[HN Gopher] I grew up gifted, but my life didn't turn out the wa...
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I grew up gifted, but my life didn't turn out the way I expected
(2019)
Author : ddtaylor
Score : 32 points
Date : 2022-05-31 12:00 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbc.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbc.ca)
| devrimbaris wrote:
| The author still focusing on "gifted" rather than problem
| solving. Give kids the means for finding their "purpose".
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| For people who have had experiences similar to what is described
| in the article - I enjoyed the book Mindset by Carol Dweck.
| Peritract wrote:
| It's worth bearing in mind that Dweck's theories have faced
| significant criticism [1] and should be evaluated carefully.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism
| digisign wrote:
| Sounds like folks taking the idea farther than is warranted
| and trying to replicate in a lab without success.
|
| "...to claim that your performance in a cognitive task is
| entirely dictated by how hard you try"
|
| This one in particular is silly. I personally lived the
| experience she describes in her book and reading it was quite
| useful. Never took it to mean, "I could be Einstein, if I
| just tried harder." You can't teach a dog calculus, no matter
| how hard both of you try. But we can improve through
| practice, it's pretty simple.
| Peritract wrote:
| > But we can improve through practice, it's pretty simple.
|
| So simple as to be trivial. As applied to education (it was
| all the rage a couple of years back), Dweck's work is
| either unfalsifiable or just truisms.
| digisign wrote:
| Sounds like you believe "common sense" is common, but it
| is often not. A lot of "truisms" need better publicity.
|
| A pertinent example. Every single job thread here has
| dozens of folks complaining that no interviewing company
| has a lick of interest in training. It causes untold harm
| to everyone involved. It certainly has negatively
| affected me. An incredibly-wide industry thinking that
| folks are unable to learn; it boggles the mind.
| Peritract wrote:
| The belief that students are capable of learning is
| universally accepted in education. To the extent that
| Dweck's ideas are testable and worth publicising, they're
| already embedded in every school.
|
| Dweck's growth mindset is just another Brain Gym [1] -
| it's shaky pseudoscience building on top of a couple of
| inoffensive claims that can't be refuted (and shouldn't
| be), using them to push unsupported assertions and
| expensive training on schools.
|
| Industry's lack of focus on training is deplorable, but
| it's a separate problem. Growth mindset is already the
| kind of thing that recruiters and internal L&D love - it
| looks good on a slide, but it involves no practical
| improvement. Corporate L&D needs fixing, but more
| pseudoscience isn't the answer.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Gym_International
| achenatx wrote:
| My life turned out great and I wouldnt trade being gifted for not
| being gifted. We do focus our kids on working hard. They get
| praise for trying hard, incremental improvements, focus, advance
| preparation, and leadership. We never praise them for being
| smart.
|
| We talk a lot about what happiness means and how to be truly
| happy.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Most of the _really_ smart kids (and the ones I knew in high
| school who ended up the most successful in life terms) did
| "terribly" in school.
|
| It's hard to initially distinguish future successful dropouts but
| there were a few things they had in common.
|
| Firstly they usually came from at least "ok" families - they were
| confident enough in their social supports and knew they had
| "options" and second chances if they needed them.
|
| Usually it was clear that they _could_ do the work (and had no
| trouble in later in life learning independently).
|
| But instead of believing what "the system" told them or following
| its rules, they either ignored or actively explored and exploited
| the rules and behaviour of the system itself. This looks a lot
| like skipping class, acting out and not caring...
|
| But now that I look back it looks a lot like learning the "meta"
| game, which turned out to be much more important in life than
| what was being taught academically at the time.
| Peritract wrote:
| "Gifted" is an expectation rather than a diagnosis.
|
| We're not good at objectively measuring potential. We're
| definitely not good enough to make a lifelong judgement based on
| a cursory examination. Children grow, and change an awful lot -
| any such judgement is premature.
|
| Identification of gifted children is unavoidably filtered through
| cultural/societal/personal bias & baggage. The 'best' case
| scenario here is that it only entrenches existing inequality, but
| in practice it both does that and causes a lot of dissatisfaction
| amongst former 'gifted' children like the author.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| Your third paragraph does not follow. So what if programs don't
| elevate all possible gifted children?
|
| And, we do have evidence that we can identify high potential
| students early. Please look into Duke TIP and similar programs
| that involve administering the SAT to middle schoolers. High
| scorers are significantly more likely to earn advanced degrees
| and create intellectual property such as patents.
