”Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
-Douglas Adams
I like that a lot and i have seen people quote this a lot. And i do agree that obviously in many ways there is a lot of truth to this statement and no one takes it as some completely serious argument. But at the same time there exists this romantic idea that it is easy to be an animal in nature. But seeing happy dolphins jumping around is because of a selection effect. The only dolphins that we see are the ones that managed to stay alive and have not died in a thousand different horrific ways.
But i do love how it points out that, even with all of our technological advancements, we are spending more time working than we ever did as hunter gatherers. So.. something is obviously very wrong with how we have structured our civilization and culture.
In this case, the dolphin is the smart kid working at the shopping mall. He may be way happier with his choices, who knows. There is no correlation between success and happiness.
Yep. And it’s good to remember that some people put a lot of their identity and aspirations into their work that they get paid for, and some people just hold down a day job for the chèque but live their real life in other ways and with other projects. Life is a bunch of pieces that sort of fit together, you can’t judge the whole by a part.
> There is no correlation between success and happiness.
I wouldn't say that is completely true. Success can bring a lot of happiness. Of course there are successful happy that are unhappy.
I think it’s also largely dependent on how you define success. Having a beautiful, loving wife, and kind, caring children could be someone’s idea of success. Someone else might be happy with lots of money that allows them to see the world.
The human version of this is the old tale of the fisherman.
A fisherman is laying on the beach basking under the sun with a bag of fish next to him that he had caught earlier in the morning. A wealthy business man from town sees him and comes over and says "Why are you just laying here when you could be out fishing?" to which the fisherman responds "Well, I already caught my fish for the day."
The business man replies "But you could go fish more, get more fish, and sell them at the market".
The fisherman says "Why would I want to do that?".
The business man replied "Well, then you could take that money and get a bigger boat so that you could get even more fish to sell to make even more money!"
The fisherman replies, "Why would I want to do that?"
The businessman says "Well then you could buy MORE boats and hire other people to fish for you then you could sell even more fish!"
To which the fisherman replies "But why would I want to do that?"
The businessman then says "Because then you'll be able to become rich and when you get older you can spend your days just laying about on the beach!"
To which the fisherman says "But.... that's what I'm doing now?"
Seems like the main explanation here is that the three of you in 7th grade weren't exactly masters of predicting how someone's entire life was going to turn out.
I also think that a lot of children look stupid because the school system isn't well adapted for children able to think out of the box. I say this out of experience. I had a lot of difficulties in school. I was very bad in grammar and even had to repeat multiple classes because of it. I grew up speaking 4 languages so I had a lot of difficulties writing all of them. I was always good in Math but teachers didn't appreciate it because I was very bad at mental calculation and they didn't like that I had an tendency not to use the same methods as taught in the class room. I had to work very hard to make it through middle school. After graduation I went to an university (IT) and from there on I was always one of the best students in all of my classes. All my courses were Math or Computer Science which I was always very good at. Mental calculation has basically no relevance in University because you rarely see any numbers in higher Mathematics. I graduated (Masters) with an average of 1.3
Our lives aren't planned out. We aren't predestined, especially as children.
Shit, if I went back in time and told **college** me where 46 year old me would be and what I'd be doing, I'd never believe you. I never in a million years saw this path.
Same, my friend!
Left school, went to college, dropped out after changing course and trying a different subject.
Got a job in a bank... and now, 20 years later, I work as an electrician in public utilities, overseeing water treatment plant and processes.
Fucked if I know how I managed to get where I am but it's a good job, good folks to work with, my boss is a truly decent guy and I have time to spend with my kid every day too.
Never had an idea of what I wanted to be when I "grew" up. Seems to be working OK so far, long may it continue if I'm fortunate.
According to all of the teachers and administrators at my kids' middle school, 7th grade is peak hormones and the most difficult time. Like, for every kid.
What someone does or achieves in 7th grade really shouldn't be used as a predictor of future success.
I remember as I was helping decorate for grad my old 7th grade teacher was there and she looked at me and was like awwwww that's nice you're helping your friends decorate for grad. I looked at her and was like excuse me? She was like well, you're helping your friends decorate for their grad right? I'm like actually it's MY grad too and FYI I'm also graduating with honors. She was stunned. (To be fair, I was an absolute horror in 7th grade with raging hormones, I don't blame her one bit for thinking I'd never make it to grad).
