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.

{{{{{{{Allyson}}}}}}} I don't know what else I could possibly say. I am so sorry.

There are three teachers in my life I will be forever grateful for. My fourth grade art teacher, who wrote on my report card that I was very talented but that I didn't give anywhere near 100% effort. My eight grade guidance counselor, who called me out hard for intellectual arrogance in a way that had a lasting impact. My junior year history teacher, who basically said that because I had good ideas and could phrase them well, no one one had called me out on the fact that my papers had no overall structure. From them, I got the message loud and clear that talent did not exempt me from work, and it certainly did not exempt me from working at being a good person.

When I went back to school and took a programming course (and in fact, managed to take it 2 and a half times) I was truly shocked by how "hard" it was... until I realized that it had been so long since I'd run into programming problems that I couldn't comprehend and fix immediately. It took an effort to let go of my self-judgement and accept that I was adrift in a sea of concepts that I had to conquer.

Sticking with it though -- led me to having a series of what I've heard a dog trainer call "Helen Keller moments" where concepts snap into place and you can suddenly grok a paradigm of how things work and how you'll make them work.

Helen Keller moments are a cool idea. I talk about the concept of "yet" a lot. I tell them learning is funny -- that you start with a sense that you get it, then you hit a roadblock and suddenly it's all confusion and you have to roll around in that mire and much and you feel like you don't get it. But it's just that you don't get it yet. Then things click and you've mastered it.

Atul Gawande has a lovely essay on this idea around practice.

I haven't ever been praised for being smart, at least by parents. But I also don't like not being good at things quickly. I have been flirting with retaking math classes so that I can retake chem and organic chem so that I can either be an RN or a respiratory therapist. God knows I have a lot of practical experience.