| Peritract wrote:
| It's not that programs don't elevate all possible gifted
| children. It's that their definition of 'gifted' is not
| reliable, and it's likely to be conflating 'gifted' with
| 'advantaged'. Are you _actually_ identifying gifted children,
| or just well-fed ones with supportive parents who have the
| same cultural background as you?
|
| Duke's TIP program (and similar) don't limit themselves to
| just identification of gifted children.
|
| > Duke has a long history of providing opportunities for
| talented middle and high school students to gain exposure to
| rigorous academic coursework and to communities of talented
| peers. Many of these opportunities were facilitated by Duke
| TIP, which was established in 1980 and provided valuable
| academic enrichment opportunities for several generations of
| pre-college students. Duke Youth Programs has also provided a
| range of engaging summer programs for more than 20 years. [1]
|
| Again, that's not rigorously identifying gifted children so
| much as it is _asserting_ that some children are gifted and
| then doing a lot of work to ensure that they get better
| advantages /opportunities than others. We don't have anything
| like enough evidence to claim that they are successful in
| their identification, or that the students would have
| achieved similarly on their own.
|
| [1] https://tip.duke.edu/
| astrange wrote:
| I seem to remember qualifying for TIP and then not doing it
| because my parents thought it'd be too expensive. So it's
| unclear how aggressive that helping was.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| > So what if programs don't elevate all possible gifted
| children?
|
| Well, that depends on who is being excluded and why. If the
| process is run by human selection, politics are inevitably
| involved. Assuming there is a positive net outcome for
| selected students, there is even more pressure to 'lobby' and
| 'influence' the decision.
|
| Also, if the number of slots is small, but the cutoff isn't
| in line with percentiles of children in the population, there
| could potentially be more children on the cusp that _aren 't_
| selected than those that were selected. This could mean that
| the assumed net positive effect of 'elevating' the small
| group is outweighed by a net negative effect of _not_
| elevating those on the edge, even though they were
| arbitrarily cut off.
|
| Those are just a few reasons.
| scarmig wrote:
| The point of labeling kids as "gifted" is to try and give
| instruction appropriate to the level of intelligence and
| preparation of different children. Getting rid of this means
| exacerbating the issues the author presents: being in an 8th
| grade classroom where teaching algebra has been banned because
| it's too advanced for the least common denominator is a recipe
| for even greater lack of challenge. If a student goes through
| school without being challenged, they're much more likely to
| run into the issues the author discusses.
|
| It's not that the label is perfect or that we have a perfect
| way to measure who's "gifted" and who's not, but an
| intelligence test coupled with subjective teacher evaluations
| is the best way we do have to identify which tracks are
| appropriate for which children.
| Peritract wrote:
| That's a praiseworthy intention, but I don't believe it works
| in practice, and I really don't believe that any current
| process for selecting 'gifted' children is effective. I'd
| also draw a stark line between 'gifted' programs and what you
| describe
|
| > but an intelligence test coupled with subjective teacher
| evaluations is the best way we do have to identify which
| tracks are appropriate for which children.
|
| I'd call the above streaming or setting, and it's definitely
| valuable/effective. However, it doesn't need to be tethered
| to any system that focuses on labelling students. 'This is
| the stream you are currently in' is a very, very different
| idea to 'this is who you are', particularly for a child.
|
| > being in an 8th grade classroom where teaching algebra has
| been banned because it's too advanced
|
| This is definitely a problem, but I think it's best solved in
| other ways, rather than a poorly-supported regressive policy.
|
| Gifted & talented programs often have positive intentions,
| but every implementation I've ever seen or heard of just
| reinforces existing systems without actually having a
| positive impact.
| gowld wrote:
| In the schools "Gifted" is variously defined as things like "IQ
| test > 130" or "3 std dev in academic performance above local
| school peer group".
|
| This is a bit different from "child prodigies" in music,
| sports, and other skills.
|
| Yes, people expect great success from people who show
| extraordinary talent.
|
| Yes, nature and nurtue are impossible to fully untangle.
|
| Yes, visible natural talent can be smothered, and hidden
| natural talent can be uncovered.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Gifted or not, nothing's wrong about being good at academics.
| That might be one's only gift. But the academy is not what it
| once was, and there's a lot of highly-motivated people seeking
| academic professions (which very often - as I learned from
| talking to professors - involve _a lot_ more than teaching and
| research).
|
| Outside of full-time opportunities in that ideal environment
| then, there are lots of yearners. Surprise, surprise, colleges
| don't worry much about such people. There's another crop moving
| in behind them, more grants to apply for. The outide world looks
| right past specialized outsiders. A lucky few become great
| writers.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Our personal mythology can attribute great significance to
| qualities, like being good at school, and use that significance
| to explain life outcomes even if that's not a particularly
| reasonable conclusion. Just like mythology uses simple ideas to
| explain complex natural phenomenon (e.g. Apollo's chariot pulls
| the sun across the sky) our personal mythology can use a simple
| idea to explain more complicated ones (because I was gifted I
| never tried hard and so I am not X).
