<p>Did we cross-post? I just said that, aside from foreign language skills, I’m talking about kids who are well past finger-painting age.</p>
<p>Sorry, Hanna; you’re right, it was Realmom who mentioned fingerpainting.</p>
<p>OTOH, are we ever really past finger-painting age? :)</p>
<p>I have yet to reach finger-painting age, now that you mention it; I was a pretty squeamish 3-year-old, and I refused to put my hands in that slime. Sand pies, yes; finger-painting, no. Maybe when I get a little older. :)</p>
<p>Ditto on elem/mid school often not being challenging for kids.</p>
<p>We are in a fairly upper-mid-class area (lots of lawyers/doctors/engineer families). Yet again & again the kids learn the same state-mandated curriculum (Columbus, the pilgrims, ad nauseum). When my (now 16 yo) son was in 5th grade, some other parents & I got a tutor to teach the kids physics and cultures outside of the same 200 yrs of Americana (e.g. Asian, Ancient Greco/Roman, etc.)</p>
<p>They really enjoyed it.</p>
<p>OK, it could be that I’m the only one! The described behavior (a 5th grader rubbing his hands together, smacking his lips, and saying, “I love a challenge!”) seems a little odd to me. Not the love of challenge–that’s familiar enough! It could be a question of culture–perhaps it’s a more common sort of statement, outside of my area. Maybe the anti-nerd culture didn’t get to the student yet. Maybe he was a recent immigrant . . . </p>
<p>But knowing (maybe) 150 scientists and mathematicians quite well and knowing more than a thousand to some extent, having taught about 2500 students, thinking about my contemporaries (maybe 500-600 of them), and QuantMechPrime’s (another 500), I can think fewer than ten who would have made a statement like that at any point, and half of them would have been doing it tongue-in-cheek. A question about my talk on Kruskal coordinates? From Kruskal? I love a challenge! </p>
<p>I applaud the love of challenge–but the particular expression of it in the article just strikes me as a little artificial. Maybe it was different in person?</p>
<p>^I agree with you.</p>
<p>I’m sure it was different in person. On my part, I know too many risk-avoiding smart kids, and I would find it very refreshing to know even more of the kids who say, however they say, “I like a challenge.”</p>
<p>I think they would most likely to smack their lips and say I love an Oreo cookie. :)</p>
<p>^^tokenadult: It goes without saying that I appreciate your contributions to this forum, and I think we agree more than disagree.</p>
<p>Most of the academically risk-adverse students I know are pre-meds; and unfortunately, current medical school admissions policies reinforce cautious course selection.</p>
<p>It seems to me that a testing method mentioned in the article (pattern recognition, with students explaining their thinking as they were going along) confounds the willingness to accept challenge with personality characteristics, though. I’m quite sure that I would not like to discuss my thinking out loud, with a “tester,” while trying to solve problems near the limits of my conceptual ability. (I’d be losing IQ points just thinking about that.) Persistence in problem-solving on one’s own is different, and incompletely correlated with the task described. If one wants an active team problem-solver, though, one probably wants the person who is happy to think out loud.</p>
<p>If the expression was authentic to the student, then I’m happy to endorse the expression as right for him–but I also like quieter zeal.</p>
<p>Hanna, the Montessori system is exactly what I was referring to. The kids choose what they are interested in, don’t they? The choice is what we need. Yes, of course, we want our kids to enjoy their childhood. But how can we say that watching TV and attending boring classes in elementary school is more “fun” for kids than learning something interesting? Of course, it takes more effort on an adult’s part to make learning fun for young kids…</p>
<p>Please make that “risk-averse.” Can’t edit the post.</p>
<p>When I was in middle school, there was a popular teaching method used in my school, called “The Packet System”. It was abandoned after a couple years, because only a certain sub-set of students did well on it. However, I was one of those who did, and am so grateful to have passed through the school during those years.</p>
