I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected • Hacker News Board

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#221

Post by karmelapple » Fri, May 31, 2019, 2:27 PM UTC

nugget wrote: post #208

throwayEngineer wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole prestigious school thing means little imo. After you meet a few dunces from a top school and the rare genius who went to CC, you really stop caring. College is what you make it. If you aren't networking a top school, I don't see the purpose, we all learn math.

I would argue that as University education has scaled up and become commoditized, the value of a generic degree as a signaling function has decreased, and that in response the value of matriculation to a top school has only increased. Schools are just brands and become an extension of the personal brands of their students and alums. Unless you're studying a hard science or similar, I'd bet that the value of lower ran…

To add a little additional context: the prestigious school I was accepted to wasn't exactly highly known for the field I was going into, and with the reality of grade inflation at top-tier schools, I figured I might get a better, or at least more hard-nosed, you-better-work kind of experience at the state school.

I'll never be able to truly compare the two, but I know at my state school that I learned a lot, improved my ability to learn, and gained a lot in perseverance, not to mention made some great friends.

My friends generally did not have parents who worked at top Wall Street firms, were nationally-elected politicians, or were celebrities, and my friends generally were not going to work at the most high-paying, time-demanding, possibly-quality-of-life-shrinking companies/jobs. That's okay, because I don't want to do 80 or 100 hour work weeks, and I don't want the people around me encouraging that, because I want to experience a lot more to life than those kinds of work experiences. Nothing wrong with people who want that, but this route worked well for me.

Part of why it worked for me is because I was privileged enough to have parents who helped me understand myself and what I wanted out of life.

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#222

Post by stronglikedan » Fri, May 31, 2019, 2:28 PM UTC

turk73 wrote: post #62

augustl wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately I spent a lot of that free time playing video games. It was fun but i could've achieved way more. I'm currently beta testing a new optimization - I'm only allowed to play WoW Classic after my todo-list is done. One if the items on the todo-list is "do something productive for 30 minutes" (and currently, there's no shortage of things to fill those 30 minutes with). Maybe I can use the extreme gravitati…

You should throw out all the games. I'm serious. I never really began to succeed until I stopped playing stupid games and became a man. Now I'm managing younger guys who can't put down the controller. Last fall I had to fire someone who was clearly staying up all night playing video games and was never prepared for work nor doing an adequate job at it. Sadly, his own sense of privilege prevented him from being able t…

> I stopped playing stupid games and became a man.

Lol...lot's of men play games, stupid or otherwise, and it doesn't make them less of a man. Responsible men (and women) just know how to moderate. You seem to not be feeling particularly manly (whatever that is) in general, so you should probably try to do whatever you enjoy in moderation, and you will feel better about yourself.

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#223

Post by misterdoubt » Fri, May 31, 2019, 2:29 PM UTC

neogodless wrote: post #137

Gikoskos wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you find this article and post it please? I have to show it to someone

Here are some articles from 2009 that mention Alfie Kohn, who wrote "Punished by Rewards." https://www.leanblog.org/2009/01/leanblog-podcast-57-alfie-k... http://www.blog.montessoriforeveryone.com/are-kids-punished-... This article also looks like a likely candidate for the OP: https://www.parentingscience.com/praise-and-intelligence.htm...

Kohn goes a long way further. Don't praise your children just for "working" hard either -- that's just encouraging them to seek your external validation.

Instead, help nurture your children's own curiosity, interest, and experience in the things that they do.

Stop treating them like lab rats to be conditioned with praise, because we know exactly what happens when that praise inevitably ceases.

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#224

Post by tmaly » Fri, May 31, 2019, 2:31 PM UTC

harryh wrote: post #85

S_A_P wrote: post #17

One of the first articles I remember reading on HN was back in 2009. The gist of the article was that you shouldn’t praise your kids for being smart, praise them when they work hard. Rewarding hard work will better serve them in the long run since being smart will plateau at some point. I have a 9 and 11 year old and I still bristle a little bit when my mom says y’all are so smart.

Be careful relying on studies in this area. The "growth mindset", like much of psychology over the last several decades, is subject to the replication crisis. At the very least, the size of the effect is almost certainly quite small.

I you watch the TED talk by Angela Duckworth, author of Grit book, she says one thing where they still really have not figured out how to teach resilience to kids.

I was speaking to a high school teacher last week, and they use these grit scores and all the tips mentioned in the grit book. But at the end of the day, they still do not have a sure fire method to teach it or the growth mindset.

Years ago I spoke to a retired mathematics professor on this subject. I remember he pointed out that Évariste_Galois was an interesting case in home education. There was not too much written on this, but he was taught by his mother the classics. What he accomplished at such a young age is still be used today in all sorts of fields.

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#225

Post by kaybe » Fri, May 31, 2019, 2:32 PM UTC

adamnemecek wrote: post #176

chrisweekly wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Education has two complementary goals: 1. content curriculum (body of knowledge) 2. learning curriculum (how to learn) The latter is more subtle, and IMHO doesn't receive the attention it deserves.