|
| Without knowing more about the author's life and what she
| presumes her alternate life would be, it's hard to really make
| sense of her position in this article. If she had been challenged
| more and learned the value of hard work she would be... what?
| What would be different? From her "About" page we see she has an
| English degree, is a mother of two, and writes articles like this
| one. If she had been challenged as a child would she have three
| kids? Write more articles? STEM degree?
|
| I've watched bits of the Johnny Depp trial and one thing that has
| stood out to me is how miserable his life seems. On the outside
| he's a super-famous movie star with tons of money and a beautiful
| wife - and on the inside... On Lex Fridman's podcast Kevin
| Systrom said something about becoming a billionaire that was
| along the lines of life being similarly hard as it was before.
|
| The author of this article seems to have an average life. Most
| people have average lives. Even people at the margins, your
| billionaires and movie stars, only have superficially
| extraordinarily lives that are, at core, fundamentally similar to
| the average person's life. So, in what sense does this author
| think her life would have been different had she been challenged
| more?
|
| Suppose the author couldn't play music well and her parents
| forced her to confront her weakness and learn to play the piano.
| My intuition is that she would be in the same place in life but
| would remember, kind of, how to play a couple songs on the piano.
| The article strikes me as dodging responsibility - "I was not
| challenged and therefore am not a hard worker." If you want to
| work hard, then do that. Challenge yourself. And, if you can't do
| it now, why do you think you could have done it back then?
| julianlam wrote:
| That's the exact takeaway I got from the article as well.
|
| "I was told I was gifted as a child, and so now I use it as a
| crutch to justify being average. Woe are we, the gifted."
| contingencies wrote:
| Giftedness is a crutch for the recognition of strong performance
| in educational systems styled from the industrial revolution on a
| production-line mentality. What is needed is not a continuation
| of the crutch but an overhaul of the mentality. All students can
| benefit from more responsive and personalized educational
| environments, opportunities and support, whether they are
| struggling, baseline bell-curve, or academically excelling.
| Technology offers this potential, but we are yet to realise it
| fully.
|
| Alan Kay often discusses the failed potential for technology with
| respect to education. He has some great quotes like:
|
| _By far the best way to invent a healthy future is to invent the
| children who will invent it._ - Alan Kay
|
| _Children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there 's
| a good chance they will lose the 21st century._ - Alan Kay
|
| _With a good programming language and interface, one - even
| children - can create from scratch important simulations of
| complex non-linear systems that can help one 's thinking about
| them._ - Alan Kay
|
| ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
| gowld wrote:
| The mentality isn't the problem, the budget is. Assembly-line
| is a cost saving strategy, not a pedagogical strategy.
|
| Most good ideas in education are ruined upon deployment because
| they cost more than sociey is willing to spend (on average),
| except for the few who have wealthy private patrons (parents or
| "scholarship aid" / "gifted" programs). And most bad-looking
| ideas are attempts to make the best of the limited budget, or
| good ideas were ruined by lack of budget. "Individualized
| instruction" is the current one -- we can't afford good
| individualized instruction, so everyone hates the bad
| individualized instruction we get.
|
| Gifted kids especially, have complex talents that don't always
| fit inside a software program in a 2-D screen.
|
| Technology can be cost effective, but that's not the same as
| giving best results.
| contingencies wrote:
| Well that's a cop-out. Homeschooling is an option for many of
| us. Furthermore, the global market for an individual, first-
| world teacher, online is currently about $20/hr. There is a
| vast array of resources available immediately at no charge.
| It has never been easier to seek external instruction.
| Gamification of learning has created kids with sophisticated
| understanding of space, time, networks, etc. free of human
| teachers. The trend is clear. We can push further.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn't Turn Out the Way I
| Expected_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20059589 - May
| 2019 (408 comments)
| chaostheory wrote:
| _"They weren't afraid to try new things, whereas my fear of
| failure - something I didn't have a lot of experience with as a
| child - held me back from making the attempt. This fear prompted
| me to stay in what had been my summer job for over a decade past
| university graduation. I had the education to land a higher-
| paying, high-prestige job, but I didn't have the drive or the
| courage that benefitted my former peers."_
|
| This is classic "curse of the gifted". To counteract it, praise
| your children on hard work and tackling hard, risky problems
| instead of correct solutions.
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