Spent part of New Year’s Eve with friend of son who totally kills it in the brain department. Speaks several languages, gifted in music and science and very quirky in a wonderful way.None of his friends is signing up to BE him however.
It is fantastic to know people as bright as this kid (loose term–he’s in his 20’s). I know quite a few brains.
I learned the second I got to college and entered professional school that I had run into a group that was as smart and smarter than me, I did have to work harder to get grades and excel. Someone who I really admired NEVER studied. He was able to get info by osmosis.
I think it is more important to be open to incorporating other people into your life. Be the person who accepts different ideas and recognize other people’s strengths.Let their strengths become yours.
There will always be people smarter, stronger than you.
I do not see anything wrong with waiting out for luck. If it has been a proven working strategy within your family why not? The most important here is not to get frustrated by comparing yourself to others. And what you see outside may not be true about the person at all. You cannot get into person’s brain to see what is going on and how hard person works or maybe relying on his good luck that has always been there for him. Just stay cool and do whatever YOU need to do to succeed. And again, you may not even have a goal of success at all or maybe not in this specific class. Respecting yourself, your own wishes and treating yourself well is actually also a skill that needs some work.
My two daughters are close in age, get along well, and are both very smart and talented in many areas. There have been many times where one of them was in tears because the other one was “better than me at everything.” A week later the other one would be in tears saying exactly the same thing. Navigating comparisons with others in a healthy way involves understanding that you don’t see the whole picture and that differences can be a good thing and not a bad one. I’m glad we aren’t all the same. That would be boring! Setting goals for oneself needs to be done by making a realistic evaluation of ones own talents, interests, abilities and going from there. Jealousy isn’t helpful.
For school aged kids, academics are such a big part of reality that the ones that struggle more with grades get the idea that they don’t measure up. Many of those same kids go on to be very successful outside of academics in ways they can’t yet imagine. Many of the academically talented kids hit struggles they can’t yet imagine. As a parent, when my kids come to me with this stuff I can bring some perspective to the conversation about talent, hard work, success that they do not yet have.
My D’s best friend is one of those highly gifted individuals that can quickly master most subjects with little effort. She has never made anything other than an A, ranked 1 in her class, made a NMSF qualifying score in 9th grade, musically gifted, lots of friends and very humble.
We tell my D that her friend is just a freak of nature and she should feel blessed to have her as a friend, but do not try to emulate her. We encourage our D to do the best she can with the gifts she has and not worry about others accomplishments. My D is still frustrated with how easily her friend masters new material and how quickly she can complete tasks.
Disclaimer: I read some, but not every post in this thread.
No doubt there are people who “naturally smart,” but I think they are out numbered and in many cases outsmarted by people who “naturally hardworking.” Many people think my D (Asian) is “naturally” smart. But to me, she is more “training and hardworking-ly” smart.
This thread reminds me of my first semester in community college. I just came to the US for 6 months. In an engineering class, one of my classmates was a lady (non-Asian) who was very competitive. The problem was that I was always slightly ahead of her. After a midterm for which I got perfect score, she came to me, “Hey, you’re so smart.” “Neah… I don’t think so.” “So how come you know all the answers? You took this class before?” “No, this is the first time I’ve dealt with this stuff. But I know the answers because I work all the exercises in the book.” “Every single one of them?” “Yes.”
She didn’t believe it, “Can I borrow your notes?”
The next class meeting, I handed you a three-ring binder that included solutions for all the exercises in the textbook, neatly presented in my own handwriting.
She then realized that I was not that smart after all.
^^^ Yeah, that is an an important point. I have been in a class in college with people I would consider natural geniuses that I know didn’t do homework (it was Calc III and it wasn’t assinged) and got As. I did a lot of homework and went to the teacher for help often and also got an A. Just a different path to the A…
There are some really excellent books on the topic.
Cal Newport (a straight A MIT PhD graduate) has a book called “How to Become a Straight A Student” that illustrates a lot of short cuts to studying, so that you’re studying smarter, not longer. He also writes about study techniques on his blog Study Hacks.
I’m one of the students who spent less time studying than a lot of my peers and aced all of my undergrad and grad classes at Berkeley. I think the main difference is the approach to studying and working on assignments. I write about unconventional methods for achieving high grades “naturally” with a few tricks and alternative study methods. The blog is called IntrotoHonors.
Your son doesn’t need to ignore or pay attention to the other students, but test out different strategies to see what suits his style best. A few tweaks in his process and he could start raising his GPA while reducing stress.
The sad thing is, there’s no class that teaches you how to study or do well in college, yet it’s a skill like anything else!
Pentaprism, " who “naturally hardworking.” Many people think my D (Asian) is “naturally” smart. But to me, she is more “training and hardworking-ly” smart." - you have just described my D. She has actually said several times at least to me “I am not smart, I am hardworking” - the same as your D’s comment : “Hey, you’re so smart.” “Neah… I don’t think so.”. Hardworking in my D’s mind takes multitasking all the time. To the point that she absolutely cannot watch TV without playing a CandyCrash or checking /answering emails. When I asked her to just enjoy watching our favorite team playing, she said that she cannot just watch TV, she needs to do something else in addition.
Also, in regard to being Asian. My D. was given a title of “Honorary Chinese” by her medical school classmates. They said that it is because she is a very good student and plays an instrument. Well, playing piano was just one of many D’s EC’s growing up. It is just her way to be involved in everything, including socially.
Best wishes to your D.! Sounds like a winner to me! I do not know how one could loose with this attitude!
