Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Trouble with Bright Kids

blogs.hbr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 156 posts

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#41

Post by mikeklaas »

bane wrote: post #14
chunky1994 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My god, this sounds so much like me! Although I'm not always miserable, only I'd always done well in school except for the last two years when everything just got very, very boring. I graduate this year, and everything you've said in: > At 16 I found myself thinking seriously about killing myself. I spent more than one night at my sink with a kitchen knife at my wrist wondering if I should go ahead and make the cut o…

It sounds hopelessly stupid, but it saved me. I'm one of the few percentage of the population that can frisson to certain works of music. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson When I was sitting there, knife to my wrist, the thought of all of the music that I would miss, that I wouldn't discover or be able to frisson to (I didn't know what it was called at the time and only learned what it was decades later, but I kne…

Any citations for it only being a few percent of the population who can experience frisson? It seems more common than that, in my experience.

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#42

Post by nl »

chunky1994 wrote: post #33
nl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how did you get around that Get around what exactly? I don't think he is saying he got around anything - just that he dropped things he didn't like. If I know that then I certainly wouldn't be this depressed It probably doesn't sound useful, but there probably isn't a single simple answer to how . BUT - more usefully, there are simple answers to when . Things will get awesome in somewhere between 1 and 3 years - as s…

I meant how did he manage to stop doing that, unless he continues to do so, yet things are awesome for him now. I want to know how things managed to become awesome if he still continues to drop boring things, or how he managed to convince himself to work on boring things.

Oh, right.

Well I dropped boring things, and things turned out alright. Just make sure you aren't using that as an excuse for avoiding things that aren't as easy. I never found Math as easy as I'm sure some of the Math genius on HN find it, but I didn't drop it either, for example.

I do agree that developing a good work ethic is important.

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#43

Post by mjtokelly »

chunky1994 wrote: post #11
bane wrote: post #8

Like many HNers, I was a pretty bright kid growing up. I scored embarrassingly well on most aptitude tests, and before entering middle school found myself the subject of repeated IQ, aptitude, learning style, personality style, thinking style, and psychological analysis by befuddled education specialists trying to figure out why I did so poorly in school. Here's a sample of what I endured before entering 6th grade. -…

My god, this sounds so much like me! Although I'm not always miserable, only I'd always done well in school except for the last two years when everything just got very, very boring. I graduate this year, and everything you've said in: > At 16 I found myself thinking seriously about killing myself. I spent more than one night at my sink with a kitchen knife at my wrist wondering if I should go ahead and make the cut o…

I was desperately bored in high school, and my solution was starting college early:

http://www.simons-rock.edu/

At Simon's Rock, the whole entering class consists of students who just finished 10th grade. In my experience there, self-selected 16-yr olds given the opportunity and expectation to live like adults mostly rise to the occasion.

That advice comes a bit late, given you have just 6 months of high school left. For you I would say two things:

1) It Gets Better

2) You can do anything for just 6 months.

Hang in there!

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#44

Post by 110101001010100 »

110101001010100 wrote: post #12
bane wrote: post #8

Like many HNers, I was a pretty bright kid growing up. I scored embarrassingly well on most aptitude tests, and before entering middle school found myself the subject of repeated IQ, aptitude, learning style, personality style, thinking style, and psychological analysis by befuddled education specialists trying to figure out why I did so poorly in school. Here's a sample of what I endured before entering 6th grade. -…

This does not say much for the value of testing _and making presumptions based on test results_. Note the emphasis on the second part of that sentence. Testing is ok. Recognising that all children are not the same intellectually is fine. But making presumptions based on limited evidence, like test scores, is something I have always wondered about. This story only reinforces my beliefs.

s/test/standardised &

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#45

Post by kevinalexbrown »

chunky1994 wrote: post #19
bane wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds hopelessly stupid, but it saved me. I'm one of the few percentage of the population that can frisson to certain works of music. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson When I was sitting there, knife to my wrist, the thought of all of the music that I would miss, that I wouldn't discover or be able to frisson to (I didn't know what it was called at the time and only learned what it was decades later, but I kne…

> Why did I do so poorly in school despite the tests? It was probably the tests. I was told I was so smart so many times that the effect mentioned in this article seems particularly germane. I didn't work hard, so I didn't do well, but I tested high, so I thought the system was broken, not me. I was already smart, so I didn't need that fact positively reinforced, but I did need instances of hard work reinforced. I ha…

The how for me usually comes through a change in attitude. One such change is knowing that learning boring things now can pay off down the line, that what you're doing pays off. Once you accept that, you'll approach the mundane shit with new vigor. For me in high school, I hated history class - you learn some remote facts, you memorize them, you spit them out in an essay on a test. Who the hell cares? We had shitty weekly assignments where you literally just made an outline of the chapter you were reading. I remember very little of the actual content. But ... years later I'm really glad that I have the skill to quickly scan and digest mundane information. This ability didn't just happen - no one is born with a text filter that magically highlights important facts in paragraphs.

