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Schools and Education General Discussion
Reply to "Competitive academics - what to tell the smart, hard-working kid who isn't "the best""
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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There's a disconnect for me here. Your DD is not actively gunning to be at the tippy top, yet she is upset that she's not at the tippy top? Ummmmmmmm....[/quote] OP here. She isn't mad she's not at the tippy top. She has made a choice to approach school in a different way and is happy with her choice. She just gets down because sometimes it's hard to see classmates honored and awarded for their choices, and not get that same validation. There is no award for "most well rounded student" or "student synthesizing some themes from Moby Dick into a pretty cool art project" or "read and understood the most unassigned science books." Individual teachers might recognize that stuff (sometimes, sometimes they don't), but there are no trophies for those kinds of things. My kid is on a different path than the more competitive kids who are gunning for Ivy admission and other very visible rewards (though she does have straight As). I think a lot of the time, she just does her thing and it's fine. She's just struggling with the end of the year awards where a kid like her doesn't get much attention, even though she's worked very hard over the course of the year, just in ways that don't result in academic awards. That's it. She's not mad she's not at the tippy top, she's just sad that in not being at the tippy top, she feels kind of invisible at the moment.[/quote] 1. Green is ugly color on her. 2. People who are obsessed with awards collapse hard when[b] the awards stop coming after age 18 or 22[/b]. The awards only exist to motivate kids who lack internal motivation. (Some internally motivated kids mop of the awards anyway.) The people who *want* the awards don't matter. The awards don't matter. Your daughter is ahead of the game if she has an internal compass. Better, in fact, if she's not even playing the game, and living a life instead. I have a shelf full of high end trophies to arrest to this. [/quote] The "awards" don't stop coming after the age 18 or 22. There are pretty well defined metrics of success in most fields, and, if nothing else, you can also compare money. [/quote] Unless you are in the NFL or NBA, what your employer and customers pay you for is not for the games schools give trophies for. Most successful people work at job functions that most high schoolers don't even know are jobs, and have nothing to do with what schools give trophies for. [/quote]
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