Man… Sort working with my kiddo on this particular root issue. Getting to the answer is great. Do it fast for sure. But learning the skill of sustained effort is an important skill to develop. We’re using piano as our entry point. He’ll be able to get the piece down in about 45 to 60 minutes. So we’re working on developing creative expression in a piece, improv that allows for techniques learned in the piece, and then just introducing the next piece. I’m looking forward to him creatively engaging the same piece for an extended period of time.
“Gifted” education has come a long way since I was a kid. We know acceleration isn’t the only or even best tool for kids. And many gifted kids come with different executive functions so rote repetition feels like torture. Employing a depth of knowledge schema and circling back to previously learned concepts coupled with individual expression has been great! That and developing emotional tools for self regulation have been the primary efforts for the last few years. It’s been getting a lot better!
I struggled at math as a young kid because I hated doing everything the long way and showing every step. I got a mental math book that taught how to do longer form multiplication in your head. I could multiply 2-3 digit numbers in my head and just tell you the answer.
My teacher made me do it on the board in front of everyone and swore I was cheating somehow because if she couldn’t do it, a kid couldn’t either.
I was also reading Michael Chriton books in the 4th grade, and teachers thought that I wasn’t because kids don’t read books like that.
School was kinda annoying with how it would punish you for being anywhere outside of normal. Even if it was positive.
swore I was cheating somehow because if she couldn’t do it, a kid couldn’t either
because kids don’t read books like that.
School was kinda annoying with how it would punish you for being anywhere outside of normal. Even if it was positive.
This 100x. I taught myself how to read before going to first grade. The reward was being isolated in an empty classroom for a lot of first grade when others were learning to spell. Well there was one other kid, but she didn’t speak. She had been taught by her extremely strict parents to read before school. They had like 7 children and were horribly strict. This girl starter crying once when she got what’s equivalent to an A-, afraid she was going be yelled at at home.
There was a special class for anyone below average. But dear me, if you were above average no you weren’t, because that’s just rude.
Doing any work I was given faster than other didn’t result in getting more challenging work. It just resulted in getting more of the same boring shit I’d already shown I know very well.
I could’ve been one of those kids who go to college at 14, but nooooo. I just learned to avoid work and hide my skills
Remember title of mental math book?
I remember being told I needed to do homework at home and my assigned work at school. I was fast enough that I got through the assignment and started on my homework. Teacher told me to stop. I kept at it as I figured it was better than sitting around bored out of my skull. Teacher lost her shit and I got sent to the principal’s office.
As a kid, this confused me. However, I kept doing it.
Part of the purpose of homework is to encourage the student to revisit the assignment later in the day. Repetition of exercise develops muscles and your brain is a muscle.
That said
Teacher lost her shit
Generally best when teachers manage their own tempers, as hot heads do a poor job of gaining the trust and maintaining the attention of their students.
I loved to read, so if I got my work or test done quickly, I had time to read while everybody else was still.workung.
I was especially good with reading tests, because I was always the best reader in my classes in elementary school. I was always the first done.
I would also be completely confused and offended for the rest of my life if a teacher had said something like that to me
Reminds me of one of my elementary school English teachers. We were all given a blank hardcover book and had to make a story with illustrations. Mine was called “The Loose Kitty”. Every page basically had the kitty on the loose in different areas of a city, running into other animals that had some rhyming. I spent so much time with the art, proofing it, etc. This teacher took hard red ink and strikes through loose and put “lost” ON EVERY PAGE. I tried to tell her no it is loose because EVERYTHING IN THE BOOK related to being “on the loose”. Nope. Got like a C- on that thing.
Am I still sour about it 30 years later? Yes, I still loose my shit.
to be fair she probably understood the concept of a kitten on the loose, but wanted to nudge you away from filling your book with innuendo without having to explain the concept of an un-tight and/or readily available vagina
Not all who wander are lost, bitch.
Sound’s like your an pour loster.
What a bitch! I never thought the comments in this post would raise my blood pressure
This one hurt for even me to read
Its because teachers hate the idea that a smart student isn’t enthusiastic about the topic they’re teaching and that they’d do clearly what is their bare minimum and then mentally drop out. Its insecurity.
I had a ton of teachers like this.
My music teacher was pretty angry that I clearly only picked the subject because I didn’t want to take art or PE.
I wasn’t there due to any passion for it, did the absolute minimum, and the only way it’s affected my life is that I keep thinking about how annoyed he was.
Eh, that’s the system so I can’t fault you. But specialty electives like that usually have limited seats - your seat may have displaced someone much more enthralled with the subject.
Also I guarantee they sucked at it and made everyone else sound worse by association. Childhood visual art classes are way easier than music anyway, it doesn’t even have to look like anything. It’s extremely obvious when someone doesn’t know what they’re doing in a music class.
Well, music is kind of a team sport, I’d be pissed if one of the percussionists could never hit the damn triangle at the right time.
This used to be my mentality in regards to work for the majority of my early twenties. Turns out pretty much every job out there will give you more work to do if you are too efficient. Eventually it reaches a point where you have too much on your plate and start getting burned out fairly quickly yet you’ve set the bar so high that anything less than maximum efficiency is considered lazy.
My new method is to work at 50%-70% efficiency while at work and I take my time on everything I’m asked to do. I’ve worked my ass off for about a decade at various jobs and was only rewarded with more work. I’ll save my efficiency for the things I actually care about in my life.