Not all the mundane bullshit you have to do will be important later in your life. But you won't know beforehand what parts were good and what parts weren't. So you can sink into not caring, or you can believe that maybe 1/5 boring things will save your ass someday. Sure, you might be smarter than your teachers now, but knowing how to impress 'dumber' people is a really important skill that about 50% of smart people don't grasp.

I've been through similar things, and I should emphasize that things do get better as bane says.

Here's a comic that helped to remind me that at some point it wasn't just about learning bullshit, but that at the end of the day you can do really cool things with crap that seems boring and trivial now: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2125#c...

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#46

Post by dpe82 »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #31
chunky1994 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what I do rather than giving up is just sink into my own world, and if that's not destructive, I don't know what is. I just feel depressed, and then end up feeling that I should be stronger and I'm weak because I'm depressed, which just makes me even more miserable.

Meta-emotion will destroy you. I deal with it occasionally and it is absolutely vicious. I'm considering trying cognitive behavioral therapy to get away from it.

It can. What helped me was learning that depression is a physical phenomenon resulting from trained signaling pathways in one's brain that can be observed and retrained. That's what CBT attempts to do, but learning some of the science behind it allowed me to really figure out what I needed to do to help myself.

These are the two books that helped the most:

"The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060988479/ref=oh_o05_s00_i...

and

"Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345479890/ref=oh_o03_s00_i...

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#47

Post by mcobrien »

cletus wrote: post #40

Like others who have posted here, I have s story similar to this. By the sounds of it, I wouldn't call myself as "gifted" as some who have posted here but, relative to the environment I was in, I was "gifted". I grew up in three small towns. For the first 9 years, in a town of less than 1,000 where the 3rd and 4th grades (for example) were in the same class. When I was 8 I was doing the same work as the 7th graders w…

Thanks for sharing this. I have a bright five year-old and, having read articles like this one, my partner and I try praise effort as much as we can.

Here's the problem. For nearly all of the tasks she's set in school, she doesn't need to expend much effort at all. We say, "nice work, you must have tried really hard!" and she replies, a little confused at us, "no".

It sounds like you found everything too easy as well. What kind of feedback would have worked for you?

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#48

Post by 110101001010100 »

lightcatcher wrote: post #36

At my school, we have a bit of a "culture of genius" problem. Many, if not most, of my classmates grew up being one of the smartest people they knew. This lead to the widespread (and maybe not untrue) belief that we can do things that other people simply cannot. This leads to a lot of students setting themselves up to fail (epic procrastination, expecting to do well on finals after never going to a class or studying)…

I know someone who earned an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry without attending a single lecture. He finished in the top 1/3 of the graduating class for that department.

But I know that during the time that we were in class suffering through boring lectures that often made no sense, he was dissecting each and every handout, combing through mutliple textbooks he got from the library and downloading and reading every journal reference in the class notes.

The crazy thing is, I think he learned more than any of us who had perfect attendance at lectures.

I know he wasn't the "smartest" guy in our classes but he often knew more about certain areas than even the MS and PhD candidates who were assisting us in labs. He was just getting much more out of the things we did because he had some background going in.

The guy was just super curious and did his homework like nobody's business. Sheer effort. It was impressive.

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#50

Post by dpe82 »

nl wrote: post #32
chunky1994 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed there is, but even when I do talk to that person, it's seems to just highlight the fact that I'm stuck in a place I don't want to be, and though I want to get out of it, there's no conceivable way to do so. There' so little time to do anything, and this year's going to decide my future. It's really hard to not think of it like a noose around your neck, and whenever I do think about it, I keep wondering whether…

this year's going to decide my future. That is totally, absolutely wrong. Just because teachers etc say it doesn't mean you should believe it. I'm sure you've read how Steve Jobs forced himself to go to college because it was what was expected, and then dropped out. Personally, I missed the course I wanted to do, started something else, dropped that and finally ended up doing a computer science degree (which was some…

Personally, I missed the course I wanted to do, started something else, dropped that and finally ended up doing a computer science degree (which was something I'd ignored for 3 years)

I had a very similar experience that took this geeky computer nerd into the crazy and scary world of politics for a couple years. I ended up running a state senate campaign and worked for the WI Senate Majority Leader for about 2 years. It was crazy and completely different from anything I would have experienced had I stuck to Computer Engineering and graduated in the standard 4 years like everyone expects. It happened by accident (because I was purposefully wandering) and was far more educational than anything I could have done in college. It was is by far the best thing I ever did.

Don't be afraid of a curvy path through life. There's a lot of value in the curves.

Edit: formatting

Post reply on HN