Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Outliers, Tiger Moms, and Nature

So I'm curious what this forum thinks about gifted in light of books like Outliers (10,000 hours of practice makes prodigy), Tiger Motherhood (which in a sense desires to validate Outliers), vs the general concept of nature - born this way.

No thesis yet, but some random sleep deprived mumblings:

I'm convinced the Tiger book has had a big affect on our recent school placement advocacy. The timing and media saturation are really frustrating. You just can't argue with Terry Gross...

I saw the Race to Nowhere recently. I was struck how both the Race to Nowhere and Outliers used Bill Gates as an example to prove their POV - but Outliers stressed how hard Bill Gates worked as a student and Race to Nowhere talked about him not graduating from college. It seemed like cross purposes. I felt kind of sorry for the poor guy.

If I have a point, it might be that people take out of that stuff what they want to think. Most of the people I know who (not on this board) talk about Outliers as if its all about why red shirting your kids is a really good idea. What I got out of Outliers was that our famly's commitment to Suzuki music education was a really good thing for my child because it is hard for her and she is supposed to practice a little every day.

I have been thinking of this today, not in philosophical way, but in regards to Chinese (Mandarin) learning for my son. He has great �ear� for languages and great memory, I attribute those to the nature. He can trick his teachers making them believe that he knows the material due to his short term memory and visual memory (being able quickly located what he needs to answer questions). However, I know for fact that he does not work on memorizing words for his lessons. His vocabulary should be much better than it is, currently he has effortlessly memorized about 50 - 60%, what about the rest? So I have come to conclusion, that he is not outside the 10,000 hours rule and I may have to become a Tiger mother to work with him on the vocabulary and writing.

I don't think your a Tiger mom, unless you shame your kids into working harder and throw their toys away when they don't.

I think kids can be born talented or smart but real achievement takes work and effort. It's easy to see a kid who self-teaches reading and writing and math through 3rd grade at 3 or 4 and believe that things will always be so easy, but even very smart kids don't usually self-teach fluent Japanese or high-level music or ballet performance, or differential equations without some effort and time and coaching or teaching. To succeed at high levels of anything, there's a lot of luck involved (I think Gladwell covers that well) and a lot of work, or at least a lot of practice.

I'd like to teach my kids to reach towards their goals with lots of effort. If they are talented and naturally gifted, that work might get them farther towards their goals, but they also need to put in some effort. At very high levels of anything, talent seems less important to me since everyone involved will be talented. If you go to Julliard for music performance, you will have lots of talented company. In elite PhD programs, very smart folks really are quite common. Work and effort can distinguish someone in that situation or reveal relative mediocrity when everyone else is working hard and passing by someone who is coasting.

In the best of all possible worlds, the "work" doesn't seem like work to the child/adult. It may be that the violinist with 10000 hours has been brow beaten by Amy Chua, but it may also be that the child can't wait to play and desperately waits through school and meals trying to get back to the piano or violin or science experiment or sport. Practice isn't necessarily torture.

Books like outliers are getting quite a bit of press in our local Suzuki program. I really think that success is variety of factors. I have a kid that has been taking Suzuki piano going on 5 years at this point (starting at age 5 to 10). I know he is working less hard than some other kids at the same level. On the other hand, he is working at this skill every day and his first 6 months of just developing enough small motor skills to play simple pieces was excruciating. After that he FLEW through early repertoire however.

So I think when someone says it takes 10,000 of work or practice to develop a skill I think they're on the right track. But someone's 6000 hours of skill development might be more like some else 12,000 hours. I do think understanding that practice = progress is an important life skill and one that my own kids were definitely not born with. Music lessons have become VERY important to us, even though it is coming easier to them than some. My daughter's been taking violin for 2 years. Just the past 6 months have we had a sort of break through on progress and she's looking more "GT" in the music world. Before that it was mostly about mind games with a 4 and 5 year old. Who claimed she needed to start lessons by the way. I recently had an experience with another parent cornering me and asking why my kid was progressing so fast. We certainly aren't doing anything magical other than practicing 6 days a week for an age appropriate length of time.

The red shirting thought is interesting! I truly don't blame people for making the choice to red shirt. We only have all day kindergarten locally that looks and feels much more like first grade. Not exactly the most friendly environment for an active 5 year old.

I think that US society suffers from extremes of ideology that, in this case, give birth to what I call the Myth of Hard Work. The myth posits that lots and lots of practice makes a prodigy. The idea that people have put a number (10K) on how many hours you need makes it more extreme to me.

The other extreme is that prodigies are born that way and will always be prodigies because they were born that way. You could call this the Myth of Not Working.

Most people know that the second myth is a myth, but our society labors very hard at pushing the first one as Truth. I believe that this idea actually drives false egalitarianism in schools: everyone just needs a chance, and you can't skip a grade because it would be saying you were "better." Sorry, but differences in abilities are real. Not everyone can get at least a B in geometry, just like not everyone can run 100M in under 13 seconds.

The truth is somewhere in between: in order to really excel, you need to put in a lot of hard work. BUT lots of practice won't guarantee that you'll go to the nationals. Even if you do, it also doesn't guarantee that someone who was born with, say, an incredible set of ice skating genes won't beat you in spite of having practiced less. Or that some outsider who has a genetic talent for theoretical physics won't figure out the answer ahead of all the great minds at the universities.

Just my rambling thoughts.

Val

This is what I worry about my children. How do I teach them this? Up to now, they have been able to progress with very little practice (forced by me) or no practice at all.

This is exactly why I've been trying to have dd grade skipped this year. Unfortunately, between the Tiger Mom hype and red shirting skewing what is normal, I don't think its going to happen.

Grade skip did not solve this issue for us.