Go Ahead, Let Your Kids Fail
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Intrinsic motivation is the dominant factor. A student that's actually driven by curiosity and a desire to master everything he or she can is tens or hundreds of times more effective than someone acting out of extrinsic motivation -- the carrots and sticks of grades and punishments.
It is so much easier to learn this way that the other kids who are just slogging it out seem to be moving in slow motion. Staying far enough ahead of them to get good grades takes very little effort when you've actually internalized that learning is something you do for fun.
The real trick of course is igniting the desire in the first place. Which has been obvious for at least two millennia:
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited." - PlutarchI always thought it was misguided to advice parents to demand homework be done at a certain time or enforce certain metrics (test scores, volunteer hours, etc), rather than just having intelligent conversations about, well, anything!
Parents are one part of it, but teachers are another. I grew up in a very rural but fairly rich community, not because the people were rich (quite the opposite actually), rather because there was a nuclear power plant in town that paid 98% of the towns taxes.
I don't remember the exact prompt but I do recall writing a paper for 10th grade english class about quarks. My english teacher went and talked to one of our science teachers because she thought I made up the entire thing, she didn't think quarks were real.
That in itself is fine, this was 1998, I doubt many english teachers would be aware of them. What bothers me is that I'm fairly sure that the only reason my paper wasn't just thrown out was that we were lucky enough to get a science teacher who was an ex-Harvard associated researcher whom moved 'out to the sticks' for family reasons. It was this chap that my english professor asked, thankfully, since I'm relatively certain that no one else in the school, let alone the rest of the science department, would have had a clue. Without that stroke of luck I'd have probably been given an F and not even considered writing outside the box papers again, or at least delayed writing another one.
Side note, but this random teacher I had was amazing, he really changed a lot of the way I look at things. From his profession (biology), to thinking entrepreneurial, to learning the basics of the stock market when I was 14...I learned a lot from that guy. All because we were just lucky enough to have someone of his caliber there to glean knowledge from. It's amazing what a single teacher can do to change someone very early in their life.
Which is to say, your (depressingly typical) English teacher shouldn't be given the benefit of the doubt on this. She probably had a dictionary sitting in her classroom that could have told her what "quark" means and that they come in six flavors. But she didn't even think to reach for it. Nevermind actually going to the library like she probably orders her students to do.
Nobody can be faulted for not knowing everything, but not even trying to learn is unforgivable in an alleged teacher.
Not only did people use online dictionaries, but we also used online maps (mapquest.com), movie listings (moviefone.com), greeting cards (bluemountain.com) and hundreds of other online services. Netscape had already hit its peak and was on its way down. High school textbooks spoke of the internet. I don't think I knew students who hadn't used instant messengers like Yahoo!, AIM or ICQ.
I was in a town of about 100,000 people in Colorado.
quark n. (Phys.) one of several (orig. three) hypothetical components of elementary particles.
That's from the 7th edition (1982, reprinted 1984) of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, about the size of a thick hardback novel.
Granted, there's not much there, but enough to prove that a student's not just making something up.
What I don't understand is, if there was such confusion over units, why didn't they simply use known values for the distances involved? I imagine angles weren't a problem. Or, god forbid, do their own measurements now that they had the technique? If it was repeatable to that degree of precision 240 years apart nearly 2000 years earlier, I should have thought they could at least settle the gross magnitude error that misled Columbus.
[1]1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Geographic...
I was referring specifically to the pattern of how long it took in the Middle Ages for literature folks to get ahold of the idea. The fact is those 8th century monks got the idea from classical sources.
The subtext of the paper would be "you English teachers can't expect to know about scientific discoveries of the last couple hundred years, can you?"
The outperformers did get a few Bs along the way (or many) but to your point had intellectual parents. In some cases they enforced studying. In others it was providing early access to computers.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/28/mind-fire/
Yes, to your substantive point, learning is easy (comparatively) when the motivation is intrinsic. Trying to preserve intrinsic motivation in my four children is why I keep slogging along in homeschooling.
I had no competitive sports involvement in my youth, nor did my wife, but we've encouraged our children all to be involved in our local soccer club, and I LOVE that they have had early experience in shrugging off defeats and continuing to improve their skills on the field. One loss (or even a bunch of losses) does not end a playing career.
And I'm a homeschooling parent too, though my son is still quite young and we will play it by ear.
For me, it was Scouting more than sports that gave me something meaningful to succeed and fail at. There are many good ways beyond classrooms.
