Saritz, I found myself nodding with agreement through that entire post. laugh THAT is the crux of it, I think. Too many people think that there isn't any such thing as thinking 'beyond' what those ideally bright folks experience, and there are more of those people to start with... and they pin a lot of their egos on being "smart" ergo, when they meet someone who is in the 145+ range, there's a lot that just doesn't compute at all for them.

It's easier to default to cognitive dissonance and pretend it's not so. LOL.


Originally Posted by Old Dad
Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
Because that 10,08 is a personal best for the one-- and unlikely to reflect a routine level of performance?

Whereas the other individual may be capable of 10,00 or even 9.96, and could use the performance pressure of equally capable peers in order to get there?

Training at the elite level presumes that your peers in training are also better than just "good and hard-working." They aren't helpful to you in terms of your own improvement otherwise.

You've missed the point though. The point of the race was only to qualify, not to find out who's potential is reached. That's the same thing college is. Undergrad work is seldom if ever designed to bring the top performers to their potential, instead, it's simply the next level and the goal is to graduate with the diploma of the subject of choice and learn the materials needed to do so.

No college is going to be the end all to find out if someone has reached their potential.


But the entire point of qualification as a barrier to entry is to determine who best fits into an elite group-- which is then a group of more-or-less similarly able peers.

So I do think that the analogy is useful-- to a point. But extend it beyond the "qualification" and ask what happens next. World record performances are almost never handed in in heats without multiple elite competitors. Not just "qualifiers" but-- those who are equally capable of truly elite performance.

They are different from "qualifying" competitors in that sense.

And really, while I don't expect undergraduate institutions to be turning out Nobel Prize-winners left and right, it is ridiculous to me that an undergraduate education should be only marginally less stultifying than k through 12 was for the most capable kids.

Haven't we already lowered the bar enough here?

And yes, I do see that particular issue as the flip side of this same coin of hyper-parenting. Everyone wants a trophy, and therefore, we can't have any distinctions made between "above average" and "extraordinary" or that might hurt the feelings of the parents whose kids are just "good" at things, but not "great" at them...

smirk




Last edited by HowlerKarma; 04/01/14 02:40 PM.
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.