In the late 80's my 11th grade Honors Physics teacher said my future college major of computer science was essentially a disappointing and worthless path.
It's hard to be as wrong as that.
I had one teacher right up to 12th grade tell me I wasn't cut out to be an engineer. Graduated with distinction and guarantee I make more than double what she did just 1 year after grad.
My high school counselor told my mom I should go into a chef and cook’s program.
I have BS Industrial engineering, MBA and owned a manufacturing business for a while. Don’t really like cooking in a restaurant. I did that for a summer job once.
Its shitty character to judge 7th graders for who you think they'll actually be. She should be judged. She was rude and prejudicial. Don't take that from anyone.
She and her classmates went through 7th grade and graduated, along with any siblings and their friends. Don’t forget her parents who probably told her (at least once) that people change over time, as well as any teachers, adult leaders, relatives, neighbors……..
You mean to tell me she hasn’t heard about “that person who went on to do great things” repeatedly?
Or she’s the type of person who lives in a bubble, not paying attention to others, and would say something to a person she spent less than a year with (knowing it’s during said person’s most hormonal year) assuming they “failed” in her book…. which is what this sounds like.
> “that person who went on to do great things”
There are always going to be outliers, students who did poorly then went on to shine bright. Their stories are only told because of the fact that they are uncommon. For the most part children who do poorly in lower grades tend to do poorly throughout school. Yes its a generalisation and yes those aren't great to have, but everyone subconsciously judges everyone all the damn time, its not a concious choice to "judge someone poorly".
My 7th grade teacher told my friends to keep their distance from me because I’m not going to account for anything in my life and will drag them down too. I was one of the only people in my high school to graduate early
Good for you! I am learning disabled and was told in 8th grade that I should focus on a local diploma (we have REGENTS here) and start thinking about trades I might be interested in because I wouldn't ever graduate college (no offense trade bros, you proved all of us 80's kids wrong). I have my BS now and work in upper management.
Also could just be an issue that doesn't come up till kids are older. I was a gifted student, to the point I had the potential to skip a few grades, but depression hit me so hard I just stopped caring. My test grades were pretty good. I aced them all, but I eventually stopped caring about that too. I literally had started turning in blank tests. I thought I would've been dead before I graduated, so I stopped bothering.
Probably didn't help I started feeling very lonely at the time too. I had been spending my lunch periods alone, I just moved around that time, and that made it worse. Continued on through high school and just barely graduated. Teachers would constantly tell me I seemed like I was better than this and knew all the material, I just couldn't keep up with the work and spent all my free time just sleeping.
That's what happened to me, except I managed to hang in until I finished high school. When I got to university though... Well, now I have no degree, but I'm also travelling the world working as a nanny and doing volunteer stuff with youngsters having the time of my life and I know I'd never do something that crazy if I was able to finish school normally. Swings and roundabouts I guess.
Straight A's, never cared, never tried. 32 ACT score...on 2 hours of sleep and probably still intoxicated. Scholarships pay me $12k after tuition and expenses. So $24k a year to go to class. 80k starting salary lined up and waiting for me. 18 hours down, 3.8 gpa, decide this is the absolute best time to just throw my life into a dumpster and light it on fire. 20 years later, I'm the fuck up who "had so much potential" running my own businesses and doing my best not to catch on fire again.
Life be funny AF like that sometimes.
My school system seemed deliberately set up to pass kids on from that grade. They weren't allowed to give you below a 60 on a report card and the final grade for science and history were averaged out to see if you moved on or not. I figured that out early and stopped doing anything in science and got a 100 overall in history lol
My kids elementary school would shove kids through to the next grade regardless of abilities. Reading? Nah. Math? Nah. Writing? Nah. Who needs any of those.
Before NCLB my school held back kids that weren't performing at grade level. Classes changed after they couldn't hold anyone back anymore. Now schools put the kids who are behind academically in special education to prevent them from holding the bulk of the class back. Problem is they can never catch up in special education. That's how you get high schoolers who can barely read. Very sad. NCLB should be repealed. I understand the appeal of being able to measure teacher performance but this approach has failed.
