What I've noticed common among a lot of Americans is a fear/inhibition of speaking the truth, mostly to not have a confrontation.
I witnessed an example of this in a music performance of a teen rock band.
In this performance, the band sucked overall. The guitarist didn't know what he was doing. But everybody (guardians, parents, teachers, friends) just keep saying, "Great performance brah, awesome shit, good going guys" etc.
While this feedback raises self-esteem with positive feedback, there is no criticism of where they failed...at all!! Who's going to tell them, "Hey, your timing on the G-C chord switch sucked"?
When these same kids go for a "real" performance/audition, they suck at it, fail miserably and thus causing anti-social behaviors, anger, and in extreme cases, suicides.
I personally believe in a system of constructive criticism where positive feedback is necessary for the kids, yet someone actually tells them that they can do better in this, this and this area.
Irrationally high/low self-esteem is a bane for competition.
There's a time and a place for critique, and immediately after a performance is neither. Only a jerk with truly low self-esteem would think that it was appropriate to offer unsolicited criticicism of the performance skills of a teenager in a rock band to their face at the performance.
If it's their music instructor, maybe. But again, that's not really the place. Next lesson would be the right time and place to get that feedback.
Are you an American? I'm European, and maybe this is just personal experience / a personal anecdote, but whenever I've had conversations with an American I found that they tend to always be really excited and then casually ignore any further communication. It's much harder to figure out for me what an American _actually_ means vs say a Belgian or a British person. No point in being an open person if you're only touting positive things.
I agree with your statement in principle, but at the same time, people need to be willing to give some meaningful comments. If I'm trying to break through in a rock band, I want criticism so I can figure out how to improve. Being told "Good performance brah", if you know you sucked, sucks.
I'm an American and my 10 yr old son is in an organized band that includes a weekly private lesson and a public performance. I agree with skywhopper that there's a time and place for criticism and right after the show, especially at that age, is not it.
Also, part of the objective of having the public performance is to simply get kids comfortable performing publicly. My kid was practically shitting himself before the show, he was so nervous about playing in front of a crowd. So, a healthy part of the applause is recognition that they simply performed publicly. It's likely that greeting them with criticism of their playing as they walk off the stage won't do much to encourage them to try it again.
>> It's likely that greeting them with criticism of their playing as they walk off the stage won't do much to encourage them to try it again.
There's a way to frame it. At the end of a band performance, the audience (even if it is just 3-4 people) is encouraged to clap, even if the performance sucked. Usually, they do clap. This is enough of a positive reinforcement.
When the whole thing is over, before packing up, have a 15 minute meeting in which all you do is say,
"Great performance guys. You did a,b,c really well. Jeff, I saw you listened to my instruction. Hi five! Stacy, you did a good job. There were some mistakes in your chord transitions, let's talk about that so you can do it better next time"
Kids should grow up knowing they are doing well but aren't perfect yet. Let's keep improving until we get there.
You don't teach kids I assume.
I do. I am a judo coach of kids.
I think the point is : It is not really up to the parents to be so critical of their kids. They should be supportive and positive.
It is really up to the coach to provide the technical feedback and it is more beneficial to assess performance at the next practice when the kids are back in a learning mode.
At that point they are mentally ready to practice over their problem areas straight away.
Parents can set their kids back by berating them at the wrong time.
Right: 10yo - agree. But once you're past a certain age, e.g. 14-15, probably not? Then again, I don't think people should be rewarded either for showing up or putting in an effort. But for younger kids (e.g. < 14yo) it's definitely not an issue + good that you want to get them to experience new things.
Maybe I have different view on things, but if I look back at how much focus was put on putting in effort (and not actually achieving anything) during my high school years, then I think we have things wrong to some extent. It's even worse today than it was before -- I have a friend who works in a school and he says it's great that grading is being phased out.. not sure whether I agree on that.
If your friend was learning to code, and wrote a tetris clone, would you congratulate them on their first major project, or would you critique their sloppy code? They had to develop and live with that codebase, maybe for several days or more. They're probably aware of some things that suck about it, but had to stick with it (otherwise you never finish). Having someone criticize your code, variable names, lack of patterns without asking would be really demoralizing.
There's a difference between a well written function, and an entire application that's well organized and thought out. And there's a difference between playing in your garage and playing on stage.
Did the band suck because they couldn't play? Or did they suck because they were nervous? Well the only way to get over that is to play in front of people more.
