I don’t usually share these, but this is excellent: How To Make Your Kids Smarter: 10 Steps Backed By Science
http://ideas.time.com/2014/03/04/how-to-make-your-kids-smarter-10-steps-backed-by-science
How to make your kids smart
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I don’t usually share these, but this is excellent: How To Make Your Kids Smarter: 10 Steps Backed By Science
http://ideas.time.com/2014/03/04/how-to-make-your-kids-smarter-10-steps-backed-by-science
Comments are closed.
9 Comments.
As I don’t have children, I’ll turn this over to those of you who do — I mean, those of you who are killing the planet via overpopulation; thanks a lot, assholes (there, I’ve done my moral outrage bit):
WHY? Why MUST a child be smarter, sooner? Look at reading skills: I was reading chapter books in kindergarten. Sure, I didn’t understand some of it — I recall running into one book as a child in which one of the characters says something about “think he knows Jody’s ballin’ Kevin?” And for years I thought “he” must not want his friend Jody playing kickball with this Kevin person.
So what did it get me? “Well, Alex, you’ll have to wait for the others to finish. Well Alex, we have to read this tiresome shit because, well, we don’t want these other children who can’t keep up to get bored; there’s too many of them. So you sit there, sweetie, and you get bored out of your mind. There’s only one of you, and I don’t dare turn my back on these others for more than two seconds.”
Let’s go to math. I flew through math. At least up to Calculus, which I am still convinced is just a big mindfuck. What did it do for me? Same thing.
Now, I realize, a 15-year-old really has no excuse for not knowing everything about how the world works. I really should have been planning my campaign for getting into Harvard. But there I was, like the idiot I am, thinking that all these adults were presenting me with some version of reality that was truth-based.
So what IS the point of cranking the kids up to 11? Do we know live in a meritocracy?
Right? I was naturally trusting. The teachers seemed smart enough and how could they be allowed to tell me things if they were not qualified. I probably could have started college early, but I’ll never know now. Instead, I burned out more or less from boredom around 7th grade after all those years of *useless* straight ‘A’s. Public school failed me entirely, as it does so many others.
Exactly! And what’s the point of getting to Reading Level T four years early if you’re only going to be made to wait? It isn’t like there’s an infinite gradation of reading levels: after a certain point, yo reach the end point: Whether you do it at sixth grade or at 10th grade is a completely artificial metric.
Well, except that it helps isolate — and I do mean isolate — the smarter children sooner.
It’s lonely at the top. 🙂 I was reviled for being weirdly smart. A great shame I couldn’t translate that into real life as a kid.
If we are talking seriously about overpopulation though, we can blame all generations of the past century for their lack of foresight. When I can finally afford them (and they will not be going to public school–I WILL NOT ALLOW THEM TO BE RUINED), children like mine are the ones who will put the world back together again…I hope.
Whoops! I’m slowing. “Know” in the last question should be “now.”
But you new that.
Man you guys are a bunch of Negative Nellies. It extremely important to be smart, but it’s not the only important thing. The other critical skills are sense and honestly. My parents are both brilliant people. They’re also both college professors with a lot of emotional attachment to education. One thing I’ve noticed, a lot of the children of college professors ended up being losers. My parents explained things very sensibly to me. They told me straight:
“Any you need to learn high learn mathematics to become a top level engineer or scientist, but don’t worry too much about your grades or record in school until you’re your sophomore year of high school. The last three years are all that matter.” They also told me, “Any you won’t just be smarter than nearly all your teachers, you’ll actually know more facts then them. You will be sorely tempted to call them out on their ignorance. Don’t do it! Just smile and if you get bored dootle in a notebook.” This one was pretty hard to follow but I only made one teacher cry during my 18 year in school and I felt really guilty about it afterward. The final thing was the sense, when I started getting bullied for being a geeky kid, my dad told me to fight back dirty. I hit am 8th grader in the face with a hockey stick when I was in 6th grade, and I kicked another bully in the nuts. Both times I got suspended and both times my dad made a huge show of reprimanding me in front of the principal, but as soon as we were outside the school walls he patted me on the shoulder and said, “excellent job son. I’m proud of you for sticking up for yourself. That was just for the idiots that run these places benefit. Now let’s go get some icecream.”
Those lessons served me well. I think they are a lot of the reason I’ve been very successful in my engineering career.
What I would give to have had some solid practical parental advice like that. My parents encouraged me to get great grades early and their number one focus was for me always to be “nice.” The number one and most useful thing to know that they taught me was to love learning; everything else I’ve learned on my own through that.
Oh, and succeeding academically often has little to do with succeeding in real life.
Jack, just to reassure you: I was kidding about the “thanks assholes” line. I’ve met enough children to realize that the problem isn’t them. I was just complaining the other day to someone — I don’t know who; I just complain at random people on the subway — about how I had always thought the Yuppies were the ultimate douchebags. But now I’m admitting that I was wrong. The hipster infestation destroying Brooklyn: That’s the greatest abomination ever.
Ever.
I took it as tongue in cheek, but you were calling the parents assholes not the children, of course! 🙂