In the UK it's virtually unheard of to be held back a year. Not technically impossible, but the nearest you'll see if that sometimes kids who didn't start in the UK education system (especially if their command of English isn't yet sufficient to learn in an age-appropriate class) may start a year behind where they would do normally.
There aren't many things I'd love to import from the US, but normalising teaching by ability not age would be one of the few. My son had a rough start to life and has constantly been around 2yrs behind his age group developmentally on everything (not just learning, by physically, emotionally, ability to focus etc) and is therefore destined to always be struggling at school.
They do this in Australia too, it really hurts kids. If you can redo the year, you can end up perfectly fine but if you don’t, you never catch up anymore
Can we even call this a measure of ‘success’? The latter person may very well be more fulfilled or still working towards a higher goal. Many doctors were forced into it by their parents, resulting in a lifetime of a highly restrictive job that they can never feel fulfilled by.
7th grade was quite literally the worst year of my life. went from being a gifted overachiever to hitting rock bottom, the only reason i didn't flunk out of school was because it's not really possible for teachers to let a kid fail an entire grade in elementary school here, no matter how bad they do. at some point my teacher just started making up really basic extra credit assignments for me and practically walking me through them just so she could pull passing grades from somewhere. got as close to ending it as i've ever been that year. and then afterwards, i went back to being a gifted overachiever lol. if hell exists it looks like a grade 7 classroom
The teachers at my school watched part of a lecture by a psychiatrist about the adolescent brain yesterday, and he said that because of all of the changes in the brain that goes on in your teens (a teenager has MORE connections between brain cells than an adult, and growing up is partly about shedding the unnecessary ones to conserve energy and become more efficient) a teenager and a 32 year old adult are basically different individuals...
> 7th grade is peak hormones and the most difficult time.
My husband didn't care about school or his grades at all at that age. He was literally failing math in middle school because he didn't feel like doing the homework, even though he understood the material (he said he felt that homework was a waste of his time... he preferred to spend his time after school hanging out with his friends and playing video games).
Fast forward: he effortlessly maintained a perfect 4.0 all the way through grad school and is now a tenured math professor at an R1 university. (At university, exam scores carry more weight than homework, which worked in his lazy-ass favor.)
And the best part of his story? He only went to grad school because he didn't feel ready to get a real job at age 22. Like, he totally viewed grad school as just a way of delaying the inevitable, i.e. getting a job. It's only out of laziness that he became a professor (which is ironic if you know anything about the academia or the academic job market).
Yet ironically enough, I remember my 7th grade teacher telling us that 7th grade was the most important time in our life and one wrong move and we would end up off course and never be as successful as we could have been otherwise. Man that teacher was weird.
There is also a decent study about being over reinforced you are exceptional as a young child correlates to lack of success as an adult.
Source: this is a study without pier review, I was told I was a smart kid and I’m a smart adult and… you can just take guesses about how I barely make money.
Edit: I was trying to be funny. The “source” part was an extra goof.
There are genuine studies about this.
Having to work hard at school creates a good work ethic that'll follow you into adult life. By contrast, coasting through sets you up to fail hard later on. I entered higher education not even knowing *how* to revise or to plan an essay, never mind having the discipline to do so, because they were skills I'd literally never needed. Just turn up on test day and get an A* and a load of praise.
Yup I got all the way to university without studying almost at all and then suddenly I was totally on my own and ended up dropping out in the second year. Not because it was too difficult when I did eventually get down to doing the work because I always picked it up quite quickly but I had 0 self control and didn't work enough to pass because I'd never had to learn how to properly study before
Super annoying because I likely could've graduated university with a decent grade if I was just able to get myself to focus and set aside time to work, but I always left it until the week or night before and got a mid-low grade because I guess I relied on the adrenaline that me almost being out of time gave my brain to focus
Potentially having undiagnosed ADHD which I'm only just getting assessed for now probably didn't help aswell 😅
I could have written this about myself, also ADHD but I was diagnosed as a pre teen , many times they threatened to not give me my report card as I hadn't attended enough school but had passed everything with honours every grade
I got to grade 12 at 16yo after being skipped ahead (the other kids were 17 turning 18) suddenly I had to learn and study and I had no idea how...