In real-life, however, things are reversed. Being mediocre yet diligent at doing busy work in a variety of subjects, which is precisely what earning a 4.0 implies, is not terribly valuable. Instead what matters is excelling at a small number of things, perhaps even only one.
The conceit of our educational system is that the way it works encourages students to become "well rounded", but it does nothing of the sort and works stronger against doing so than towards. Students are discouraged from developing passion, discouraged from exploration, discouraged from putting forth more than the minimum amount of effort, discouraged from developing their own interests and their own points of view.
At the beginning of a term, I'd always get at least one teacher that says "you all have As now, and you can keep that as long as you don't mess up." (It's usually worded a bit nicer, but that's the idea.)
I HATE that mentality.
It means, to keep an A, I have to be on the top of my game for every test, every assignment, and every class. It means that if I screw up and stay up late before one test, I might mess up my grade for the rest of the semester. It means that one night can ruin my perfect 4.0 (which I gave up on after freshman year), thus "ruining" my chances of getting into my college of choice.
Luckily, I decided after freshman year that the difference between a 3.8 and a 4.0 was not worth the huge amount of extra diligence it would require. And that has paid off: instead of wasting time on HW and studying, I've spent my time learning Python and C and Linux administration and dozens of other potentially useful skills (that haven't helped much in college applications, but will be useful in and after college).
EDIT: Something else I wanted to add to this:
I've thought about this a bit, and I think one of the big problems is how our grading system is structured. Like I said: if you mess up, you're (in theory) done.
My ideal system would be the opposite (mostly). At the beginning of (high) school, a student starts with 0 in each subject. From there, school would be similar to an RPG: classes would have a prerequisite "level" required, and each class would gain points toward "leveling up." In each class, each assignment would be worth a number of points, and the total points earned at the end of the term would determine the points earned for the course. In order to graduate, a student would need certain "levels" in each subject.
This would not punish nearly as much, allow the best students to progress faster, and allow slower students to take it more slowly.
I haven't written this down before now, so excuse any glaring holes it may have.
Actually, you should mention that in your college app. For certain schools, especially ones that at least pay lip service to a "holistic review" process, that might be more interesting than your GPA.
As a senior, he's realized much of the gist of what you and TFA are saying. He started teaching himself python (I'm a coder but I've never pushed it on him and I'm letting him learn on his own answering questions when he brings them to me) and now he's discovered Arduino and has completely lost himself in building projects and coding them. His grades have started to suffer some, but he is convinced that he's doing the right thing by following his real interests and I agree with him.
OTOH, there's a side of me that wonders how I would have felt if he'd done this before college apps were all done and grades submitted. As other commenters have said, it's a wonder that any creativity survives this system.
Obviously, this is probably nigh impossible in countries outside of the US, particular Asian countries.
It's a situation without excellence - you maintain or you're a failure.
No college is going to give you a magic bullet of knowledge that ensures happiness or success...but every one will give you an opportunity at unique experiences and resources (and if you go the school route - take as much advantage of those as you can).
It shouldn't be about earning a grade or messing up and losing a grade...it should be about your dreams, hopes, and ambition...about what you want to get out of life and how you develop those tools, qualities, and skills to get it.
If you've figured out code and tech is your passion and you've figure out how you personally best grok it...then you're already years ahead of most university students ;-)
I agree that for many college is "simply to help you figure out 'how you learn'", but for others it is about the knowledge gained.
Most 18 y/o kids can't really function in the real world and a lot of the service college provides is a glorified summer camp. Carefully consider if this is worth hundreds of thousands if dollars and 4 years of opportunity cost, to be taken "more seriously" and acquire "connections."
You can learn a lot for sure, but its a steep price to pay.
Source: I dropped out after a year and started working and Im equally successful as compared to my college graduated peers
Personally, my advice is: university-level science/engineering/math classes are going to be, on the one hand, a damned hard weed-out filter the first couple years, but once you get to the advanced stuff, it's going to be one of the only opportunities you ever get to learn truly high-level, difficult, interesting material with actual human guidance, rather than having to just pick up a stack of books and work through them on sheer hope and grit.
- in my experience, what schools teach is the "theory" of CS, which only sometimes overlaps with the "practice" of CS
- the "practice" portion of CS taught at unis are usually out of date by a couple of years, if not more.
- 4 years of your life is a relatively high opportunity cost. Especially in a fast moving industry like CS
I had a good experience getting my engineering degree, but looking back it's the social experiences I value most.