I also think there should be a difference in expectations depending on where/what you're seeing. You have every right to criticize a group playing Madison Square Garden. But there's a reason the 14 year olds are playing O'Mallys Pub on a Tuesday, or the Ernie Ball stage at Warped Tour, and not the main stages or an arena.
What's particularly awesome and worth congratulating is watching a band of teenagers suck on stage, and then watching them a month later suck a little less. We should be striving for "better" rather than "great", in my opinion.
What country are you from? In my experience Americas fall somewhere in the middle in terms of directness, compared to European countries.
I lived in the UK for a few years and found Brits very hard to read / resistant to confrontation. On the other hand, I'm married to a Spaniard, and when I'm over there, it's sometimes a bit uncomfortable how direct and open people are.
Belgium. It's not necessarily the directness that I mind, it's the fact that often people are (excuse my language) full of shit. They say A, but actually mean B. Which is a trait, for example, the British have as well, but one I seem to understand a lot better than when I'm dealing with Americans.
Americans have a reputation for saying things like "let's do lunch sometime" as a sort of vague statement of agreeableness and intention to stay in contact, whereas, let's say, Swedish people would consider that to be a straightforward intention to book a lunch date.
I'm Belgian but I haven't lived there for many years. I'm not sure if you still live there, but I do not support your position at all. Belgians are just as ambiguous in communication as anyone else. In a different way, maybe, but they're certainly (overall) not direct.
Among "opportunity for improvement" and "a challenge", my preferred wording came from an American war movie: "Boss, we have a situation" was translated in French with "Boss, we have a problem". As if the original movie's character meant there was an interesting "new situation" about natural water cooling the nuclear reactor, while the French translation acknowledged that it could be a problem to have water pouring in a nuclear submarine at -3000 feet...
Maybe this is part of why a lot more popular bands come from the US than from Europe?
Not to be glib, but when I lived in Europe I was shocked at how many unknown American bands they would fly out to play at tiny venues (bars, "underground" clubs) every weekend. I asked, don't you have your own unknown bands that rehearse in garages and dorm rooms? It turns out: not so much, not nearly to the level that this exists in America.
So maybe the difference is that Europeans like to shit all over their friends' bands?
Band popularity has a lot to do with marketing. If you are looking at the size of European countries they have just as many influential artists as the US. UK and Sweden in particular.
Americans get excited about the most commonplace things like they were 12-year old virgins. You can also see it here when some idiotic startup comes up with an idiotic business model. I can never decide if they are serious or not.
Same in sports. They all go full hysterical mode when they qualify for the next round of 8. Er... boy, you do this every week, you haven't failed reaching the final once in the last 3 years, why do you and your team mates and your family need to overplay it so much as if you accomplished anything special? Do other players/athletes from other countries need to do the same? No.
I can't see the point to spread and spread and spread on things which have just been done how they should be done. Acknowledge them and move to the stuff which went wrong or can be improved, that's more interesting.
About making a fuss about nothing, I remember that time when I visited the USA as a teenager, and when we left most of the American adults began to cry (after we managed to escape from the bloody hugs. I don't know who invented hugs, but I hate him.). We looked at each other, wondering what was going on. It seemed our departure was something big, so we tried to force ourselves to do the same but we didn't manage to shed a tear. So we kids had to witness all these grown-ups crying for nothing. That scene shocked me, I remember it after 25 years.
(Okay, one possible explanation was that they may have thought that we were sent back to slavery in a third-world commie state, since God knows all countries don't have the luck to be in northern America.)
Well, if just after performance you told me: "wow, that was great", then the next time we met: "actually, you sucked guys" (or even worse, tell that behind my back), I would deem you liar and dishonest person. Constructive criticism, especially by close friends and family, is the best outcome imho, while an empty, meaningless praise only causes harm on the long run. I'm from Europe, so it must be a cultural difference.
In my opinion, it takes a real lily to not be able to handle or constructively internalize others' criticisms as they're lobbed at you. These are important skills. I don't always welcome criticism, but when I get it, I listen.
You touch on something I think about often as a father. Many years ago, I had a psychology professor who basically went off on a rant for an entire class meeting about this, and it struck a chord in me.
It was basically this:
1) Parents don't understand a child's emotional needs. Children need a foundation of love, which at an early age basically means attention from and interaction with caregivers.
2) Modern parents, especially pronounced starting with baby boomers, often feel they didn't get enough love and support from their parents. So they lavish their children with praise – frequently instead of focused attention – and think they're doing a good job.
3) This creates children who commingle love with achievement. That is, their parents love them because of their supposed achievements, and thus, if they're not achieving things, they aren't worthy of love. So children simultaneously have inflated egos but also very insecure egos. (This also ties into the whole idea that you should praise a child's effort, not their intelligence.)
