<p>Early on, we realized that S needed to be challenged to be happy and to do his best. As long as he could hold his own (be in the middle of the pack), he was happy to be in more advanced classes. If he had to struggle mightily, he might be out of his depth, and going down one level might be indicated. He just played it by ear.
But I think I understand what that math prof was saying. If you have to bring out the heavy artillery, the result may be messy. Parsimony is highly valued in math. Less so in many other disciplines. QED.</p>
<p>Quantmech–that’s funny! My S who is a math major has the laziness thing down!</p>
<p>For a science competition in HS they were required to make a “submarine” that would sink, release ballast, and rise again, by itself.</p>
<p>His elegant solution was to freeze marbles in ice. It sank, melted out a marble, then rose. He didn’t win, of course. Something about the indeterminacy of the payload vs. the ballast. Not to mention the temporary nature of the submarine.</p>
<p>But did he listen to my prediction of the judges’ reaction? No.</p>
<p>It’s not an either/or situation. I spent more time watching clouds, climbing trees, talking to imaginary friends, and building elaborate stories with my toys of talking dinosaurs who lived in forts made of blocks, than just about any little kid I knew. I still liked to learn. I read books constantly and was happy when my mom pulled out the arithmetic flash cards shaped like robots and rockets.</p>
<p>I was bored plenty in school, but had the advantage of living in areas where there were magnets that could escape the standard curriculum in some subjects. It might have required me to go to a school in a part of town that other neighborhood parents wouldn’t have gone within a mile of when I was in 4th and 5th grade, but it meant that during those years we were a year ahead in math and were designing our own scientific experiments and writing small lab reports.</p>
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<p>When I was in 6th grade (at public school), during the Ancient Greek unit, we made vaguely realistic costumes and set up our own mini-Athens in the classroom. It was fun. :)</p>
<p>This thread is interesting because it makes me think about what we did with our kids … I learned a few things from others in my life, like a college roommate who had kids first… we kept lots of books in baskets on the floor so they were always available for the kids to access… we had a lot of pop up books and “find the ____” types of books, ie Waldo etc … I had a great pattern matching card game, remains one of my favorite for bright kids… and we spent a lot of evenings on the floor matching cards, playing games etc… lining up matchbox cars… by engaging on the floor, our kids knew we were in it with them… and our involvement was welcome… </p>
<p>We have always used the mantra “we gave you the ability, now it is up to you to supply the effort to maximize the ability” and sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But, as they mature, even the kids start to realize that they can influence the outcome by their work… our oldest one seems to have incredible innate math ability… and I think what has been described above about “thinking” being needed to be good at math is definitely true for him. He can get quiet sometimes… but he is thinking… our youngest is different than his brother and as a result, he seemed to think he was not as smart… but tests seemed to show they had similiar end results/scores, but different ways to get there. What I know I have seen is the younger was always willing to sit down and do his work… he never dodged it…still doesn’t and we haven’t had some of the procrastination battles we did with the older one… I also think that our youngest will put a bit more effort into his work when he sees results from his previous efforts. This is where great teaching/coaching pays off… because recognition of the effort is so important to each and every kid. </p>
<p>Thinking about the poster who described the math packets…and how some kids thrived and others didn’t move along from bucket to bucket… has me wondering about the ambient noise and distractions in the room… how some kids can screen that out and focus… others are too busy seeing who has what crayons, or they are watching the doorway to see who is going by… some folks have an innate curiosity, ie what is in that next bucket… some folks like to make lists of all the books they read… creating an environment for learning includes minimizing distractions for distractable kids… or building a reward system for a kid who likes to measure their success… perhaps some emotional intelligence for parents and teachers so they can sense what works with each child… and care enough to respond/act accordingly is very important also. This becomes very difficult when working with economically challenged families…especially single parent families… there isn’t much energy left to coach/guide a child after a long day or night of work. That is when optimism or a glass half full view of reality is soooo valuable.</p>
<p>“One byproduct of being smart is that smart kids don’t have to put in effort to succeed academically in the early grades. … The problem once they hit that wall isn’t always that they’re too arrogant to work - it’s sometimes that they never learned how to get results from work.”</p>
<p>That was my downfall – when I got to college at 16 it was the first time I had to study and I had no clue how to do that; and being told what a genius I was, I refused to admit that I needed to study. So I cut classes and watched the TV show Lou Grant being filmed on campus (yes, I"m that old) and got fairly mediocre grades and not much else out of college. So when I learned that my S was a smart one, we pulled him out of public school and put him (at great economic strain at the time) into a private school for the gifted. He finally was in the position of walking into a class not knowing something and having to learn it (after four years of that not being the case!). The big eye opener for him was learning Latin – he had to read, study, memorize, learn new rules, apply old rules, all the basics of learning. Now, being smart, he’s not always challenged in all his courses, but when he faces a tough one he knows how to approach it. He knows how to learn.</p>
Not to mention the temporary nature of the submarine.</p>