Also, about the "4 years is a high opportunity cost" thing. Given how it's much easier to find a high-paying software engineering job with a bachelor's degree than without, it's probably worth it. Besides, just because someone is in school doesn't mean they can't follow along with the latest industry trends, especially in CS where much of it is open source. It's not like the only learning you do in college is in your classes.
So my advice to matteotom is ... go to college. Take challenging classes that interest you (I highly recommend studying operating systems, compilers, and computer architecture). But also, don't neglect the opportunity to learn things outside of class (sounds like you won't really have much of a problem here). Do internships in the summers to get some industry experience (and a nice paycheck). And yes, of course, don't forget to make friends and have fun (I certainly wish I did more of that in college).
Completely wrong.
How do you expect to re-invent the stack if you don't understand the fundamentals, and where we've been before?
The practice of CS is something that anyone can pick up. The theory is what makes you more potent. To the OP: don't be yet another Rails programmer. Help us build a better stack than the web so we can move forward.
If you need the structure of a degree program, that's great. However, the typical programmer, who by the nature of the job needs to be a life-long learner, will tend to have what it takes to learn it on their own already. You are going to struggle professionally otherwise. And so that structure is not necessarily an asset.
But I do agree that learning the theory is valuable.
Pay close attention to what HN discusses on a regular basis. What proportion of it is software engineering? CS theory? Or any sort of deep technical topic, for that matter? Contrast that with the proportion of marketing/blog-spam about "ToDo in Ruby on Angular.js."
The problem with aggregators is the latter category always tends towards the top because it's easy and more people can relate to it. But it's not the sort of learning that makes you think, nor is it particularly insightful. It's just telling people what they want to hear: that this Ruby on Angular.js thing is what we all gotta jump on...because everyone else thinks so!
Also, I'm probably about 7 years older than you, and yeah, high school was fucking stupid. Moving on with your life is gonna be awesome.
That makes me sad, you're only young once, if you're pulling a 3.8 you should get out a little bit more, talk to girls (or boys, w/ever), there's all the time in the world to hunch over in front of a computer screen.
I do: I play sports, hang out w/ friends, etc; but, I enjoy learning new computer-related things in my free time.
The A students become professors. The B students work for the C students.
The academic society forces this focus on high grades across all subjects that is unhealthy.
But what's a student to do? If you can't get into a top school with a couple of Bs, life gets tougher. If you want to major in Computer Science, any school is fine. If you want to major in Philosophy, you had better get into a top 10 school. And once there, you'd had better get top grades because you'll need to go to graduate school.
The problem is even larger than the author suggests. If you're in a large city, to get into the nice high school with the fancy IB program, you might need straight As in junior high. And that junior high school may have competitive admissions.
It's a wonder that any creativity survives!
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/...
I bet its extremely rare for a person to both be very well credentialed and also very successful in their field (where the field does not explicitly depend on credentials--the Supreme Court is a counterexample).
In the case of doctors and lawyers (and engineers in many cases), there is a legal requirement to have credentials in order to be involved in practice.
I believe it is different in the US, but in the UK, experience is valued most regarding hacking (IT work). A CS degree holds little water, since many of them are, well, inadequate.
Students who think that credentials are everything won't be looking at UVA and Michigan except for specific programs they may have.
That said, someone I used to babysit when I was a teenager dropped out of college and sold his last software company for over $300M, and this was about twelve years ago when three hundred million dollars was real money :-)
Getting an A- in 9th grade may have been the best thing that may have happened to me in high school. It relieved me of the pressure to get straight A's and "compete" for the top of the class. I no longer had to be driven by an external factor.
In college I realized how awful things were (for those that were driven by grades). You could look around and see zombies sitting in desks. Most weren't interested in learning or thinking critically... just worried about getting the "right" answer and "good" grades.
I remember the first time I "failed" and got detention in high school... it was my senior year. Thank goodness I hadn't gotten it earlier because after experiencing it, it wasn't all that bad. In fact I actually sat down and got my homework done then.
Life's too short to worry about grades and failure and we only make childhood shorter by placing this pressure on our children so early.
I was initially shut out of all the non-remedial math classes after that, and over the next couple of years I fought to get into the regular or accelerated classes. The reaction was always along the lines of "Why? You've already blown it, you're not getting into a good college... just stay where you are, it will be easier for you".