That's all very abstract though. He gave a bunch of examples, but only one has stuck with me. Let's say your three year old comes to you with a drawing. Unless she's a prodigy, that drawing is going to be objectively bad, mostly squiggles with maybe a shape or two.
How most modern parents respond:
Parent: Good job! This is such a pretty drawing. I like how you used different colors. That's a great circle. You're a good drawer. Can you go draw me a square now?
Parent then goes back to watching TV, which would be a smartphone in an updated example.
How a parent should respond:
Parent: Thank you for showing me your drawing. I like how you used different colors and only drew on the paper. (legitimate praise is fine). What's this? (points to circle blob)
Kid: A horse.
Parent: Oh, a horse. Cool. Does she have a name?
(or Is the horse happy today? Can he run fast? whatever. The point is to engage in open ended questions that show you care and let the kid drive the conversation, somewhat.)
Kid: His name is cow.
Parent: A horse named cow, how silly.
And so on.
Anyway, I'm sure people would have problems with my sample good response too, and I'm probably misremembering the details. I'm also not sure the baby boomer stuff is totally accurate. But the overall idea is to give attention and focused interaction, not undue praise, and that makes a ton of sense to me.
It's weird, i don't think i had a ton of praise growing up (in the 90s), but regardless i ended up a basket case when it comes to praise. I loathe it.
At some early point in my life i saw how meaningless praise was. Parents (mine and others) praised without warrant.. and it was obvious to me. Worse yet, i couldn't figure out where the line was - what was legitimate praise? I became distrusting of all praise, and rarely felt pride from anyone but myself. Which, honestly sucks.
Whether it's parents praising their children, or gifts at Christmas that people often don't want but smile and act like they do.. everyone is just lying to each other so constantly that everything of value feels so fake.
It's honestly quite upsetting to me. I wonder if it's like this everywhere? Is it mostly an American situation?
I might agree with you, but I would need more context.
For example, my daughter did a rock-camp last summer. It was some neighborhood kids that got together with a teacher for 5 afternoons to learn six songs and after the camp was over, they put on a show to play the songs they had been practicing.
The kids' talent levels ranged from truly amazing to early beginner. Nobody played flawlessly but everybody had a lot of fun. The feedback the kids received was overwhelmingly positive and I think it had the effect of making the kids want to do it again next summer. People were congratulating them on their hard work and learning to play so many songs in very little time.
The kids that played at a high level would probably appreciate some criticism. The kids that were struggling may have been embarrassed and less likely to continue. I could be wrong about that, but it's my gut feeling.
Lauding the effort publicly seems like good re-enforcement.
The constructive criticism might be better off in a more private and 'safe' (biased towards the receiver) setting; this way shaming someone for a good attempt isn't the result.
My kids are in music lessons, the youth orchestra, etc., as I was at the same age. I also played in a rock band as a kid. I don't think that things have changed at all. Maybe the whole "self esteem" thing is an urban legend.
Everybody's enthusiastic at the performance, like you say.
At the next lesson, they review the recording. But then, they've been receiving that kind of critique at every lesson. You should hear the conductor let 'em have it at orchestra rehearsal. Because of this kind of dialog and close analysis, they also know exactly how well they're playing, immediately and intimately. Part of the goal is to teach kids how to engage in the critical dialog, and to be self-critiquing.
With the typical teen rock band, there is no adult involvement at all, other than fiscal.
It might not sound like it but it actually is quite helpful - translated it means "you are not doing well at a very basic thing and need more practice" because if a guitarist, on stage, can't hit a G-C chord switch competently, then there's really not a lot of wiggle room. They...suck...and need to be shown ways to improve. A lot of times the self-esteem-based response will dismiss the criticism as 'being mean' or some crap when it's actually totally valid.
Probably not - you're supposed to hone your craft through practice before you perform in the way that was described.
If the overall performance was poor, and something so basic was clearly an issue, then maybe they don't realise?
This is like a development candidate being poor at simple interview problems - it simply is the case that often you don't know what you're doing wrong until you've developed skill, but people around you saying you're doing great can suppress your desire to work on that skill in favor of rushing ahead to interview where you fall flat on your face.
