Reply to Why should I want my child to go to TJ if he gets in?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]I'm the PP who asked about "learning how to work." Thanks for the thoughtful response. Pretty much describes my experience. Where do people "learn how to work"? Places like TJ? I feel like I missed a memo at some point.[/quote]

I am the exact opposite. I have learning disabilities, all moderate but a long list, and ADHD. ES was so,so,so hard for me. Middle School was a mixed bag, English, History and Social Studies were easy. Math and Science were a disaster. Math and Science were so bad that the school as going to wave math and science requirements for me to graduate. My parents said hell no and insisted I would take Math and Science, I thought they were crazy. We figured out how I tested, I had to verbalize my answers to myself as I wrote them down. I took Algebra, Algebra II, and Geometry. I took Biology, Chemistry, and Anatomy. I took Honors and AP English and History.

Here is the thing, I thought I was stupid. I remember crying in the classroom corner in second grade and telling my cousins I was retarded. My nickname in MS was LD. My parents never let me not do my work. My Mom sat at the table doing homework with me every freaking day. She was as bad at math and science as I was but we sat there and did it. And at some point in time, it clicked. I graduated from high school in the top 10% of my class and went to college. Oh my god was college awesome. I shined. I could take the classes I wanted, not math and science. I was a whiz in the Humanities. we celebrated my C in statistics like it was an A. I found that I loved Geology, it was the history of the planet told by rocks and very cool.

Then I shocked the hell out of everyone and went on to earn my Doctorate. And teach statistics and game theory. Turns out I understood the concepts but just couldn’t solve the problems by hand. Give me a data set and a computer program and I was good to go. I have never been more proud of the 3.5 I earned in my graduate level stats and game theory classes. I taught myself the basics of calculus and matrix algebra.

How did I learn to do hard work? I had no choice. If I wanted to succeed, I had to work. And my parents never let me think I couldn't succeed. When other people dropped out of Grad School because comprehensive exams and the dissertation were a painful grind, I shrugged my shoulders and ground on. I barely passed my comps, but I passed. The dissertation took 3 years but it got done. Plenty of people who were smarter then me and who found school far easier then I did dropped.

My son does not have my learning issues and has not shown obvious signs of ADHD. He is smart as a whip and school is easy for him. We enrolled him in language immersion so that he would have something that he would have to work at in school. We started him in AoPS so that he would have a challenge in math. We applaud his effort scores and not his grades. I have flat out told him if I ever hear that he is telling kids in school that things are too easy he is in deep trouble because there are kids like me that school is not easy for. They don’t need anyone telling them that school is easy. I secretly applaud when he struggles with something because he needs to learn that there is a reward for working through something that is hard. I worry that he is not learning perseverance and that it is ok to struggle because he just has not struggled.

Any way, I learned to work hard otherwise I would have failed. Hell, I failed even though I worked hard. But failures can lead to success if you have the right support and mindset. [/quote]

Thanks--this is really helpful.  Good on you (and your mom) for powering through.  I'm sure it was excruciating at the time--I watched both my siblings struggle with learning disabilities and thinking they were stupid when they were really pretty brilliant.  I have read Carol Dweck's work about mindset, and I think it pretty well explains what happened with me.  I was smart enough (in the relevant sense) that I never had to work very hard to do well in school, was constantly told how smart I was, and my parents' attitude was that so long as I was getting good grades I could do whatever I wanted.  So, I breezed through school but never really applied myself.  Only now, 15 years out of grad school is it really hitting me that I have no idea how to push myself or how to grind through challenging problems, and that it is holding me back and leaving me frustrated.  I often wonder if my parents had pushed me into a place like TJ I would have learned these skills.  But, then I hear about 15-year-olds sleeping 4 hours a night just to keep up and its sounds absolutely miserable.

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