As a former high school math and statistics teacher, when we go to the point of discussing “central tendencies,” I used to love to tell my classes they half of them were below average. That really made them think, since everyone else was telling them that they were all above average.
My college physics professor kept 30 years of test questions and grades. He would compare each class that came through to 30 years of students before us. Talk about not measuring up!
Singapore students top the charts in international comparisons.
“You’re not the smartest kid,” Paul Zhao’s father told him when he struggled with fractions. “And that’s ok. Just make sure you are the hardest working kid.”
He grew up in Singapore, where teachers hit students with a stick if they did poorly on homework assignments, writes Zhao on Medium.
Singapore uses a one-time test to track high school students into the top, middle and bottom stream, he writes. He worked hard to get into the top stream. When he got his results, “my dad showered me with neutrality. . . . No rewards. No congratulatory notes.”
These days, U.S. parents shower praise on their children, Zhao writes.
Everything a child does—be it worthy or not—is rewarded with applause, cheers, unearned positivity, and social-media likes or hearts or whatever is the fashionable cheap social currency. I think it’s why so many of us millennials are insecure, fragile, and hyper-sensitive to any objective criticism.
. . . We do whatever it takes to earn external affirmation.
Now a high-tech entrepreneur specializing in artificial intelligence and machine learning, Zhao is not the smartest guy in the room, he writes. Many of colleagues “learn faster.”
“If someone spends half the time that it takes me to get something done, great for them. I’ll have to put in the extra work or effort. I’m ok with that.”
Valuing effort rather than intelligence is said to be characteristic of Asian parents.
https://www.joannejacobs.com/2018/12/youre-not-the-smartest-kid-and-thats-ok/