(An Open Mic D-Chord is a D-Chord (D A D F#) where they don't mute the lowest string and thus put a really nasty sounding E note on the bottom of the chord)
I think I understand what you are saying...but at the same time, given the example 6stringmerc used, there is nothing to "teach", the student has to practice more. That isn't teachable, the skill is only achieved via practice and work. (I give guitar lesions)
Which we, as a society, also seem reluctant to do. "oh you must not be good at that, try something else", instead of "if you want it you are going to have to work harder"
So, guitar is tough. Because it's not that you can teach someone how to do a G-C chord transition. There's no theory or understanding that goes into it.
It's muscle memory, plain and simple. You just have to do it a lot, over and over. I've had music teachers essentially say "that part sucked, you need to spend more time practicing it". There's no trick to be told, there's no intellectualization that will help. Practice.
It sounds like extremely constructive criticism to me. More specific than anyone has a right to expect; it's exactly what sounded bad, and exactly what needs to be practiced to sound better.
> What I've noticed common among a lot of Americans is a fear/inhibition of speaking the truth, mostly to not have a confrontation.
I’ve found this to more common among other cultural groups (for instance, some of my Indian and Iranian friends). I find Americans are generally on the blunt/direct/plain spoken side, sometimes extremely so.
Can you elaborate on who you’re comparing Americans to, and what contexts you find some other national/cultural group to have a different response?
Do you actually think the kids don't know where they screwed up their parts?
And even if they didn't know, right after the show isn't the time to mention mistakes.
It's hard enough to get up in front of people to speak, much less perform, so I think the situation you describe, if followed later by a discussion on what to improve and work on, is entirely appropriate.
Did you know that Steve Jones, the guitarist from the sex pistols, had to have another guitarist play behind a curtain for him for the first few shows? It didn't stop the band from changing popular music, and it didn't stop him from developing a very tight technique.[1]
> In this performance, the band sucked overall. The guitarist didn't know what he was doing. But everybody (guardians, parents, teachers, friends) just keep saying, "Great performance brah, awesome shit, good going guys" etc.
Also known as the "Everything is Awesome" syndrome. And this is not just for kids. In American companies (at least as far as I could observe), management principles teach you that you should not say anything negative to the employee directly, instead talk about "opportunities for improvement", etc... It's everywhere.
And I wager that the political correctness is also very much linked to that.
The author seems to be attacking common core ("so many different ways to think about simple addition") but then links it to self-esteem, without actually showing the connection. How does he know the math curriculum was designed to boost self-esteem?
Also, the ability to do rote sums is not the same as understanding math. So the fact that his son "could add up already" doesn't mean much, at least out of context.
How math curriculum boost self-esteem? You mean like being able to calculate precise predictions of any model of any discipline? In what way do you think that can possibly influence the self-confidence of anyone?
If self-esteem is so high, why is suicide so common?
Giving someone self-esteem doesn't mean letting them whine all the time. Your swimming instructors saying “C’mon dude, stop complaining, let’s get on with it!” IS giving the kid self-esteem!
Teaching many ways to add is important because not all kids are going to be able to learn the same way at that age. Different methods are going to "click" for different students. And those extra ways of adding aren't useless. In fact I spent a fair bit of time in college math and computer courses learning new ways to count, let alone add.
Agreed. A person who has unnaturally high self esteem will be more surprised by failure than someone with moderate or low self esteem. Losing a job, going through a failed relationship, flunking out of school, or any number of other personal "failures" may be that much more devestating to a person who places unwarranted expectations of success on themselves.
If you need this codified in the modern US media cycle, just take a look at the Corey Feldman / Today Show situation. He was terrible on appearance #1, the internet let him know (as it does, both in tempered and vicious ways) and he claimed he was being bullied, then came back and did appearance #2 which was even musically worse than the first one. Then he thanks everybody for the support, rather than pay attention to the valid criticism that he has not made a bit of improvement since his Howard Stern performance in 1992.
Calling a terrible work product terrible isn't bullying.
The man is 45 years old now. He's not a child anymore so it's reasonable to stop treating him with child gloves, or, to the point, coddling his self-esteem.
They don't have self-esteem but exactly the opposite. They are in constant need of external validation to feel good about themselves. A person with real self-esteem doesn't need to be praised all the time.
This. Self-esteem develops from personal achievement, not external praise. When you see the results of your actions and those actions have produced positive results, you gain that sense of achievement even if others don't recognize it.
This is the big miss from the self-esteem advocate crowds... the ones that do the participation trophies. They aren't creating self-esteem with worthless praise and merit-less awards... they're creating a dependency on the praise of others and that's not healthy: it creates the opposite of esteem when not fulfilled.
> A person with real self-esteem doesn't need to be praised all the time.
True. And from what I understand, adults get that self-esteem from being given unconditional love as children, when they don't have the capacity to provide it to themselves.