I did eventually get into the classes I wanted to, but they were right - I didn't get into a good college. It's interesting to have a system where you can be told you've ruined your life at 14.
Then when I'd figured out what I wanted, I did an undergrad at a non-prestigious university and am now doing PhD at Cambridge. Mistakes you make at 14 shouldn't have to follow you into adulthood, and I think the idea that people have to go straight to university from school is toxic.
This is one thing that "gifted programs" in public schools are actually good for. At least while I was in public school, being declared to be "gifted" allowed you to take any accelerated course that you wanted, even if you did not even come close to meeting the academic requirements.
This allowed me to, among other things, without any opposition transfer out of regular classes that had teachers that I did not get along with (10th grade (standard) english teacher and I had problems, so a third of the way through the year and after one failed quarter I had myself bumped into the honors english class so that I could have another teacher.)
The system is wildly unfair to those who cannot take advantage of it, but I am fortunate that I could. It also bred in me a general disrespect for education, rules, and authority in general. If I could flaunt the system just because some doc once said I was clever, why would I respect that system?
What is a "good" college? I understand going to some colleges will give you a leg up in the "business" world. HNers and programmers tend to ride the meritocracy train and if one hops on board then the only thing that "should" matter in the eyes of HN peers is what you produce and your results. So don't get a standard job at a typical company working for the "man" where your resume has to make it through HR BS, instead start your own thing?
I agree, a system where you can be told you've ruined your life at 14 is BS. I don't know the circumstances surrounding your F. Regardless, the fact that adults gave up and give up on a youth is somewhat revealing about the culture and beliefs they have... sad.
I think that if you want to do this successfully, you need to get really good at hacking expectations and doing end-routes around roadblocks. For me, I had the advantage of perfect scores on a bunch of my standardized tests, so I had this other credential that would make people sit up and take notice. My parents also advocated heavily for me, and I was not shy about befriending adults who I thought were more competent than my teachers and getting work/academic experience with them. I'd taken college courses at 3 different schools before applying to college (acing all of them, and in one case doubling the class average), and I'd worked for a tech startup and done good work for them, so I had plenty of people willing to write recommendations for me.
The most important thing to realize if you're faced with a roadblock (and probably in life in general) is that different people are impressed by different things. You will never please everyone, but if there are some people who are impressed with you and willing to advocate for you, you can usually do an end-run around the people who think you will never amount to much. It's somewhat unfortunate that the public school system is packed with the sort of people who look at surface impressions only - think about what sort of people might be attracted to work at an institution where their own freedom to decide what to teach is itself set by bureaucrats sitting in the State House who have never gone near a classroom. It's doubly unfortunate that these are people in authority who have significant power over how our kids turn out. But the real world itself is much broader and more malleable than the classroom, and you can hack your way around a bad classroom experience.
In today's academic environment, it's downright impossible to get an F as a gifted person, unless you're making a statement.
And that's a luxury most kids including highly intelligent ones (IQ 130+ or top 3-4%) don't have.
However, my broader point is that you should use the advantages you've been given to make a mark on the outside world and work your way around obstacles. For me, that was intelligence and mathematical ability. However, other people have other strengths that they could be using but many aren't. My girlfriend realized in high school she would never be super-special in academics or test scores (though she's no slouch either), but she's a champion networker and really good at putting people at ease, and that's gotten her a job as an investor at a highly-regarded philanthropic foundation. My uncle struggled throughout high school, almost didn't get into college, took 5 years to graduate - but found that he has a knack for cars, and now makes a very good living owning a chain of auto-body stores.
I might be misunderstanding you, but I don't agree. I was in the gifted program starting in 3rd grade, through high school. I got many Fs in junior high and high school, and I eventually dropped out of high school in my junior year I think. Granted it's been 10 years ago now.
I spent 5 years either working in fast food or doing nothing. Eventually I took the ACT, got my GED, and got my CS degree from a public university.
I'm doing very well now, and I feel like failing school and taking some years off helped me a lot. I'm sure I'd be nowhere near where I am now if I had stayed in school.
I had a pretty bad attitude about education after my high school experiences, so I just fancied myself as some sort of autodidact that does things his own way without concern for the "system, man".
I've done well for myself as an engineer, so I feel that I cam out of it all ok. But now that I have kids, I don't really want to pass on my bad attitudes onto them, so I guess I'm facing some of the issues this article discusses.
http://www.chroniclebooks.com/titles/the-underachiever-s-man...