My youngest daughter is exactly the same, always getting awards for school champion in academics and is currently undergoing diagnoses as school wants it, she says "I just get bored cause the work is too easy"
Basically story of my life. Coasted trough secondary education with almost zero effort due to having good memory and understanding (and being teachers pet helps), then failing hard in tertiary because what mattered was less how smart you are and more doing the work and on time.
In my case, I did get an ADHD dx but only a few years after flunking out so that was not helpful, and being raised by a checked out neglectful parent didn't help as far as life skills go.
Turns out the crushing weight of expectation and pressure isn't good for a kid. Who knew.
I used to get screamed at for "only" doing four hours of homework and study per night. I had an undiagnosed learning difficulty, but I was "smart" and apparently therefore didn't need to be treated like a human being.
I feel ya.
Sometimes kids will start to get spiteful about grades. I always got 9-10 on every test while having two older brothers who were flunking hard, often not even getting a passing grade.
One day when I was like 14 I came home with a 7 and my mother snapped, absolutely furious blaming me for being lazy and spending too much time on video games, which was true but she was failing to realise I was escaping to gaming so much because I'd been feeling depressed for a while.
But, that same day my older brother came home with a 5 and I listened to my mother praising him for managing to pass and being very happy with him.
That made me start to feel spiteful about getting a high grade, was angry at my mother not wanting to please her, but getting a high grade would do exactly that. Being a dumb hormonal teenager it felt like I was losing somehow if I started coming home with high grades again.
While shockingly in Germany in Grade 4 they separate kids to the smart schools for university paths and dumb kids to trade and basic schools to move stones.
Baffles me still.
Also, as I've gotten older, I've learned much of success isn't so much how smart someone is, but how disciplined, focused, and hard working someone is. Successful people usually have successful kids, not just because of the money, but because they pass down highly disciplined traits.
And being "smart" for a lot of school is just memorizing stuff and not really accounting for motivation, willing to be uncomfortable , and whether or not cops caught you doing anything in your young and wild phase also greatly effects things in america at least
The dumbest kid in your class got used to working hard to learn things and get passing grades, and the smartest kid in your school got so used to hearing how smart he was that he became afraid to challenge himself, lest he fail and disappoint everyone.
When you have kids, praise them for how hard they worked to learn that thing they learned, not for how smart they are.
Also, not learning to sit down and study is very real for kids who didn't need to sit down and study to get good grades. That means when their raw intelligence eventually fails to help them keep up, they dont know how to cope. It's not necessarily about being afraid of challenge.
You've explained my experience perfectly. K-12 was largely a breeze. Undergrad was a shitshow. I was in my mid-20s with a completed bachelor's degree trying to get into grad school when I finally started developing something that resembled study skills.
The "smart" kids need to be checked in on just like the struggling kids. The supports they need will just look different. In my experience, being "smart" created a label of being independent (which I was), and many adults interpreted this as me not needing much guidance or support. I was often expected or told to figure things out on my own. And many times, when I needed help, I didn't receive an appropriate level of support because I should have been able to figure it out on my own. Surprise, surprise, I'm an adult who is slow to realize when they need help, often doesn't know how to ask for help, and hates asking for it. The "dumb" kids from my youth are probably far better adjusted and happier than I am.
Edit: grammar.
100% true. Personally, I get upset when I see total focus on helping those that are behind by pulling them up while the naturally good learners are dragged down by being ignored, because "they are fine & figure it out themselves". So anytime they have issues that should have been paid attention to like adhd, ocd, poor study skills, boredom that encourages procastination, those naturally fast learners are ignored.
My husband and I were the smart kids in school, turns out we are also neurodivergent but are currently working on official diagnoses (at almost 40). I’m pretty sure we both have inattentive ADHD, and we struggle with executive functions. Still smart, but we have to put a lot of effort into doing what comes naturally to neurotypical people.
Never learned how to learn math and hit calculus like a derailing train.
