This is dredging up all those memories of high school which I have *got* to get over.

[conuly]

But on that note, I implore all teachers, guidance counselors, shrinks - anybody who works with young people: Be very careful about trying to encourage your wayward by telling them how smart they are. Whether or not it's true, try not to make it your default phrase.

Throughout school (but especially in high school), every time I didn't do well, or parent teacher night came around, or I had to talk to a teacher ever in any capacity, they always mentioned how smart I was.

Sometimes this was prior to "making an exception" for me. Sure, I didn't have the grades or the prereqs to be in this or that class, but "since you're so smart" I got it anyway. (And felt profoundly uncomfortable.)

Sometimes this was the softening up part of a lecture - compliment me first, then tell me I need to work harder. "You're such a smart girl, you could be the best in the class if you'd just try. You will work harder on your homework, won't you?" (No, I wouldn't. I needed less in the way of lectures and guilt trips and more in the way of help with my total lack of executive function and organizational skills. I doubt anybody at the schools ever had the capacity to realize that WAS the problem, and I don't hold any blame against them, but honestly, if lectures worked they would've worked back in the first grade. Also, on the subject of guilt trips, I never ever want to hear the phrase "don't say sorry to me, say sorry to yourself" again. It probably was effective in the immediate goal of making me feel bad, but, again, I wasn't particularly inclined to work harder for the people who made me feel bad... even if I knew how to work harder in the first place.)

Sometimes this WAS the lecture. "You're so smart, I don't understand why you don't work!"

The end result of all this was that now, ten years after graduating high school, my response to hearing somebody comment on my intelligence (by which people *usually* seem to mean my book-reading habits or my vocabulary choices, which is a funny measurement of smarts if you ask me) is to immediately look for the exit.

Evangeline went through a stage of really liking to watch Supernanny, and Jo does that same technique of "praise them first, then go for the kill". "I really liked how you were careful with the time-out technique, you really had the method down pat, buuuuut I hated how you still didn't praise your kid this time, that time, or the other time!" Every episode, 40 minutes in, it was cringe time for me. I literally cannot hear this approach without getting that moment of panic.

And it didn't do jackshit to help at the time either. I didn't feel motivated, I felt like I was being put on the spot. If people thought I was smart while I was failing my classes, and attributing that to lack of effort, what would they think if I tried hard and STILL failed? What would they think if I handed in one homework assignment, but then couldn't manage to hand in all the rest because I had *no idea* how to keep up doing that sort of thing? Better to hand in NO assignments than to hand in SOME assignments. (Now I know better, but like I said, smart people can be so VERY stupid at times.) Besides which, I *wasn't* stupid. I could *tell* they were only complimenting me in order to manipulate me.

If you're trying to motivate (manipulate) your student, please, find another method. Don't praise their intelligence unless you mean it without any strings attached. It doesn't help. In a worst case scenario, it might make them really, really insecure about how smart they really are, especially if you're obviously saying that so they do their homework/study/go to bed on time.

And if you suspect they might be on the spectrum, please - don't tell them when you're breaking the rules in their favor. I might be atypical in this regard, but I'm thinking not. If they're like me, they won't feel grateful, they'll just feel awkward and uncomfortable and kinda wishing you hadn't, especially if you're only telling them in order to motivate (manipulate) them into doing their work in THAT class at least. Trust me, some things are better left unsaid.

Comments

[steorra]

It seems to me that there's a difference between the kind of "praise, then criticize" that you're describing Supernanny as doing and that you're describing your teachers of doing, because Supernanny is praising specific actions, while your teachers in praising you for being "smart" were praising supposedly static traits that you had no control over.

I tend to feel uncomfortable when I'm told how smart I am, but not for the same reasons.

[siderea]

There is a difference between them, but it's immaterial to the phenomenon conuly is describing. "Shit sandwiches" -- which is what that approach is called hereabouts -- have the toxic effect of conditioning (a la Pavlov) recipients to associate being praised or complimented with being shamed or attacked -- as surely as if every time they were praised they were also punched. You can pretty much ruin somebody's ability to hear positive feedback.

[conuly]

I'm glad to hear there are people in the business who know better. I heard it so often from guidance counselors and... the... um... other type of counselors (I'm at a loss at how to pair the two in a sentence without sounding like I can't talk!) that I thought it must be an official approach.

[steorra]

That makes a lot of sense, thanks.

I think I've been explicitly taught to use that method to give critical feedback: "Don't say something negative without also saying something positive, and say more positive stuff than negative stuff." And I suspect it's become pretty ingrained. I guess I will have to rethink how I deal with such things, and try to figure out how else to do it...

I suspect it's ingrained enough that if I don't say positive-with-negative, I'll feel like I'm being mean, or that people will think I'm being mean even when I don't want to be. But I don't want just to not seem mean short-term, I want to not be mean or harmful in the long term...

Do you know non-harmful ways of softening critical feedback?

[conuly]

I understand what you're saying, but honestly, they sound so similar that I think overexposure to one will ruin your ability to hear either, ever.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Right on; so well-said!