EDIT: Your comment reminded me of this book because I want my children to read it someday (but I don't want them to get the attitude too early)...
Sometimes even very rulebound places aren't very good at catching people ignoring the rules.
Bloody hell, I didn't realize the system could screw someone over that easily.
So yeah, it is pretty harmful. Let them fail.
[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/why-students-le...
What to do? A standard has to be set, and as been. But professors can do as they please. Inflating grades has all the wrong incentives, which is why it happens. Schools give high GPA, kids give alumni dollars back with better jobs, repeat. However, now you can't compare the kids as the metric is borked.
garbage in = garbage out.
I believe being spoiled by many of the finest computer, console, and arcade games of our time, as well as being a heavy book addict, made me bored of the "correct" way to play school at the rather early level of 2nd grade. So I started looking for ways to play the game to make it more fun.
In high school, hearing the words "wasted potential", were like a trophy to me. It showed the teacher respected my knowledge (which I obtained for my own pleasure and proved at will by getting random A+s), but frustratingly knew it was not a result of the system they were paid to run. The few really awesome teachers I had, did not get this treatment. I could sense their love for knowledge, either in the way they were actually passionate about the subject they taught, and/or the way they treated students with respect. For these extremely rare few, I was willing to pretend to play by the school rules out of mutual respect for the teacher, not the game.
Unsurprisingly, many of these truly awesome teachers were fired or forced to transfer schools. The highly competitive high school had too many parents complaining to the school board about their kids being given a B, and even tried to convince the teachers to erase records of cheating (they being honorable ambassadors of knowledge, of course refused). This was the final proof to me that the system was a joke.
"Wasted potential", I learned was a reference to the potential of the system to use you to perpetuate itself. It had nothing to do with your own potential future, which was always your own great responsibility (thank you Uncle Ben). I had 127 recorded absences in 12th grade. I still graduated, as I expected - the only thing more important to the school than student attendance, was public appearance.
Only two tests---a midterm and a final. I took the midterm, and ended up with either a D or an F (I don't recall the exact grade, except it was not good). I showed up for the final, read the question, realized I had absolutely no desire to even bother answering the essay question; I got up and left the classroom.
My final grade for the class: C. Sheesh.
As someone who grew up in India, I am all the more sensitive to the role of authority. Thanks to massive density of population, weak economy, and cultural norms, Indian institutions promote the worst forms of deference to authority. However, rather than culture, in countries like the US, the schooling system is the primary source for teaching people to conform to their peers' expectations and to defer to authority. The American society, in general, is quite different from the hierarchical structure that exists in American schools. In the real world, you have more freedom to question authority. Life is also different for adults because they are often more mature than kids, and are in positions where they have more choice than in the school. Schools should thus change to mirror the society, while still understanding the fact that school students are mostly immature.
Often, such suggestions for reform are mistaken for 'give them the choice to study what they want'. On the contrary, throughout secondary school, students should necessarily be taught all subjects and forced to sit through all classes. But, be careful to note that this does not necessarily imply that they should be judged on all these courses. The key problem in modern schools is that the 'judgement' system is broken. Just like performance review systems in most companies. Schools should take a leaf out of the HR policies of companies like Netflix [1] and do away with formal judgement/performance review processes.
I think there is room for both. Require students to take 'basic' classes in all subjects (up to whatever level of competency you require), but also require them to take advanced classes in subjects of their choice. In addition to furthering their knowledge of their own interest, these classes also provide a much better opportunity for students to learn how to research, study, write, ETC, because they can do all of those things on a topic that interests them.
Additionally, having just a few such classes can change the perception of school from a place you have to go, into an opportunity to learn that happens to require you to learn some things you are not interested in.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
Their way of handling poor grades completely eliminated grade anxiety for me. Instead of freaking out when I failed I would try to identify why I failed and how to improve that.
All this pontificating about the state of our education system and the problems with our super achievement-oriented culture aside, what do you actually tell a 15 yr old who's deathly afraid of failure?
Maybe it's Oregon, my in laws in the Bay Area are more prone to this kind of behavior.
In my local area, schools are formally ranked by their average grades. This means they spend 13 years encouraging kids to believe that taking easier subjects (with better pass rates for the school) is in their own best interest.
I've remained pretty obstinate about this even in my adult life. I like to fail until success is inevitable.
College dropout now. School's never "worked" for me. But I was born into a family where blindly grades were everything, and I'm pretty sure this had more of a negative than positive effect on me.