As a teacher of young teenagers, I am constantly faced with students who feel that they are “dumb” or “not good enough” so they won’t even try to excel. This is the story I tell my students often: the smartest grade 4 student does not know more than the average grade 7 child. It is a matter of how many hours you are willing to work to gain the knowledge you want. In most cases, real learning, innovation and discovery comes from putting the necessary time in to work. It is becoming harder and harder to teach children to persevere. This is a society where one can acquire knowledge without a lot of work because of access to computers, cell phones, etc. This is all great except that many children are learning to expect results without having to work very hard – it isn’t like the days when we had to go the library, look up ….
I find that it is best to start teaching children how hard work pays off when they are young. For example, when the children start drawing, give them a lot of praise but also show them how their drawings can be improved. If a child is drawing a cup and it does not look like a cup, praise the child for trying but don’t tell them it looks “just like a cup”. Show them how it can be improved to look more like a cup.
I do not believe in these notions that learning should be fun and easy. It can be, but more often than not, it is putting the necessary time in to work. For example, you hear people say, “why make them suffer memorizing things (e.g. multiplication table) when they can access this information on a computer”. Really? Do I have to explain why? As I said, the average grade 7 child is smarter than smartest grade 4 child. That is, by working hard, you can be the smartest kid in the classroom.
I laughed at how different our experience of first baby was. I had no info whatever from my mom or anyone,except I read books,in which they asserted that if you were not scared, childbirth was painless for us as it is for animals. So when I got the first pangs, I thought I had a very bad stomach upset and did nothing at all except correct the prints for tom's first book. When tom finally decided we had to go to the hospital because I looked terrible, I was rushed to the delivery room, while he went to mail the book's prints. Marc was born 15 minutes later, before Tom's return. He was gorgeous with tons of curls.