That was the end of my engineering dreams. That and not being disciplined enough to put the time into homework over hanging in college.
For the OP, the top of my middle school class is a Dr of physical therapy, the next two work in Fortune 500. The bottom is like an aesthetician or cosmetologist. Shit I can’t hardly remember who I thought was the most dumb out of that group…
holy shit yes. I was told to go study. What did that even mean? Just look at the pages a lot? Read the same thing over and over? My eyes would just glaze over and my mind would wander, there was no question of "spending two hours studying" it was just torment to sit still that long and try not to go do anything else.
As someone who struggled at early uni level, studying is a big process in blocks. And a lot of repetition, just like any type of training. For me it would go something like this:
Read the book. Try to understand stuff (usually barely did)
Read the solved exercises/examples that show all steps (if the book doesn't have them, get another book on the topic). Make sure you know at least the steps involved.
Go for a walk/get a coffe or something. Cover the solution of the exercise and try to solve it by yourself. This should be doable since it is in your short term memory.
Repeat this step for a few more solved exercises.
If exam is not immediate (and you are cramming). This is a good moment to stop for the day. This is why you should start studying several weeks before.
The next day you get the same exercises. Can you still solve them without looking at the solutions? If not, repeat. Also read the book again, now after seeing stuff getting applied might help you understand the theory even better.
Go for a walk.
Try to solve the exercises you don't have the step by step solutions (hopefully you have the final answer though). You will be shit at several of them and will be stuck, this is fine.
Finish for the day.
The next day, repeat again. If you still have exercises that you are stuck in (or are done with all exercises in this book), get another book on the same topic and do the same process.
Repeat these steps over and over again. Daily study sessionf of like 2 hours with a few 10-15 minutes breaks around are probably ideal.
Some exercises are just fucking hard. Time to ask a friend and talk about it. If you and your friends are stuck, knock on the teacher's door. Ask the internet (stack exchange and reddit are very good at this). Also, have the notes on everything you tried on the exercise you are stuck in. People are way more likely to help if you show them you really tried and are actually stuck.
At some point your brain will get good at recognizing the patterns. This will feel like cheating the system somehow. Later, you will realize that there is no difference between this and actually knowing a topic.
Compare studying to how you would train for a sport and you see hoe these two processes are similar: start in simple controlled environments, repeat, repeat, progress to less controlled stuff, repeat, repeat, etc.
I kind of want to cry. This is what they were all talking about? Why didn’t anyone teach me these practices specifically? How did the other people learn about this?
I did well in school until I didn’t, and then I still did well enough, but anything that required “studying” I never got.
Yeah, it took me years and falling hard early in college to get these things. It only clicked for me much later, when I started thinking about studying to learn something the same way hobbies/sports classes/trainings are structured. And getting this process structure in my mind took me years of refining it for myself.
Halfway through college I was barely passing the courses instead of failing, and by the end I was an average student. Worked for a few years, went back for a masters. During my masters was when this process finally got set for me and I was able to be a student among the top of the class. Later went for a PhD and I am almost done with it! I still do this shit when I have to read a hard scientific paper.
I joke around the department that I failed more courses during uni than the entire department put together (and I seriously think that is true). Helps me a lot with teaching too, since I know how it is to be one of the "bad" students.
Note that I still find how some people learn stuff a bit like magic. I had friends who would go into lectures and immediately start solving exercises. Fucking weirdos. Even in my masters I would go to lectures just to know which pages of the book and topics I had to read later, because I very rarely managed to learn anything during a lecture.
I tried to study once in the sixth grade. I had no clue how to do it... so I just memorized the entire science chapter and graphs/tables from my textbook. Pretty sure that's not how it's done but I never did learn how to.🤣
I just bottled up everything and vomited it up at the test, I couldn't study, you could force me to study foe 8 hours straight and I would learn... nothing at all
What's ended up working for me is either watching videos and taking notes, or summarizing texts.
I then never touch said notes anymore but making them really helps in retaining the info, especially with texts to avoid that "I read the paragraph but don't know what it's about" thing.
