting on a couch eating a bag of cheetos.

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#107

Post by ThomPete »

lacampbell wrote: post #37
FussyZeus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But guess what, a large proportion of the remaining brats will be all attitude and no skill while the drones will at least become doctors and corporate lawyers. By using creativity as the ultimate-and perhaps only-benchmark, Mr. Grant falls into the same trap as the Tiger Moms he so despises. I guess fuck all the parents who think their kids deserve more than an economically-optimized future? Seriously with the fut…

Seriously with the future of humans doing work so utterly in question right now I 100% don't buy this narrative at all. I don't know who started it, but something about it makes me reach for a tinfoil hat. The general historical trend has been towards automation but I still don't see any massive change in the horizon.

oh but its already started. Dont think robots though, think ai, digitalization etc.

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#108

Post by Retric »

hueving wrote: post #101
Retric wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2) This falls into the just world fallacy. Intelligence does not seem to come with real drawbacks. Highly intelligent people often have upper end reflexes, are unusual attractive, highly creative, social, and or content. They are more often taller and live longer as well. The trappings of intelligence are different, but very high raw intelligence is seen across most walks of life including actors, athletes, and sales…

>are unusual attractive Source? I've never heard of intelligence being correlated with visual attractiveness.

Like height the link is probably though health and generally freedom from birth defects. It's not a 1:1 correlation, but it is a positive one.

Consistent with such views, meta-analyses (Jackson, Hunter & Hodge, 1995; Langlois et al., 2000) show that there is a small but significantly positive correlation between intelligence and physical attractiveness https://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/I2011.pdf

That said, selected populations may show a negative correlation such as when more attractive people are more easily given a job etc.

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#109

Post by developer2 »

shouldbworking wrote: post #12

I may be biased from my own experience, but I remember being incredibly frustrated at a young age from the lack of help understanding things I was "too young" for. My role models and teachers made zero efforts to help me learn analog circuit design and my first programming language, Perl. This made it much harder than it would have been if I was attending actual classes, and probably set back my understanding many ye…

>> It's too hard to get placed in anything significantly above your grade level, especially if your brilliance is restricted to a single subject

This. Once past maybe grade 2-3, classes should be per-subject with mixed ages. Throw the 7 year olds together with the 12 year olds who are on the same level for any given subject. At some point, we need to find a way to tailor education to each individual student. Lumping kids together based solely on their age is ridiculous. Letting only very few children skip entire grades across all subjects rather than by level per subject is not the right solution.

I would have given anything to have been 3-5 years ahead in math while at school. I dropped out in grade 11 because the subjects I cared about were so mind-numbingly unchallenging that I lost all interest in what education had to offer me. I make as much today as a software developer as I would with a degree at most companies, so any incentive to go for a Bachelor's or Master's would be for purely personal growth. Of course my high school transcripts are incomplete, so I couldn't even register for university without going back and doing the prerequisite high school equivalency classes.

Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

#110

Post by ckarmann »

postmeta wrote: post #87
alltakendamned wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> French kindergarteners spend 90 minutes sitting down to a white-table-cloth four course meal each day during school. No they don't, I'm not quite sure where you could've got the idea ?

table-cloth is embellishment, but four-course does seem to be part of the system: https://karenlebillon.com/french-school-lunch-menus/

Four-course sounds grandiose but it's nothing more than a little carrot salad, a meal, a little piece of cheese and a yogurt (and some bread), that you get on your meal tray. No kid spend 90 minutes eating that; they rather spend their time playing during the time of lunch break. So it's top 20 minutes swallowing everything (or half of it actually) as fast of possible.
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