School absolutely fails on the second one. You are forced to study on someone else's schedule which is terrible for learning.

And don't get me started on group work (because it's 'pedagogically useful'). You get a team of 4-5, 2 hours and a task that can be done alone in ~10 minutes, 20 if you try and integrate the whole team.

And then you're in the real world, and you don't have enough people and time, and you need specialists for the different subtasks.. thanks, school.

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#226

Post by kouh » Fri, May 31, 2019, 2:32 PM UTC

BjoernKW wrote: post #89

S_A_P wrote: post #17

One of the first articles I remember reading on HN was back in 2009. The gist of the article was that you shouldn’t praise your kids for being smart, praise them when they work hard. Rewarding hard work will better serve them in the long run since being smart will plateau at some point. I have a 9 and 11 year old and I still bristle a little bit when my mom says y’all are so smart.

Hard work in itself isn't necessarily valuable. Smart work is. It's vital to learn early on that you have to put in the work if you want to achieve anything at all. Merely being gifted or naturally good at something certainly is not enough. However, I'd say it's just as important to understand the purpose behind any kind of work and to be able to question how things are usually done. Achieving the same or better resu…

Are you sure? Doesn't work have value under any scenario, if only a residual educational value: a lesson for you and/or others? That would reduce "hard" and/or "smart" to multipliers of that value.

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#227

Post by bitexploder » Fri, May 31, 2019, 2:34 PM UTC

CyanBird wrote: post #195

bitexploder wrote: post #74

One of the worst things you can do, as a parent, is tell your kid they are smart. I have two kids and one of them is obviously “gifted”. The other is still pretty far ahead. Smart is a bad word in my house. Gifted is not something that is ever uttered. We (as parents) work very hard to instill a sense of hard work, effort, and purpose into our kids lives. They do BJJ, a martial art that is very hard, even if you are…

I wonder how would it be possible to teach young children to not value "being smart" and make that stick as they grown into rebel teenagers, deception is certainly not the way to go, as they will obviously notice it over time. Telling them "it doesn't matter" I don't think that's sticky enough, probably just being upfront and saying to them the reasons behind it, why it doesn't matter

They figure it out for themselves. No one has to tell you. It is a very difficult balancing act. I could write a long essay length document on my approach to this. My son is older, age 12, and he knows he is smart now, but, I think about it in concrete terms of how does this matter? He just /IS/ smart. He won't ever be dumb. But if I can't teach him how to work hard and apply his natural gifts and what he has learned what good is being smart? I think kids are really good at figuring it out and using it (intelligence) without a lot of guidance. Of course, we do things and I try to keep them challenged at home, but I also try to show them what hard work is and how to enjoy simple things. In the real world, people care more about what you can do than how smart you are. Of course we love it when smart people do great things, but... it just doesn't matter in practice. I think it is all about focusing on values and emphasizing things (like hard work) over smart.

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#228

Post by asark » Fri, May 31, 2019, 2:34 PM UTC

Hendrikto wrote: post #42

> my husband, young son and I were living in my parents’ house. How big is her parent‘s house?

Standard suburban detached-house above-grade bedroom count in the US since at least the 80s is 3br in normal neighborhoods, sometimes 4 in the more expensive ones. If for some reason you want a 2br house you're probably gonna have to look at neighborhoods 35+ years old, or attached (duplex, say) housing. Lots of the 3br houses in places where basements are the norm have been upgraded with a fourth, basement bedroom—sometimes "nonconforming" (no emergency exit window) especially if it was finished 20+ years ago, but that hasn't stopped people from sleeping in them.

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#229

Post by cozzyd » Fri, May 31, 2019, 2:36 PM UTC

sanxiyn wrote: post #136

beauzero wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother was always a better learner/student than me as well. He would study 10+ hours for an exam...or all night if that is what it took. I would cram 15 minutes before an exam. We both got similar grades. The difference is that he retained most of what he studied. A month later I didn't remember it. We adjusted our jobs similarly. Mine requires large amounts of information being take in and used quickly to solve…

This kind of thinking is very foreign to me but apparently it is common? Getting 100% in exam never required any effort for me, so I never studied for exam. I always studied to understand, so I retained it all.

Yeah it's as if the exam is the goal rather than understanding the subject...

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#230

Post by dugluak » Fri, May 31, 2019, 2:37 PM UTC

adamnemecek wrote: post #176

chrisweekly wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Education has two complementary goals: 1. content curriculum (body of knowledge) 2. learning curriculum (how to learn) The latter is more subtle, and IMHO doesn't receive the attention it deserves.

School absolutely fails on the second one. You are forced to study on someone else's schedule which is terrible for learning.

But that's the reality of life and part of learning as well. Most of us don't get the luxury of doing things on our own schedule or terms. Usually the schedule is decided by someone else, like the customer or the boss or whoever is paying you.