Also, given the US's gun laws presumably suicide is often more successfully completed in the US than in other places. Given this, the US suicide rate isn't comparatively that high.
When people tell you you are great at something, but you don't know, or can't talk about it, and feel you can't live up to your parents/teachers expectations, that's a lot of stress.
Also if you thought you were great at something in school, but actually you find out you suck in the real world, if that was a major part of your identity, some people just can't live with that.
Suicide is considered 'contagious'. Before social media (1970) the 'contagiousness' (to really muddle a complex issue) was ~6. Meaning that each suicide 'affected' 6 other young people deeply, seriously disrupted their life, or left them feeling suicidal as well. Typically this was only close friends and family. Now, as we are all more connected, we see that a single suicide affects more people and more quickly. Now the 'contagiousness' of a single suicide spreads to 134 young people, a ~2100% increase.
My wife teaches and this is all over the local schools now [0]. Kids are now live streaming and live snapping these grizzly acts. It seems that you become the most popular kid in school in an instant and that you get a lot of social capital when you kill yourself live.
I want you to know that I am choosing my words carefully now: It is fucking crazy. Not even kids in a fucking Syrian war zone are doing this fucking crap. To borrow from Tumblr: I. Can't. Even. My wife is damn near at the end of her rope with this on top of all the other shit she has to deal with. I think she'll end up as yet another burnout teacher, I can't blame her.
The linked article has a lot more and better discussion on the complexities of these suicide clusters and how hard it can be to identify and stop them. These clusters seem not to be linked to self-esteem and 'everyone gets a ribbon' culture as strongly as they are linked to Instagram and other digital shrines/death-cults generators. They may be linked, but it seems that the root cause of the self esteem cult and the suicide clusters may be social media. They are correlated, but not causal. This brings up an interesting case with the military suicide rates, as they are a very tight community that the rest of America has forgotten. To quote an Iraqi Porto-potty, of all things: 'The USA is not at war, the USMC is at war'.
We are loosing the war with suicide, and social media is the enemy.
> If you are feeling suicidal, there are many resources available.
There are resources readily available to stop you killing yourself right now. After that the prospects for help tend to dry up pretty quickly until you boil down to the next crisis. Hotlines are a fine thing to have and to promote, but they're not nearly enough.
Well I'm sorry for trying to help others out. What are good resources then? Just HN comments criticizing others for not being up to some random's standards.
I upvoted your post as I found it interesting (albeit very disturbing). I interpreted 0xcde4c3db's comment as essentially agreeing with you – but also adding that suicide hotlines by themselves aren’t enough (similar to how, in the case of a physical health problem, applying First Aid keeps someone alive but in the longer-term, medical care is needed).
My point is that there largely aren't good resources for a lot of people. It's not a criticism of you personally; you're raising awareness of one part of the situation, and I'm raising awareness of a different part of the situation.
They are under phenomenal pressure. Everything is more competitive, and they are under a barrage of ratings and selection processes.
Endless standardized tests. There was one standardized test when I was a kid -- an intelligence test -- and my parents never showed me the results. I took the ACT and SAT, but they seemed much less critical to getting into a decent college.
Grades seem much more critical today, due to competition for slots and scholarships in the more prestigious colleges.
Ranking systems, such as who gets to skip a grade in what subject.
Competitive selection processes, such as who gets into the youth orchestra, and which level of the youth orchestra.
Increased pressure to attend college, and to major in a short list of subjects that are associated with lucrative jobs.
Mountains of homework, yet we're also told that kids should learn how to "code" and to build up their "resume" for college admissions, oh and maybe also start a business. I learned to code in the ample spare time that I had because I had relatively little homework.
It's hard to know, because the definition of suicide has changed; the way it's recorded has changed; and religion in the US means some deaths by suicide are masked.
But, in general, yes, suicide rates are rising for young people. This is worrying because young women were for years the group at lowest risk of death by suicide. (But with high rates of self harm and attempted suicide).
Yeah, my personal experience with teens is that they are anxious and full of self-doubt. I certainly don't see an excess of self-esteem. I wonder how much hard-science there is on the harmfulness of praise
>At the heart of the problem is an educational ethos that prizes building self-esteem over academic attainment.
I'm not going to argue this assertion, because I think it's a valid one, but I would like to give it context that the author is seemingly lacking:
As a generalization spanning several decades, parents aren't interested in being parents and in turn the provenance of their responsibilities at home - discipline, ethics, morals, codes of conduct - have been transitioned to that of either the School System or LEOs in more extreme cases.