I have a coworker that is currently in the situation I was in five years ago. He’s working late every single day and barely has any time for personal business because he worked too hard at the beginning to “climb the ladder” that he’s now overworked and miserable as more things keep getting piled on top. I was talking to him the other day and he was saying that he started working on the weekends because he has so much shit he has to do.
I learned that lesson in high school. Always more tasks if you finish any
Exactly! Employers and managers typically won’t know either, unless they are micromanagers who track your every move. If this was a start up and doing more will have a big impact, then putting in more effort is justified. Med/large company? Nahhh
My mental model is somewhat orthogonal to this, 100% efficiency by definition is the most I can sustainably do indefinitely. I can probably do 150% if I really need to, but not for very long at all, and I’m usually between 85-105%.
If I’m doing ~30 hours a week of work I’ve been asked to do, or needs to get done, and doing 8-10 hours a week of whatever I think is important to prioritize, I’m probably in a pretty good place. I don’t tend to get overly rewarded with more work, and I’m still recognized as doing valuable and important stuff by my teammates.
If someone is doing way more than 40 hours in a week on more than a very rare occasion, some layer of management has failed, and if it’s the norm, the whole system has failed. I’m well aware that may be working as designed, but I would contend it was simply designed to fail.
I used to sleep in my accounting class. Another student got offended and was like why doesn’t he just skip? My teacher said he comes in, gets straight As, he can take a nap if he likes.
See I use to do the same in history but I got an F. Loser
Me in chemistry. I would sleep in class then get called on and answer correctly just to fall back asleep.
She was an awful teacher though.
This was me in highschool, I was so bored of the pace we were going at, so I skipped a lot of classes, came in and aced tests, not with the correct answers they were looking for, but still correct. 🤣
This was me including the AP classes. Then I got accepted to a really good engineering school and got my ass handed to me because I never developed proper study skills.
This was me in engineering school as well. First 2 years were brutal because I’d never really had to study and things suddenly got hard and needed to put in some effort. I got through it but it was a much different learning experience than I expected.
I got through it too but I can’t say I ever developed the level of study skills that some of my classmates had. In the end I guess I developed my own study style which I guess I still use now almost 40 years later in my work career.
It’s weird to think there might be people who had a different experience with engineering school.
This was me in world history and chemistry. I napped and got woken up if no one else had the answer in the former, woke up after the lab was explained (that was just regurgitating what was in the lab sheets) then did the lab in the latter
Based
I suppose it could be a criticism of the quality of the work: i.e. you finish it quickly but it’s half-arsed because you were too lazy to take the time to do it properly.
It was the teacher’s way of calling him a dork
I know I ain’t doin’ much.
Doing nothing means a lot to me.~ AC/DC Downpayment Blues
A teacher once said to me, for acting antisocial: “if you keep pushing people away: one day, they’ll just leave you alone”
I wasn’t doing it for attention. I’m very glad to be largely left alone now. It’s great.
“Antisocial” doesn’t mean “introverted”
Out of curiosity, how old are you now?
The problem is psychopaths are driven to leadership and they’re not actually good at anything.
Basically their ego tells them that they’re pareto people when they’re really not and society can’t tell the difference. Mostly they just steal labor. And they’re too stupid and insecure to identify and empower the most efficient people.
You just described MAGA.
Wtf does that have to do with the post
That was my question but I thought I was just being high.
All teachers are psychopaths. Get with the program
Common forms of “society doesn’t understand or value the people who actually get shit done”.
Yea and these people will not shut the fuck up, either.
Just reminded me what Pareto Principle was and now I have business school PTSD. Thanks.
It actually might be a fundamental principal of the universe like the Fibunnacci sequence. It shows up everywhere, there’s a great old vsauce episode on it.
Sure. Still doesn’t resolve the PTSD from BS management classes though lol.
My HS football coach once called me the dumbest smart kid he’d ever met because I kept mixing up my assignments for each play. Highest GPA on the team…
Didn’t get my ADHD diagnosis until I was 39, lol
I got the same insult as a child. I just thought “ah she’s stupid” and moved on and never thought about it until I saw this post
A task is always only so big that the weakest child can do it. That’s often not enough to learn something thoroughly.
I had a similar problem.
Once, in school, i did all my homework fast. We had a week to do it, i handed it in after a day only. The teacher saw that, thought i’m very interested or that they give us too little homework, and then increased homework for me and everyone else. I learned not to do things quickly. It will only backfire.
This is the way.
Don’t procrastinate the work…just procrastinate the turn-in.
This way, you can feign being busy and be done at the same time! Nobody needs to know that you’re done. That means you can slack off right up until the last possible second, completely stress-free.
If you start showing your hand, they’re gonna start expecting more from you. And what will you get in return? Maybe an extra 0.5% on your raise? Nah brah. Keep it. 0.5% on 100k is $500/yr. Is less than $10/wk…after taxes, they barely bought you a coffee every week.
By all means…work at a medium pace while you’re new. Don’t want to get caught while you’re still green. But once you’re comfortable in a place…
Quick ≠ good
Quick ≠ bad
Tell that to your wife
Yeah but if the work were bad, she probably would’ve included that in the criticism, because it’s a way better criticism
People often frame themselves the hero
People often argue using bad assumptions.
