Confidence boost

New from the "Well, I Coulda Told You That" department, we have: a study out of MIT showing that confident kids do better in mathematics -- and that confidence instilled in childhood persists into adulthood, with positive outcomes in higher education, employment, and income.

The study appeared in the Journal of Human Resources, and tracked children from eighth grade onward.  It looked at measures of their confidence in their own knowledge and ability, correlated those assessments against their performance in math, and then studied their paths later on in education and eventual employment.  Controlled for a variety of factors, confidence was the best predictor of success.

What's interesting is that their confidence didn't even have to be that accurate to generate positive outcomes.  Overconfident kids had a much better track record than kids who were underconfident by the same amount.  Put a different way, it's better to think you're pretty good at something that you're not than to think you're pretty bad at something that you're not.

I can speak to this from my own experience.  I've had confidence issues all my life, largely stemming from a naturally risk-averse personality together with a mom who (for reasons I am yet to understand) discouraged me from trying things over and over.  I wanted to try martial arts as a teenager; her comment was "you'd quit after three weeks."  I had natural talent at music -- one of the talents I can truly say I was born with -- and asked to take piano lessons.  My mom said, "Why put all that money and time into something for no practical reason?"  I loved (and love) plants and the outdoors, and wanted to apply for a job at a local nursery run by some friends of my dad's.  She said, "That's way more hard, heavy, sweaty work than you'll want to do."

So in the end I did none of those things, at least not until (a lot) later in life.

A great deal of attention has been given to "helicopter parents," who monitor their kids' every move, and heaven knows as a teacher I saw enough of that, as well.  I remember one parent in particular who, if I entered a low grade into my online gradebook (which the parents had access to), I could almost set a timer for how long it'd take me to get an email asking why he'd gotten a low score.  (It usually was under thirty minutes.)  To me, this is just another way of telling kids you have no confidence in them.  It says -- perhaps not as explicitly as my mom did, but says it just the same -- "I don't think you can do this on my own.  Here, let me hold your hand."

Humans are social primates, and we are really sensitive to what others think and say.  Coincidentally, just yesterday I saw the following post, about encouragement in the realm of writing:

Now, let me put out there that this doesn't mean telling people that bad work is good or that incorrect answers are correct.  It is most definitely not the "Everyone Gets A Prize" mentality.  What it amounts to is giving people feedback that encourages, not destroys.  It's saying that anyone can succeed -- while being honest that success might entail a great deal more hard work for some than for others.  And for the person him/herself, it's not saying "I'm better than all of you" -- it's saying, "I know I've got what it takes to achieve my dreams."

Confidence is empowering, energizing, and sexy.  And I say that as someone who is still hesitant, overcautious, self-effacing, and plagued with doubt.  I all too often go into an endeavor -- starting a new book, entering a race, trying a new style of sculpture -- and immediately my mind goes into overdrive with self-sabotage.  "This'll be the time I fail completely.  Probably better not to try."

So it's a work in progress.  But let's all commit to helping each other, okay?  Support your friends and family in achieving what they're passionate about.  Find ways to help them succeed -- not only honest feedback, but simply boosting their confidence in themselves, that whatever difficulties they're currently facing, they can overcome them. 

After all, isn't it more enjoyable to say "see, I toldja so" to someone when they succeed brilliantly than when they fail?

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Sending my regrets

One of the most tragicomic moments in my life happened at my twentieth high school reunion.

I was painfully shy when I was young.  I brought the concept "awkward teenager" to its absolute apex.  I made some passing attempts to fit in, but those were by and large failures.  I did have a few friends -- some of whom I am still in touch with, and whose friendship I treasure -- but to say I had no social life back then is an odds-on favorite for Understatement of the Year.

Anyhow, I was at the evening dance/party for my reunion, and did what I usually do at parties: got a drink and then stood around looking uncomfortable.  While I was standing there, I was approached by a woman on whom, when we were in high school, I had a crush of life-threatening proportions.  She came up and started chatting with me, and I relaxed a little, especially after reassuring myself that we weren't teenagers any more, and that I was indeed twenty years older than I had been when I graduated.

The conversation went here and there, and after a while she blushed a little and said, "I have a confession to make.  When we were in high school, I had a terrible crush on you, but I was too nervous to ask you out."

I goggled at her for a moment, and said, "Well, that's a little ironic..." and told her I'd felt the same way, and didn't ask her out for the same reason.

We had a good laugh over it, but really, it's kind of sad, isn't it?  We're so wrapped up in our neuroses and insecurities that we become our own worst enemies -- passing up opportunities that could have been rewarding purely out of fear.  It's not that I want a different life, mind you.  I've got an awesome wife, work in a wonderful school, and am finally seeing my novels take off.

But man, I really wish I could have loosened up a little back then, and just had some damn fun.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sureshbmani, Shyness Of angel, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This all comes up because of a study that came out a few days ago about regret.  Titled, "The Ideal Road Not Taken: The Self-Discrepancies Involved in People’s Most Enduring Regrets," by Shai Davidai of the New School for Social Research and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University, and appeared in the journal Emotion.

What Davidai and Gilovich found is that regret occurs when the three subdivisions of self don't line up -- the actual self (who you really are), the ideal self (who you wish you were), and the ought self (who you think you should be).  And this gives rise to two different kinds of regret, which are processed by the brain differently; could regrets (ones about missed opportunities for doing something you wish you had) and should regrets (ones about times you didn't act according to your own code of proper behavior).

Davidai and Gilovich found that the "could regrets" have far more long-lasting impact on our personalities than the "should regrets."  Nick Hobson, writing about the research over at Psychology Today, said:

[T]he findings suggested that ideal-related regrets are less likely to elicit psychological and behavioral coping efforts, which leads people to think they are still unresolved.  In contrast, because people have a more pressing need to deal with their ought-related regrets (again, because of social pressures), they are more likely to ultimately perceive them as resolved and dealt with.