I submit it's nearly impossible to be both an academic task-master and an emotional development coach at the same time and expect both of them to excel in all scenarios where the provider is a Civic Organization of some sort (e.g. school system).
After all, it's a bunch of adults promoting the self-esteem bandwagon for these past few decades, not the kids. I wholly encourage Mr. Astill to join his local PTA and begin to address his long-term concerns with the root of the problem. I say this rather tongue in cheek, because actually doing something about the issue in one's one neighborhood is a lot harder than sitting down and writing about it (as a writer, believe me I know).
This touches on something nobody wants to acutally acknowledge or talk about. There is some subconscious shifts taking place - marriage later or not at all, fewer kids per household, etc - but fundamentally raising children is a ton of work. It is its own job, possibly in a class of its own in difficulty or at least rivaled by almost any other profession.
But society and culture just expects the job of you. Do it, don't be trained to do it, and probably worse of all do not organize society around promoting those who are best at it. In any other disciple if you are amazing at it you should expect gainful employment carrying it out. And there is a dramatic difference between parenting and caretaking or teaching. And even those have really bad real world metrics to gauge success, given by how often sitters or teachers can perform poorly.
But you don't solve this problem when you shove down every adults throat how not having children means they are a failure as a person, combined with the expectation that they should both be good parents and have an independent second (or first) career.
Being a parent is its own job. Throughout history, humans have consistently dedicated tremendous amounts of absolute hours of its adult population to the raising of children. Societies often organized around the subjugation of an entire sex to do the job. It is crucial for the wellbeing and long term prosperity of current and future generations people accept that reality.
> American children came top at thinking they were good at maths, but bottom at maths. For Korean children, the inverse was true: they considered themselves poorer at maths than the children of any other country, but were the best.
This really stood out to me because I often found my own examination results puzzling. I would ace exams that I thought I failed and just pass ones I was sure I had done well in.
This has lead me to believe that the more I know about a subject, the more I know how little I actually know about it and the greater respect I have for subject as a whole.
This might explain why children who are not great at maths might think they are. Not due to an inflated self esteem but because "knowing what you don't know" is a part of the learning process.
Interesting anecdote. As a father I feel nearly the exact opposite so I'll share my opinion.
On academics, I want my kids to learn how to learn. And to love to learn. I want them to learn to be persistent, have mental fortitude, be formidable, take risks, be collaborative, and not be afraid to fail. They should learn to be productive in whatever aspect of society they end up in. I want them to be happy. Lives are short. Childhoods are shorter. Striving to be the best at math and science academically gets a "meh" sort of reaction from me.
Yes we need those skills, and raw academic achievement is an interesting measurement, but, I'd like to see some convincing stats that it holds a causal relationship to national productivity per capita and GDP. I'm guessing that would be the goal of an education, in terms of the economy.
"If their instructors had focused on making them feel good about swimming, instead of on making them swim, they could have drowned."
Swimming is almost natural. Most mammals can swim with out training (even my cat knew how to swim). Fear on the other hand is what leads to drowning. You don't need formal training in swimming to stay a float. You need to not be afraid of the water.
On personal level for the downvoters as to why this is such a crappy metaphor is I know several adult family members that do not know how to swim and one of them my wife and just trained recently.... it required lots and lots of confidence boosting and reassuring.
So the instructor actually does need to make them "feel good" aka comfortable with the water.
The author could have picked so many other metaphors where state of mind plays less of a role.
I can only float (i.e. relax on my back doing nothing) in very salty seas, such as Aegean sea, and I absolutely cannot do it in fresh water. Despite it, my parents taught me to swim at 6, no way I'd be able to float before that.
The floating thing and even treading water are more or less required education before you're let out of the shallow pool/end and in to the part where you can't stand on your own.
I really like the idea of this concept, as it helps guide people to understand what's important to them. Having a grounding sense of goals, principles, and boundaries enables people to cultivate a productive self-worth that can be very powerful.
I feel like a lot of Hacker News readers can probably relate to this, as I've sensed a lot of self-directed joy has come from their time spent learning and using computers.
Looking back, other people's people evaluating/encouraging/criticising my math skills, swimming abilities, or self-esteem has done much worse for me than individually realising what's important to myself and wanting to work towards that. I really hope that we culturally have a change in attitude towards these things.
The grading scale at my daughter's elementary school keeps moving more and more towards not having any sort of discernable outcomes. The possible grade as of her most recent report card are:
Basic skill
Progressing towards goal
Meets goal
Exceeds goal
And in several subjects (it grows every semester), Es are not awarded at all. I am not sure I understand the point of this system.