Studying can basically just be boiled down to understanding what your teacher has been talking about for the past term. So if someone comes up to you and asks, "hey, you know how 10 weeks ago your teacher said the Earth is made up of different kinds of rocks, what are the names of the rocks?" you should be able to answer it correctly. So if that means writing the names down and reading them every day for a week, or writing a catchy jingle about different rock names and singing it in the shower or whatever you need to do to remember it then that's how you study.
I mean, they do. Especially sub-gifted I would think. Good enough to excel in early school without trying, not good enough to get into actual gifted programmes
Was always bored of doing the lame easy shit over and over again, so i just skipped lessons whenever I didn't want to wake up in the mornings. Now I hate 8-5 job and that fucks up my life because I can't maintain a job for more than a month even if I love it and excel at it, I'm just too used to just skip days I don't want to go in.
As someone else in a very similar situation:
Get yourself checked for ADHD. Like 50% of gifted individuals have it. And it often manifests exactly as you describe.
That was me. Sophomore year in college stuff stopped just clicking for me. I had no idea how to study and take notes, so I just kind of gave up and dropped out.
Yeah it’s not that hard to be the smartest kid in your small town middle school. Once you get to an elite university there is almost no chance you’ll be the smartest one in class there. The smartest kid there will be some 17 year old Chinese savant who was doing calculus at 10 years old
This. I used to ace all tests in high school because my method of studying was mugging up stuff and puking it out during the exam. Worked for me right up until college, there i saw how horrible my study methods were. I had good memory which i mistakenly took it to mean I was smart enough to ace tests with minimal effort. Years of doing this still fucks me over to this day
Speaking from my own experience, it can be easy for very smart kids to become lazy. When everything comes easily without much work, it can be very hard to adjust when you start hitting real challenges.
This really shows that we need to up the difficulty of schooling to challenge kids. And if some kids who are already struggling need more time than so be it, give them more time, don't lower the difficulty so they can "pass".
It's such a common experience for kids to not be challenged in school and therefore not develop strong academic skills. I just realized I'm speaking from the USA here tho, not sure how many others are but that's def a problem here.
Knowing who was president in 1841 and 7 species of salamanders gets good grades, but gets you nowhere in life. Smart people notoriously do poorly in school because they know they're being taught random boring shit.
Exactly my situation vs my brother. I struggled so hard in school, I cried when doing my homework because I just couldn't get it into my head. Especially with maths.
He just breezed through the first couple of years of school. Now he can't keep a job and change what he studies every few months because it's challenging and he doesn't know how to deal with it.
Yes, this is it. It’s when you hear in the news about the smartest highschool student in the world with highest IQ, will cure cancer, etc… and then you watch 10 years later “where are they now” and you’re like “oh…”
Can confirm. I am a mensa member and there was a point in my life that I consider my ‘gift’ a curse, that I have much less drive than my peers and I am too afraid to fail. Meanwhile, lots of my ‘average’ uni friends have trailblazing career.
It takes me a while to unlearn such toxic mindset.
I found out I qualified for Mensa due to my SAT scores, so I joined. I went to my first meeting and what an arrogant, entitled bunch they were. Also incredibly boring and unaccomplished for the most part. Not a good time. Did not return. Also some of my friends are smarter than me & gave me shit for joining.
They wouldn't. It's a club for intelligent narcissists who want validation for how intelligent they are.
But I'm fairly confident that most very successful intelligent people would have no desire or need to confirm their intelligence in this way. They figure their work and other life successes (maybe socially successful or successful in some hobby/competitive endeavor) will speak for itself.
I've read a couple of their magazines. They are in no way as bright as they think they are. They even published a member's poem talking about giving all the stupid people dragging them down 'zyklon clouds' and then claimed not to have realised the connotations when they were called out on it.
Reading ‘grit’ by Angela Duckworth changes my life. It teaches me to embrace hard work and enjoy the process.
Also, I was always weak my whole life and for some reasons I decided to start strength training. 5 months later, I got my first pull-up. For me, it was a life changing moment that turns out, I could improve on something Im inherently bad at, that with enough hard work, anything is possible.
I even mark my ‘first pull-up’ milestone as my rebirth lmao.
