By stealing their words I become smrt too

[aesmael]

    Bronze Dog, whose Bronze Blog I should read more often, has articulated in the comments of one of his Doggerel posts, something which I have been attempting to grasp for a while now.

Certainly getting into one of my peeves. Something I wish they figured out when I was a kid: You don't praise children as being smart, at least not very often: You praise them for working hard.

Anecdotally, I was heavily praised as smart, and as a result, I don't like to be seen working: Smart people are supposed to do things quickly and naturally. At least that's the general idea of what gnaws at me.

Bonus elaboration by Margaret: Yes, absolutely. Praising kids for being smart rather than for working hard just teaches the smart ones to be embarrassed to be seen working hard (since that means they have failed to be smart) and teaches the average and dumb ones that they don't have to even try since hard work doesn't matter and there is no way they can succeed.

That said, it is still better than than the sexist treatment of girls (maybe not so much these days) in which neither "smart" nor "hard work" is worthy of praise, only pretty or nice or popular or good or some euphemism for "biddable."

Comments

[dclarion.livejournal.com]

Wait... Let me find that hickey -- one of these:

("Hickey" is the proper name for a conduit-bender.)

I need to bend my head around something. If you praise kids for being smart, the smart kids won't want to work because they will have failed at being smart, and the not-smart kids won't want to work because it just doesn't matter? You lose both ways?

I'm going to go out on a limb and call myself "smart", or at least a smart-ass. The way I see it, "smart" doesn't make it come any easier, it just means that I see the world in a manner fundamentally different to the way other people see it. That might mean that I see a problem's solution before Joe (who is "not-smart") over in the corner, there, but it doesn't mean that I don't have to kick some serious mental ass to get it to work.

Consider the music library software I eventually want to get around to writing. Joe may lament that he's "not smart enough to understand all that programming stuff". He may not be. He may be, and just doesn't know it. Either way, I'm going to be at the job for weeks, even months. I have a clear idea of what I want to do, but actually doing it is going to involve stealing/organizing/writing tens of thousands of lines of code, not to mention getting off mt gluteus maximus and finally learning either GTK+ or raw X. Then there's the debugging; did I mention that you might not get quite what you wanted if you write "pointer++" where you really wanted "++pointer"?

Anyway... Hard work is what gets you there. Smart is sometimes another road to your destination, and sometimes a roadblock.