Because it's not meant to rank children against each other. It's meant to tell the parents and students how they are doing compared to the standard. If they have not met the goal, then something needs to change. If they have met the goal or exceeded it, there's not much to worry about.
It's not like kids really learn much in elementary school anyways. Which is itself a problem, but a different one.
"Self-esteem" is a nice way of saying American children are becoming more arrogant with fewer skill, lower performance and less experience than ever. Adults, teachers and mentors need to do more to put them in their place, for their own good. Respect is earned, not entitled to "special snowflakes."
While they didn't turn out to learn much in math, they did learn how to sit still at a desk, which is perfect preparation for a later office job. At least the parents got a break and someone else to take care of their kids for a few hours each day.
"...the country’s elementary schools seem strangely averse to teaching children much stuff" <- If you really really want to understand why this happens, you should investigate the subject: "Cultural War"
The article mentions that too much effort is going into teaching arithmetic by different means. Is that really necessary? Once kids get addition, subtraction, and multiplication as useful operations, and know what division is for, that kind of covers it. (Long division by hand is such a clunky operation, and done so much better by calculators, it may not be worth teaching any more.)
"I like having low self-esteem. It makes me feel special" - Jane Lane, in Daria.
I have been hearing this from my kids' teachers as well. They're moving to spending less time on time-consuming operations like long-form division (because calculators allowed on tests and relied on for even textbook exercises).
Not sure what to think of this - I always thought you had to learn/get proficient on the basics before delegating those to a machine...
There's a hand procedure for square root. It was once taught in schools. Few ever used it, even before computers. If you really needed square root, people used tables or a slide rule. Manual long division has reached that point.
Long division was probably the first algorithm I've learned. If you don't think that learning how to manipulate abstractions by applying algorithms is a usefull thing… well why not just skip arithmetics too, calculators are good with this one.
I had a mechanical calculator of the hand-crank, moving carriage type to play with as a kid. This gives an insight into how multiplication and division really work.
There's a carriage with two rows of numbers, a full keyboard (10 keys per column), a hand crank, and a second crank which moves the carriage sideways one notch. Moving the carriage is a shift by a power of 10.
To multiply, you clear everything, then punch one number into the keyboard. The buttons lock down and stay down. When you turn the crank one turn, the number in the keyboard is added to the upper row on the carriage, and the lower row has 1 added. So to multiply 25 x 25, you punch 25 into the keyboard. Turn the crank once, and you have 25 in the upper row and 1 in the lower row. Turn the crank five times, and you have 125 in the upper row and 5 in the lower row. Then shift the carriage one notch right. Turn the crank once, and you add 250 to the upper row, and 10 to the lower row. One more crank turn, and you have 25 x 25 = 650 in the upper row, and 25 in the lower row. This makes it very clear that multiplication is repeated addition with shifting.
Division is repeated subtraction. You clear everything and enter the dividend. Turn the crank once to add the dividend to the top row on the carriage. Then clear the keyboard, clear the lower row, and shift to division mode. In division mode, turning the crank subtracts from the top row while adding 1 to the bottom row. Now enter the divisor in the keyboard. Move the carriage so that the high digit of the divisor and the high digit of the dividend line up. Turn the crank. This subtracts the shifted divisor from the dividend and adds 1 to the quotient. If the dividend goes negative, a bell rings and 9999 appears at the left end of the top row, indicating you subtracted too much and went negative. That's OK; just turn the crank one turn backwards, the leading 999.. changes to 000 and the bell rings again. You now have one digit of quotient. Shift the carriage left one row and repeat. Each shift gives one more digit of quotient. When the carriage is back to the full left position, the lower row is the quotient and the upper row is the remainder. This makes it very clear that division is repeated subtraction with shifting.
This is clearer than manual long division, with all that trial divisor and guessing stuff. It reflects the basic fact that division really is just repeated subtraction with counting.
I bet you learned the 'new math' of addition and multiplication algorithms before long division. (e.g. for multiplication you construct a new set of numbers to add to get the final result.) But we probably should skip much of the arithmetic curriculum. We can move on to more interesting problems more quickly, or study different algorithms if that is the goal.
It doesn't seem like this is a problem with self-esteem. The problem is that American schools don't have good educational standards or trained teachers. In the countries that rank ahead of us in the international assessments, even elementary school teachers need to have education degrees. That is not the case in most American school districts (just need a teaching certificate). Teaching is also a more highly respected profession in other countries.