I didn't get told I was "so smart", because my family had that Old World thing about not complimenting children lest their little heads swell up and explode. I don't even recall what I thought about it - I guess I knew I was smarter than the other kids, but nobody said it to me, and I was constantly in trouble for daydreaming, not doing my work, not turning it in even when I had done it.

I hated school, that was all. School was bullies, and lines, and bad smells; teachers shoving you around; bizarre rules about everything, incomprehensible New Math, always something going wrong, and I just hated the hell out of it, like Calvin in Calvin & Hobbes. If They had ever asked me honestly why I didn't do my work, and if I somehow would have been safe in telling them the truth, I could have told them straight-out that I thought it was stupid, meaningless busy-work, and they had given me no slightest reason to WANT to do it, or to care that they wanted me to do it. "The first duty of the prisoner is to escape", and that was my focus through practically all of school.

I also hated that "praise them, then go in for the kill" trick, which I thought both mean and dishonest. I had not asked for their opinion anyway; I resented the entire process of forcing me to do things I had no desire to do, then criticizing me on how well I did them, as if it was their bloody right, but the mealy-mouthed faux compliments were just insulting. It was practically impossible to 'motivate' me because They didn't had so little I wanted, except that they'd leave me alone, which they weren't going to do.

[conuly]

When it comes to that trick, I'm sure it works on some people, probably people who haven't much been exposed to it before, especially if it's tried by somebody who genuinely does care or whose help has been sought out.

But by now I have such a viscerally negative reaction to it...! And if I do, I'm sure any habitually "underachieving" student does. This technique is inordinately popular among guidance counselors and teachers. It doesn't work better because it's used more often.

As far as smelly schools go, how did you feel about the noise? Would it kill people to echo-proof the gyms?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Actually, I don't think it does work on people. I don't think the praise softens the criticism; I think the criticism dilutes the praise, or negates it entirely.

What I think does work, is telling students what to do differently, whether it's "bend your knees more", "proof-read your paper more carefully", " check your references" or whatever. Two forms I use are "I'd like you to..." and "I like the way you..."; if I'm reprimanding, I start off with "Another time....", because it's useless to talk about what 'should have' been done this time.

I didn't mind the echoing gyms, because they were awesome to sing in when no one else was in them. (Heh, actually, all of school would have been much better if no one else was there.) But.... the bells, THE BELLS!!! God forbid one actually got absorbed in what one was doing before the end of class, because this ghastly amplified firebell would just about knock one off the chair, and ring on and on - how is one supposed to think in that din, and gather up all one's stuff in one minute flat? Horrible!

[rantinan.livejournal.com]

I run screaming from that phrase too.. its usualy suffixed with "to fail"

As in "You're to smart to not succeed at this."

All the festering crap I've been though, that still hurts the worst.

[conuly]

You ever notice that the people most likely to use that phrase were the ones least likely to offer actual, concrete help?

[rantinan.livejournal.com]

and lots of vauge platitudes instead.... yup

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I didn't have it so bad, but while I enjoyed some aspects of school, I didn't learn much at the junior level.

"Why haven't you answered these questions?" What they meant was "why haven't you written down the answers to these questions?" I had answered them. Inside about thirty seconds, in my head - yes, of course I was speed-reading, I was well over seven years old, why on earth would I be stuck reading at talking speed like a baby? Why would I want to waste time writing down anything as obvious as the answers to those stupid questions?

I don't know if I had any organisational skills, but they never gave me any motivation whatsoever to attempt to use them.

[conuly]

Paradoxically, I did have the ability to organize things. Sorting my crayons, or my toys, or my books was a great pastime I could easily spend an hour or so a day on.

I just couldn't do it in any sort of useful capacity.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I do my best never to use 'smart' that way. 'Good at this' is the same for me-- I swap it with 'you must practice a lot!'

I've also picked up two bits of advice. One is from Minister Faust at CW: when you say 'but', what you say is, "I didn't mean anything that came before that word."

Similarly, a really good parenting technique is to just give compliments then stop. No, "I love you, but," ever-- "I love you, and," is better. No, "You're great at painting, but I wish you would clean up." Compliment, end the sentence, start a new sentence asking for things or whatever.

[conuly]

No, "You're great at painting, but I wish you would clean up."

A sentence calculated to make your kid really, really not want to clean up. If I used it on Ana, I wouldn't be surprised if she threw paint. And I wouldn't blame her!

[eofs.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I guess at least if I'd got "you're so smart, but you need to apply yourself" then it would have shown some recognition that I wasn't applying myself. Looking back, it's shocking how little effort I got away with - especially back in the days when they gave separate marks for effort and attainment. I don't think their system was designed for the attainment mark to be higher than the effort mark, because I certainly can't remember ever getting a low effort mark.

Of course, partly I slipped through the cracks because I was still achieving so highly - but I find it hard to believe that you couldn't at least in places tell that I just wasn't trying. I sometimes wonder how much more I'd have achieved in a school which had stretched me, or even just made me work harder at what I was given.

It's absurd that I made it through school, and this in the country recognised as giving more examinations than anywhere else in Europe, and had never really learnt how to revise material. (I think it's called studying in American?)