<p>It was mainly in math, and consisted of plastic buckets full of “packets” - like chapters of math - sitting along the edge of the room. You worked your way independently through the first packet. Then took a test. If you passed (not “squeaked by” - but actually demonstrated competency), you went to the next “chapter.” I went through two years of math in one year. The class had about 60 students of all abilities, and 3 or 4 teachers, who wandered around helping students. Students were required to pass a certain number of packets for a “C”, more for a “B” and still more for an “A.”</p>
<p>However, many of the students were not motivated enough, and did the bare minimum. So the program was abandoned as a fad. It was the absolute best math experience I’ve ever had, though.</p>
<p>I’ve known kids who went through Montessori (here in Gemany, where I am at the moment) who learned absolutely nothing. I wonder if they have the same problem.</p>
<p>My daughter went through Montessori math at an unbelievable pace, and loved not being held back by others. Now she is back in public school waiting around for everyone to catch up or understand the current concept. For her, like Binx, the former way was much preferable.</p>
<p>“I wonder if they have the same problem.”</p>
<p>Yes, some do. That’s why I think Montessori is not ideal as a universal system (although I’d prefer it to the present near-universal system). Some kids just don’t care, and they won’t do squat unless you make them. But if you’re a motivated kid, it’s the best thing in the world. When I was in first grade (in a multi-grade classroom), a second-grader and I had a special advanced reading group where we read biographies of Louis Braille and Helen Keller. We were fascinated, so we learned Braille and got involved in some advocacy for the blind. No pressure; just inspiration. If we’d been stuck reading Dr. Seuss, we would have learned one thing for sure: to hate school.</p>
<p>I just got inspired to Google that second-grader from my reading group…she’s a chemical engineer.</p>
<p>jessiehl has posted a set of insightful comments on the subject of the article; I agree with her and will try to avoid repeating those.</p>
<p>To provide more a serious reaction to the subject of the article, having recovered from a fit of pique about the one aspect of it:
I am very much of the opinion that a person can increase his/her intellectual ability by working on difficult problems, in a way that represents a true increase in the capability to solve unfamiliar problems, and not simply the acquisition of knowledge or the application of learned patterns. I also think that this can happen at any ageeven ours (for the actual parents on this forum). It seems beneficial for a student to understand that ability is malleablealthough in my case, at least, I didnt believe it prior to having clear-cut personal experience of it, in college. </p>
<p>All that being said, I have some qualms about the research methodology and analysis, in addition to a few comments that fall into the devils advocate category (to be posted later).</p>
<p>For example, I would be curious to see the Human Subjects approval forms for this research. Do you think that you would have given informed consent for your children to participate in the studies described in the articles?</p>
<p>The article just confirms what I always have told my kids: you are very bright, but without hard work, it won’t get you anywhere. I believe it takes both to succeed…no matter who you are. In fact, in my opinion, hard work is the more important of the two. Two of my three kids work very hard and are very successful in school…the third was a bit derailed in middle and high school by ADHD discovered late, but is doing much better in college…and has always been a hard worker outside of school.</p>
<p>I may have said this on another thread–I always get annoyed when teachers (not just parents or other students) say “Your child is so smart” as if that is the sole reason they do well. They were all born with good brains, but if they didn’t do their work, they wouldn’t be so successful. If they didn’t do way more reading than TV or video games, ditto.</p>
<p>I always praised them more for working hard than for just being “smart.”</p>
<p>Definitely.</p>
<p>As a countervailing element, I should mention that a math prof once advised me not to go into mathematics because I wasn’t “lazy enough.” He meant that a mathematician needed to resist the temptation to work too hard, slogging through to a result, using a straightforward, but time-consuming approach-- rather than sitting back and searching for a more elegant approach, which would be harder to find, but faster, deeper, and more beautiful. I admire mathematical elegance, and spot it when I can; but in my line of work, the willingness to slog has also served me well.</p>