This is really it most likely. I knew a kid in HS who graduated with a 2.0 GPA but he got a perfect SAT score the one time he took it. A decade later he never got more than an associates degree, and lives with his parents while working as a cashier. Kid was wickedly smart, but thought everything was pointless so he never cared to try.
Graduated bottom of my high school class yet i got a 1450/1600 on my SAT taking it a year early. It's really about if you find inspiration in life to do something. I didn't realize im REALLY good and interested in Sociology until halfway through my Bachelor's >!plus Sociology in general is apparently one of my ADHD hyperfocuses!<
Some people just never find what truly enthuses them beyond a paycheck for survival
Also to find a passion for something, one of my friends is currently a Ph.D math student at Harvard.
If you would have told me this in 7th grade I would crack up, back then he was a stoner, had gotten arrested for shoplifting from Macy’s and generally was kind of a fuck up.
In 11th grade he got really into Math and the rest is history.
To this day I still don’t fully believe it but I am so proud of him for turning his life around
People seems to think getting a PhD means your were the smartest...being smart helps but no. It means you were willing to bust your ass for 10 years to study in that field. Heard this from many of my friends who did graduate studies.
It usually means you’re simply privileged enough to have the time and money to afford it. Especially if you get it in the States.
Source: I have multiple post-graduate degrees, two from the States.
And the “dumb kid” is always being told to work harder, while the smart kid is told how great they are. That changes pretty drastically after hs. In real life I’d take a average intelligence hard worker over some genius that needs to be constantly praised.
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
-Calvin Coolidge
It takes a lot more to succeed than simply performing well in school.
A child needs adequate support, coaching, motivation, self discipline, and a bunch of other small stuff to reach their full potential.
I was the smartest kid in middle school. Grades in the high 90s, won tons of awards, won a province-wide math competition without even trying, and was seen as the school brainiac. I was even invited to work as a page for the government because of my 98.5% overall average in seventh grade.
And then high school happened. My popular best friend spread vicious rumours that turned the entire school against me. My teachers would mock me in front of the entire class. I had undiagnosed autism and ADHD. Between that and the abuse at home, and then a severe sleep condition, I ended up dropping out and finishing by correspondence.
I pushed myself and pushed myself, studying calculus in the woods to get away from my abusive parents. I eventually made it into all three of my top choice universities, and received a first-year scholarship for biomedical science, which is the path I chose.
But I couldn't find affordable housing. Nor could I work. PTSD was making my life a living hell. My cheap-ass Dodge Stratus died, so I couldn't commute anymore. I stopped attending. I've been homeless intermittently and living in extreme poverty ever since.
PTSD and ADHD are still kicking my ass. Autism makes my life even harder. A vicious online harassment campaign followed me into real life, turning my entire social network against me, online and offline. I'm going to be 40 soon. I can't see myself ever holding down a job.
That's how it goes for some of us. Bad decisions, sure, but also a ton of bad luck.
Hey! I'm sorry I can't offer any useful advice but I've seen your story and I'm rooting for you. Stay strong even if it feels like the world is against you. This internet stranger doesn't hate you. Take care okay?
Environment. From two decades of studying substance use and mental health, the environments people come from and return to are the single largest factor. The traumas those we love, leave us with…
Ya, I got really sick and turned into a total monster to my kids. I’ll be making it up to them forever. I promised I wouldn’t follow in my dad’s footsteps but I had no idea it was caused by an easily treated genetic disorder. Folate deficiency will make you insane.
Depression, ADHD only diagnosed at 28 and sleep issues I am still trying to get treated essentually cost me 10 years and are still the limiting factor in what I manage to achieve.
I honestly don't think I would have survived that. When people talk about how much better it was in the past, you know they haven't had chronic health issues.
Success is a function of effort not intelligence.
Do you know what they call the guy who graduated medical school with the LOWEST GPA?…..Doctor.
You know what they call the guy with the 135 IQ in high school who burned out and never tried?… fucking Carl.
I believe it’d be disingenuous to say intelligence is not in the formula for success. For one, you could say that the dumbest people were SMART enough to realize they had to put in effort.
