Originally Posted by Grinity
If I had a magic wand, I would add chapters to both books that say something like this -

Our goal is to teach children that working hard bring rewards, so, in addition to finding placements where the children have a chance to work hard in order to learn things, it's important to communicate to our children that we believe that working hard brings rewards.
Yes! (Including that it can be its own reward.) One thing that struck me was how true what Dweck says of entity theorists, especially "bright girls" is/was of *me*. For example, I've struggled through my whole life with the phenomenon that when I do something where I may not succeed, much of my energy is going to wondering whether I'm going to succeed and what will happen if I don't, and to shutting up the voice that's wondering that, instead of actually going to the task itself.

I read out some of the questions from the back of the book, designed to identify where people sat on these spectrums, to DS, DH, and a highly successful academic friend who was visiting. We adults didn't come out identical, but it was clear that we were all much further towards the entity theory end of the spectrum than DS, who was endorsing all the "you can change if you work" and "a chance to learn something is better than the chance to look clever" type options. It's possible that DS was to some extent giving what he knows to be the "right" answers, and that he thinks more like us internally. Still, looking back at my own experience, I think I was sold an entity view by teachers, parents, etc. etc., and I think this is really common for academic children like all three of us. Somehow "you can succeed if you work" is reserved for people who don't do well at something, while children who are good at the same thing aren't given the same message - instead, they are underchallenged and sold "you're just naturally good at this".

One might speculate - lazy talk for "I haven't looked to see if there's research on this" - that this might be related to the relative weakness of the relation between IQ measured in childhood and adult success. Do the people who manage to "realise" their IQ tend to be those who remain incrementalists in their hearts? It wouldn't surprise me.

I could witter on but I'll stop there.


Email: my username, followed by 2, at google's mail