HÖGA FÖRVÄNTNINGAR!

“You’re really smart!”
We hear that kind of praise all the time. But it’s devastating.
Joshua Zucker is the director of the Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival. I had asked him
about the role of praise in teaching. He continued:

I have no problem with praising effort. It’s praising intelligence by itself that’s the problem. That kind of praise will eventually shut you down.

This experiment is my favourite. A bunch of kids were given some fairly easy math problems. At the end, half the kids were told, “You must be really smart.” The other half was told, “You must have worked really hard.”

The kids were given another set of problems. These problems were a little bit harder. The kids who were initially told they were smart did very poorly. Of course. “Oh! I can’t do these. I must not be really smart.” They shut down and did miserably.

The kids who worked hard had the opposite reaction. “Wow. These are tough. But if I work hard, maybe I can figure them out too.” Then they did them.

There was a vastly significant difference in performance. All because of five words. “You must be really smart.” One shot of five words. Once.

Schools get this exactly wrong. Kids are taught the opposite. They’re told they’re smart. They think this means they should understand everything right away. But they won’t. And at some point they stop doing math. I asked Mr. Zucker how he dealt with this growing up.
I was lucky. Just when I was beginning to think I was smart and didn’t really need to work hard— at age 14 or so — I started going to math summer camp. At camp, you would have 10 problems and eight hours to do them.This was completely different from school. At school, you would have 30 exercises to do in 30 minutes. You could answer them all correctly. But at camp the problems were different. You would never understand them completely.

You were forced to realize that being smart wasn’t enough. You realized it would take a lot of hard work to succeed no matter who you were.
That’s what kids really need — stuff they’re not going to get to the end of. Then they’re really thinking. That’s my goal.