One of my kid goes to a gifted middle school with correspondingly high standardized test scores. Some of her classmates blow her scores away. She gets A’s from working hard but mostly takes pride in the fact that she excels at various creative pursuits that aren’t measured by tests.
High school was really easy for me–I really didn’t have to study much at all. When I got to college, I learned that my high school was too easy, especially with regard to math and foreign languages. I learned this the hard way.
So, some of those naturally smart people may be skating by with As, but they aren’t actually getting very good preparation in those subjects. Some of the kids who have to study more may be getting better preparation.
My Indian husband did not work hard in medical school. His natural abilities let him goof off and learn the material. Likewise in the US he had an easier time of things during training and eventually during his medical career. I am less smart, only low end gifted, and hate to memorize so I had to work harder. One gets to the point where you have to decide your lifestyle. For physicians this means many hours in any residency but then choosing your path. Some choose uber competitive paths and work hard. Others get the job done. Some choose shift work, such as emergency medicine , which has its own lifestyle challenges (imagine changing day shift to night shift in different months- you can’t just take one or the other in private practice). There are super smart physicians who choose ordinary practices instead of trying to be researchers/academicians et al. Along with the rest of us competent physicians who can do the job well.
There is more to life than always working hard to attain the highest level of achievement, btw. It may not seem so to premedical, medical students and residents because they are caught in needing to learn so much. After awhile one figures out what things are worth and chooses a path.
I relate to not just majoring in something because one is good at it- I choose chemistry because I liked it best. No regrets even though I switched to medicine for grad schooling. Some majors would have been so much easier but not interesting to me. The globally intelligent are lucky to have many choices.
Befriend them, find common ground, and use them as intelligence sources for studying and free food opportunities*.
Including getting them in on enthusiastically facilitating the crashing of their parents'/family's dinner parties/soirees. :D
Had the exact opposite experience. Barely kept my head above academic water in HS, found college to be reasonably manageable/easy.
The latter was a factor in my trying to take the most advanced college courses allowed without taking the intros*. At the time, felt doing otherwise meant I wasn’t “doing college right”.
Took an advanced graduate course without taking the prereqs for the same reason in grad school against the dean’s and Profs’ advice and did fine.
I did make it a point to read through the entire syllabus in the preceding break/first few weeks of the semester in question.
I read the Cal Newport book, as did a few of my friends. The funny thing about freak of nature smart people; they assume that you can just want to do something and voila, it happens. The whole book was like that. I came away from it thinking that regular people are going to hate themselves because they don’t process and absorb like Cal the Wunderkind…
I also read the Newport book. I think he is right, but he is speaking to us from the successful outcome end, not from the “training yourself to study smart” end. I think it would be a much more interesting book if he could have somehow gone back in time to high school and written it from the teen Cal Newport perspective. Also he seems a little too in love with himself which is kind of unattractive in an author.
About the original post, we have these social comparison problems in our home and in our school district they are rampant. I believe that some parents encourage these comparisons and then the kids spread the ill feeling around. We try to combat it by reminding our kids that grades are private…you know like your toothbrush. you don’t share them. But a lot of times that is not practical.
I remember spending a lot of time in high school thinking. not studying but thinking about what happened in my classes. I had good grades and other kids’ parents were jealous because after all it was all so easy to me. But now I wonder how many of those kids went home, sat down on the couch with the tv and radio off, and just thought about school. Probably not many…
“We try to combat it by reminding our kids that grades are private…you know like your toothbrush. you don’t share them.”
This is such a great strategy for just moving on in the day and avoiding the complex, myriad and sometimes illogical reactions that can come when the grade is shared. It helps keep kids, kids.
“But I know the answers because I work all the exercises in the book.” “Every single one of them?” “Yes.”
I read somewhere that noted physicist Richard Feynman did much the same, though he did not share this information. He is said to have kept solutions to problems that had been thought unsolved, or particularly tricky to solve, in boxes in a basement. When someone would approach him, excited to have happened upon a “solution,” or eager to challenge Feynman, he would drolly share his previously worked out solution, as though this were nothing at all to give deep thought to. Drove people mad.
"A grade is just a point in time. It is not an ultimate life determination. It is important to keep kids, kids. "
for some career path, it just does not work like this. You are either in or totally out. And the difference is if you have at least 3.6 or the GPA gone down to 3.3. This tiny .3 may be “an ultimate life determination”, that tiny .3 may result in derailing one’s life long dream! I believe that adding a bit more effort to actually maintain what one needs for achieving a life long dream may be very well be worth it. And 17 y o - 20 y o are not little kids anymore especially considering that a large percentage in this age group work and any work is great responsibility. I agree that grades are totally private business. D. choose the crowd of friends who were not into discussing grades / scores / acceptances / working habits…etc. with each other. They just wanted to have fun. D. deliberately avoided “intense” people who are into this type of discussions.
MiamiDAP, didn’t your daughter go to a high school with like 35 kids in a class? How could she “choose the crowd of friends who were not into discussing grades / scores / acceptances / working habits…etc. with each other. They just wanted to have fun. D. deliberately avoided “intense” people who are into this type of discussions.”? If one or two of the 35 wanted to discuss grades, how could it be avoided?
My kids went to a small school. There were no ‘crowds’ to choose from. Everyone was on the same basketball team, everyone in the same girl scout troop, same birthday parties, same homework. There was no avoiding the kids who wanted to brag about getting an A on a test or project, no opting to find anther ‘crowd’. Of course they chose their individual friends, but there wasn’t that big of pool to pick from. At many high schools, the same thing happens because the group of kids taking the same courses (orchestra, French, Calc BC) is pretty small. Often my kids would end up with the same 4-5 kids in several classes just because that’s how the schedules worked out.