[conuly]

Yes, it's called studying here. That caused almost more confusion to me than children crawling around with "torches" which seemed incredibly unsafe! Revising here means rewriting and fixing your mistakes. You might revise your math after a test (though that'd be checking more often) or revise your essay (editing) before handing it in, but you can't really rewrite a test or exam you haven't taken yet.

[dandelion.livejournal.com]

You'd have achieved more, but you'd have had a different problem: my school would have made its displeasure at your university and course choice clear. I got "And why not Oxbridge?" to which I replied "they don't do pharmacy", which was accepted as a reason...but also viewed as a bit of a cop-out; why wasn't I doing a subject I could take to Oxbridge? Why not medicine? A friend of mine who did have the grades (but not the temperament for Oxbridge-style work, and frankly nor the desire to go there) wanted to go to a very low-ranking uni and they were Not Happy with that either. Others had eg AAB after AS and told that therefore they wouldn't get into vet medicine (she pulled the B up to an A in chemistry and did. Sadly the main person she was showing had left at that point.)

So, my prediction for alternate universe!Emma at, say, my school:
- Better grades, because there is always someone saying "you could do better" (remember my LJ entry about "you only got an A?" from my physics teacher?) and making sure you do all the work. Or extra work, like an AEA, or an after-school GCSE, or early exams.
- More of a fixation on individual module marks and whether they were good enough within the grade (could that 72 be pushed up to an 80 at a resit? Is that necessary or can you pick up 8 marks elsewhere?)
- Being pushed strongly away from subjects such as drama in favour of English Lit and History, with a view to Oxbridge interview in something traditional.
- Anxiety stemming from the fact that you're either:
--setting high goals and having to achieve them. And there's lots of people around to give clever answers and get amazing module marks and make you feel dim; 300/300 for AS or A-level was not unheard of. My sister did it in English and friends did it in Geography, Politics, Psychology and Economics. It's about here you start doing the module marks thing and consider resitting modules you did alright at, just not perfectly, because you feel insecure about what you've got and what it means for your uni offer (even if really you're a shoo-in).
--or anxiety from the fact that you've gone down the drama route anyway and it feels like lots of the teachers are judging you (and some of them actually are, albeit very politely)

[eofs.livejournal.com]

Which is, admittedly, a very good point. (I think there were also other upsides to going to my school, vis-a-vis life skills.) Don't get me wrong, I received pressure from school about my choices of university, vocation and indeed A-Levels, thougt I'm sure it wasn't a patch on what I'd have got at your school. On the other hand, I had the head of sixth form tell me that I couldn't take five AS Levels because I would be failing them all and have dropped one by October. (I will never forget, nor forgive, that.) Of course the grass is always greener - your school pressured everyone to go to Oxbridge, my school offered almost no support for those who wanted to.

But there can be a middle ground. I don't talk about my time at high school because it wasn't a particularly happy one due to bullying (there were terrible discipline problems). But academically I was mostly happy. Although I suppose since this was the school where I would get undeserved As for effort, in retrospect it's they who could have given me the needed kick up the arse. It wasn't all sunshine and puppies, there were bad teachers there as anywhere else and one of them gave me serious setbacks to enjoying English for some time to come. But for all that I loathed him, he also obviously recognised that forcing me to read the book at the snail's pace of the rest of the class was cruel and let me read ahead at my own speed, do the relevant work as I reached it and then gave me extra work to fill in the time left whilst the rest of the class caught up. I was working a year ahead of myself in maths much of the time (continuing groundwork laid at primary school, where I'd been accelerated since I was 8) and a group of us received separate tutoring to prepare us for the Level 8 SAT paper (as we did in English and science too).

I'd like to take this moment to point out that when I look back at my early teenage years, I can understand why I was bullied so badly...

But anyway, there was a school that, for all its faults, managed to stretch me and provide work that was more challenging than the curriculum. I could probably have been stretched much more, and as I said originally I could definitely have done with someone spotting my lack of effort, but the amount I got did strike a balance between challenging me and pressuring me.

Then I moved up to upper school and in areas where I'd been stretched in, I stagnated. We were expected to go up two full grades from starting at 14 to sitting our GCSEs. I came into maths already achieving an Ad (ie, bottom end of an A). After a year having seen little progress, I approached my teacher, concerned that I was showing no improvement. His response was along the lines that it was a perfectly good grade so I didn't need to improve!

(In fairness, I vaguely recall comments that had our SATs results been known before we were Sorted into our various divisions at the new school, the brightest of the year might have been put together into a 1-year GCSE maths, and maybe triple science as well. Generally I liked changing school at 14, but the scattering of the cleverest students was a massive drawback.)

Looking at the G&T policies for the two schools now, I think things would have been a lot better if I was a couple of years younger. I was part of the first year to have an identified Gifted & Talented group, which meant they didn't really have a clue what they were actually meant to do with us and not much happened. I note that the current G&T policy was codified a couple of months before I sat my A-Levels. And my high school now has all sorts of exciting looking opportunities I would have availed myself of, including sitting modules of GCSE Science in year 9 - allowing them to fast-track to triple science at upper school.