Which is certainly my experience.  Oh, there were times in my past that I acted poorly.  Sometimes, really poorly.  In fact, on a couple of occasions, I was an unmitigated shit, and I still toy with the idea of contacting the wronged parties and giving an abject apology.  But it's the things I wish I'd done that have stuck with me the most -- like my long-ago coulda-been girlfriend.

Hobson, though, says we need to be gentle with ourselves over these failings, that they're universal to the human condition:

Contrary to what you hear in the media or what your friends tell you, living life without any regrets is pretty much an impossible task.  It is completely natural to wonder what your life could have been like had you chosen another career path or had you married your high school sweetheart.  From huge life-altering decisions to trivial everyday choices—our lives are comprised of could haves and should haves.  It’s what makes us human.

Which is reassuring, and something I need to take to heart, because this fall is my fortieth high school reunion, an event I look forward to with a combination of excitement and trepidation.  There certainly are lots of people there who it'll be nice to see again.  But I know it will bring up those old longings, so well portrayed in movies like Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married, that I would give a lot to be able to go back and fix the things I regret doing -- and even more, the things I regret not doing.

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This week's recommended book is one that blew me away when I first read it, upon the urging of a student.  By groundbreaking neuroscientist David Eagleman, Incognito is a brilliant and often astonishing analysis of how our brains work.  In clear, lucid prose, Eagleman probes the innermost workings of our nervous systems -- and you'll learn not only how sophisticated it is, but how easy it can be to fool.

Seeing red

This morning I ran into a story in The Daily Mail that describes a new policy in Uplands Manor Primary School in Smethwick, West Midlands, England.  To wit: teachers are no longer allowed to mark papers using red ink.  All papers are to be corrected using a soothing color of green.  And while Uplands headmaster Ken Ridge denies that the decision was made because "red is negative," they're just the last in a long line of schools who have made this decision for exactly that reason.  In fact, in 2009 teachers across Australia were urged by government officials to stop using red because it is "perceived as aggressive" and could lead to students becoming "demoralized."  [Source]

Now, as a veteran educator (26 years and counting) my first thought was; how fragile, exactly, do they think that the human psyche is?  There is an increasing tendency, both in education and in parenting (which, now that I think of it, really amount to the same thing), to use an "I'm OK, you're OK, everyone's pretty doggone OK" approach.  Don't tell a kid he's gotten a question wrong; focus on the fact that he had fewer misspelled words in his answer than last time.  Don't tell a kid he's failed; tell him that he "needs some improvement."  Don't score on correct answers, score on effort.

To which I say: bullshit.

Self esteem, in my experience, doesn't come from people telling you over and over that you are competent when you're not.  It doesn't come from any number of self esteem building exercises.  It doesn't come from having your papers graded using soothing pastel tones.  It comes from striving for mastery, from achieving what you thought you might not be able to achieve, from being successful in worthwhile endeavors.  As far as I can see, all that happens when you tell a kid over and over that he's amazingly wonderful regardless of his behavior or academic performance is that he becomes insulated from the real world, develops a sense of entitlement, and decides that anything he does will be good enough for praise.  One of the most socially maladjusted teens I've ever seen came from a family where he was told, at every turn, that he was not only brilliant, that he was more brilliant than any of his peers, and that (in fact) he was so brilliant that the public schools were not doing him justice.  Having taught this young man (twice) I can say that he is plenty smart, but not so smart as all that, and there were a number of times when his "I'm so bright that you have nothing useful to teach me" attitude was shown to be, in fact, false.  This truth notwithstanding, he continued in this general frame of mind right up until graduation, and his first comeuppance -- possibly in his entire life -- came in the form of rejections from the fairly prestigious colleges he had applied to.  This devastated him (understandably) -- when had he ever been told, by anyone, that he wasn't good enough?

The sad truth about human society is that it's a pretty rough place at times.  We do our children no favors by overprotecting them when they don't win the race, when they don't pass the test; as hard as it is, it's better to say, "if it's important to you, what can you do to do better next time?" rather than "races and tests aren't important."  They say that adversity builds character; and within reason, that platitude is true.  For all of the struggle my son went through, trying to learn how to socialize in middle school, he gained more by my saying, "I love you, be strong, I know it's hard but you need to keep trying," than he would have if I'd said, "those people are all stupid, you're better than them, you don't need them."

It's a fine line.  We want (both as teachers and as parents) to see children in an environment where they can succeed.  This success shouldn't be too horribly difficult to achieve; but it's as bad to make it too easy, because then it is perceived as worthless.  How to strike that balance is no easy task for teachers, especially in these days of large class sizes and (very) heterogeneous populations.  And when kids don't succeed, it's important to understand that there are three possibilities for why that happened: (1) The teacher didn't adequately teach the concept. In my experience, this is uncommon, but it does happen, and a skilled teacher should be willing to own up and reteach if necessary.  (2) The student is placed incorrectly, and the task was either too difficult for a student of his/her ability or the student has outside issues that are interfering with his/her ability to succeed. When this happens, school administration should address either getting help for the student, or changing his/her placement.  (3) The student didn't put enough time or effort into mastery (or the right type of effort). This seems to me to be the most common of the three.

And when this happens, the right solution is not to grade in Gentle Green, or to tell the student that "your right answers were great!" and ignore the wrong ones.  The right solution is to tell the student, with gentleness and compassion, that (s)he can do better, and to give advice as to how that might be accomplished.  The genuine pleasure on the face of a student who has struggled, and then done really well on a worthwhile assignment, is a thousand times more authentic than any number of insincere positive reinforcements, gold stars for everyone, and self-esteem building exercises.