It's pretty much expected in the US that kids don't really learn much of anything in school until they get to 8th grade. I certainly think we could introduce more advanced math concepts at earlier grades instead of taking five years to cover basic arithmetic.
That's not to say that I would like us to adopt a system like that of China or South Korea, in which students are drilled from morning to night on mostly rote tasks and then pitted against each other in a gladiatorial competition called the National College Entrance Examination. If there was a better way of squashing children's natural curiosity and love of learning, I can't really envision it.
1. I don't know what education degrees look like in other countries, but I highly doubt more education majors in the US would solve anything without first overhauling that curriculum and making it more demanding.
2. Is there any factual evidence for this often-repeated stereotype about Asian children having less curiosity and love of learning than American ones?
1. I'm sure they are more rigorous than the education major in the US, which is pretty much a joke. I agree that the way we train teachers has to be revamped.
2. I never said that Asian students are less curious. From interacting with Chinese and South Korean classmates, they are just as intellectually curious as their American peers. I just don't think the East Asian model of education is very good at fostering individual engagement and understanding. It's heavily focused on rote memorization and is definitely "teach to the test". I would welcome a study on it with a good analysis. Don't really known how you would measure it though. South Korea also has the highest suicide rates in the developed world, and much of it is concentrated in those under 18. So there are plenty of reasons why we would not want to adopt it here.
The author states "Nor is [poor education performance in America] due to high levels of inequality: the proportion of American children coming from under-privileged backgrounds is about par for the OECD."
I'd be interested to see a citation for this claim; I think it's either misleading, or things have changed a lot over the last 5-8 years (which I doubt). What I recall from my time working in education research, looking at the international tests including PISA, is that average scores from the USA are brought down by the fact that the bottom-performing kids do so much worse than elsewhere, which if you look at the way public school funding works in America, makes a lot of sense (i.e. wealthy district = higher taxes = more funding for public education).
The problem isn't that America has more low-SES students than other places, it's that we (speaking as someone currently living in America) do a worse job educating them. I'm not saying that the problem is only inequality, but it is definitely part of the picture.
There's a great book called "The Collapse of Parenting" [1] that talks about this. It obviously expands on these ideas, but here are a few notes:
- Many parents confuse self-esteem with courage
- To be courageous means to recognize the risks and your own limitations, but you find the resolve to move forward anyway. Bloated self-esteem means you aren't aware of your deficiencies
- The right kind of humility means you recognize your own shortcomings and you are better prepared to take risks
Of course, the idea of children with low self esteem has been rising in correlation of increased usage of social media. I would add that the rates of anxiety are also related the high usage rate of social media users.
Self-esteem is reliance on your own power to think, judge, and act; regardless of what others may feel, say, or threaten. If some snowflakes cannot stand being judged by others, or cannot judge themselves, they do not have self-esteem.
As for post-modern "teachers" who believe that unfounded praise, unrelated to achievement, is the source of self-esteem -- they are nurturing lemmings, alienated from their true human potential.
I mainly agree but I believe the narcissism is in the parents more than the children. It is then passed on to the children.
No one wants to just admit their kid is pretty average or below average at certain things. They believe they have failed themselves and that there is no way that their offspring could just be a regular person.
Of course it has become harder to be a regular person and have a fine life in modern, Western society. We don't have the regular person jobs anymore that a regular person who is pretty average can take up like they could generations ago.
The stakes are high and a smaller and smaller group of high achievers, or what appear to be high achievers get all the spoils. A parent has an instinct to make every effort to guide their offspring to that to the point you get average kids who honestly believe they are well above average. It has been reenforced.
I can attest to this fact ... I was a tutor to freshmans during my grad studies. The kids couldn't handle simple sum of fractions without a calculator. Forget about sum fractions containing a variable. I was astonished at how they managed to clear the SAT's.
I witnessed an example of this in a music performance of a teen rock band.
In this performance, the band sucked overall. The guitarist didn't know what he was doing. But everybody (guardians, parents, teachers, friends) just keep saying, "Great performance brah, awesome shit, good going guys" etc.
While this feedback raises self-esteem with positive feedback, there is no criticism of where they failed...at all!! Who's going to tell them, "Hey, your timing on the G-C chord switch sucked"?
When these same kids go for a "real" performance/audition, they suck at it, fail miserably and thus causing anti-social behaviors, anger, and in extreme cases, suicides.
I personally believe in a system of constructive criticism where positive feedback is necessary for the kids, yet someone actually tells them that they can do better in this, this and this area.
Irrationally high/low self-esteem is a bane for competition.