I had a bad time my first two years of college, because I had never had to work at school work before. I didn't have the foggiest idea how.

That's the one thing I wish my students would learn before they leave my class. So I spend a lot of time pushing kids to do work of the harder type.

I had a mom complain about what I ask kids to do at back to school night and I told her, "I'm teaching your kids the way I want my own kids to be taught. When I look around at my colleagues, I see parents who send their own kids to private schools while they teach your kid here in ways they wouldn't want for their own children. I teach the way I was taught at an all girl's private school and it's the way I want my kids taught."

But I have a well earned rep for having the hardest class in the school and it's hard for my straight A students as well. If they work, though, they won't fail.

My rude awakening came in high school. I had a couple semesters of unexpected grades.

I had two teachers who made me work. They were my favorites.

I never had to worry about being praised the wrong way by my parents. They didn't praise me for anything until I was in my late 20s. Even now...it's just not their way.

Are there any articles on whipping flabby 50-year-old brains into shape, other than the "use it or lose it" types? I was very much the "I'm smart, so I should be able to do this, I don't want to risk not being smart," and I never really pushed myself. To wit, I simply didn't consider taking physics in high school because I heard it was all math, and I didn't think I could do math. I was a senior in college before it dawned on me that I had a logical, analytic brain and that I'd be headed in a completely different direction if I'd risked that physics class.

Even now I will go to great lengths to avoid situations where it's clear I don't have an immediate grasp of what's going on. I'm probably worse at admitting I'm lost than the stereotypical male.

THat’s pretty typical for “smart kids,” Connie. I fell into that hard in high school math and became convinced I just wasn’t good at it and never could be. Years later, I was the one explaining trig to my classmates and reveling in a college statistics class, but my initial resistance was because I didn’t want to be “not smart” and so was afraid to take the risk.

Oh, that article was heartbreaking, beautiful but heartbreaking. A friend of mine lost her daughter, her first born, to brain cancer when she was two years old. It made me think of her and of all her parents went through. She died around the same time that Franny was concieved.

Allyson, so sorry your family has to deal with so much crap right now. Same for you, brenda.

Kat, that article is so utterly devastating. I read it when you linked it on Facebook a couple of days ago, and just cried at my desk. And yeah, the line about parents being a reflection of their kids rather than the other way around really stuck with me. And I'm not even a parent!

I was definitely one of those kids who was praised early and often for being smart, and then had a rude awakening in college (or a series of brutal rude awakenings). I learned to read at three, got pegged early on as a smart kid, and coasted on that rep all the way through high school without doing an ounce of work, and had almost no idea how. Or, at least, how to work hard at things I didn't enjoy, or that didn't come easy. And then three weeks after I got to college, my mom was diagnosed with cancer, I was at a huge university where it was easy to disappear, and my family was preoccupied. So I stopped going to class altogether. It took me years to fix the mistakes I made when I was young and traumatized. I'm still working on it, in some ways.

ION, gronk. I am in the rental car shuttle on the way to the airport. So. Tired.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes yesterday!

Much coping~ma to your family, Allyson.

My sister and I were both "smart kids" in k-12. When my sister hit high school she took every music course available, four out of five courses her senior year. While she certainly practiced, music came very easy to her, and when college presented her with a challenging academic load (and introduced her to beer) she almost flunked out. So when I got to high school my parents pushed me into every AP and honors course possible, to the point where the guidance councilor was warning them I'd crash and burn. When I got to college Latin gave me some trouble, but on the whole I did OK.

To this day my sister seems to think she's the family dummy, in spite of getting her MA while teaching and raising two kids. (Hell, just keeping a teaching job in MI looks like a genius-level challenge to me). She just made a bad choice or two when she was 16. That's pretty much what 16 is for.