New York Magazine: Don’t tell smart kids they’re totally smart.

Follow the bouncing ball. The Tracker was led, via Seed Magazine’s Daily Zeitgeist to a good post by Julianne Dalcanton about the cult of genius (on the Cosmic Invariance blog) and finally to a superb article in New York Magazine by Po Bronson. If you have kids that you think are pretty smart, here is food for thought. Don’t tell them all the time they are smart. You might paralyze their confidence. There is data to back that up, it says here. Bronson personalizes it somewhat to provide lessons from his own life. There is fine reporting and writing in here plus a good example of scientific method at work. (And for those without grade school kids in the house, the pic is of TV’s cartoon kid genius Jimmy Neutron).

Read it;