Fractions and Praise

I had a few ah-ha moments this week.

JT was having a hard time reducing fractions. At first he really seemed to understand and would successfully complete the problems I would assign. Occasionally, he would have these strange moments where he'd take wild guesses at answers. I thought he was just having a hard time focusing. Turns out, that was not the problem...

Most of the early problems we encountered involved fractions like: 5/25 or 3/9. He could do those no problem. Then we came across.... 12/39. The wild guesses began. I suddenly realized he didn't understand what we had really been doing. He thought the numerator was always the number you used to reduce the fraction! After some further conversation, he was able to handle numbers like 27/72. All of this made me consider the fact that I have a hard time knowing when he is goofing off or not really getting it.

What had annoyed me in the whole situation was the fact that I felt like I had explained it well enough. We had spent the last couple days factoring numbers and discussing primes. Sometimes I get so frustrated when I feel like I need to repeat things over and over again. It's not that he's not understanding and needs more explanation, it's that he thinks he knows what I'm saying and stops listening. Did this come about because he cruised through his first couple of years in school so easily? Or does he just naturally think he knows it all?

I've been reading a very good book this week, "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer. In this book, he brings up a study done by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford. She took a group of students in New York and gave each an easy test. When they finished she said one of two things to them, "You must be smart at this" or "You must have worked really hard". The students then had a choice to take either a test similar to the one they just took, or a harder test. Out of the kids that had been praised for their effort, 90% chose the harder test. The ones praised for their intelligence mostly chose the easier test. The study went on with several more testing options resulting in the children that were praised for their effort taking on more challenges than the ones praised for intelligence.

This study just blew me away. I thought of all the times I tell JT he is 'a smart kid'. Not neccesarily in a way that I would think of as trying to make him feel better than others, just as a positive statement for something he was doing. I wondered if I was responsible for making him lack motivation in the ways I praise him. So....I decided to change that this week.

When I gave JT an assignment Tuesday, he thought it was 'too hard'. He sat there complaining with no signs of getting starting. When I told him he would 'have to work hard' and that he would 'learn a lot if he tried it' he gave in and began to work. When he finished I praised him with the phrase, "You really worked hard on that!", he told me he was happy I had assigned that because he learned something new. What an eye opener!