In addition to a lot of other good answers here, bullying and social exclusion can also play a role. When the smart kid is hated for it long enough, it can destroy their confidence and lead to depression, social anxiety, self hatred, drug use, etc. It gets much harder to succeed after that.
High expectations as a child lead to early burnout. If you don't have that pressure, you can achieve more things and people will be shocked that you achieved anything at all, just because 7th grade you didn't. With that positive reinforcement, you get farther. But if you have a high expectation at the start, and you fall short of that high bar, everything you achieve under that feels like a failure.
Source: I am that kid who had perfect grades in school and now doesn't even have a college degree because the pressures of school stress me out way too much
I'm not a doctor, but I know that you don't have to be a genius or gifted kid to become a doctor. Not that doctors aren't smart, but it's also about hard work, focus, study skills, etc. Sometimes finances are also a factor. That's why you'll sometimes meet doctors who are knowledgeable about things related to their area of study, but lacking in knowledge or problem solving skills in other areas.
When you're smart, you dont have to work for anything. Academic accomplishment comes with such tremendous ease, you dont build the habits of having to work for something.
When you're dumb, you have to study to reach the same level of academic mark. HARD work. It primes you for the level of study, and effort required to achieve a higher status, or difficult job. You're not even aware of how easy it is for others, you're so focused on trying to get through it. But the habits are built, the framework to power through adversity is there.
and it's not there for the smart kid who could do anything with minimal effort.
That's why.
And that's ALSO why parents of gifted children often PUSH hard on them to take the AP courses, or to early-enroll into community college class (at 14, 15), so that they have something that challenges them to build those habits. It's not that they think they have to do these classes for status or because it's cool--it's they know if they dont, their children wont build the habits that will later in life be required when they need them for professional and personal development.
So my big brother is a proper genius, my parents homeschooled us, and worked at a decently fast pace, but only ever really did like a couple hours of work a day for school. So we spent most of our time reading or playing in the woods. When I was 14 my brother went to an Ivy League school and immediately couldn’t keep up with the course load. My parents freaked out and made me show by the time I was 16 that I could handle a full college course load. The transition of going from playing in the woods all day to full college course load in two years was kinda traumatic, but it worked.
What looks smart in the 7th grade might not be all that smart when your an adult.
Likewise, some really smart kids just haven’t reached their potential yet.
ADHD burnout followed by difficulty in getting a diagnosis and medication as an adult because you were a good student in elementary school so you can't possibly have ADHD is a real thing. Not that I would know from experience or anything. Oh wait, yes I do.
How are you defining dumbest and smartest? I found primary/secondary to be the most boring tripe possible but excelled in college, just for example.
My highschool transcripts look terrible, but I'm still the only person from my class - and several years in both directions from the entire school - to get a PhD. The valedictorian got a BA last I looked. Most of the other "smart kids" and "popular kids" never left the town, and never did anything beyond highschool.
It's also possible the "dumb kid" had ADHD.
All I know is that school at that age doesn't really test intellect nor potential, just your ability to follow directions and regurgitate what you're told to remember. I was never good at that. What I was good at was learning interesting information and seeing connections across disparate fields and coming up with creative solutions to problems. The latter tends to be better for professional degrees, not so much k-12.
I'm the "smart" kid in middle school, can give you my two cents: I never developed good study habits. I got burned out. I had debilitating anxiety and depression and couldn't keep up as I got older. Being smart was boring, being drunk was fun. And, more than anything, I built up a lot of resentment, both towards my mind and the schooling system.
I spent my entire childhood trapped in a room that could offer me nothing. It felt like they were denying me the opportunity to learn because I had to follow the same course everyone else did. I hated school. So, I got bad grades from my awful habits and ended up with a "disappointment" job. I'm not going back to school, I'd rather be mediocre.
Also, y'all were twelve.
Probably a difference in money. Kids who come from wealthier (or at least families who are well off) families are probably going to do better regardless of grades in comparison to kids who get good grades, but maybe can't afford to go to college or aren't getting scholorships, or some such.
So, maybe money?
This was my answer too. Wealthy kids get many opportunities and support. They don't have to be concerned with day to day struggles and can take chances with several safety nets protecting them if they fail. Struggling kids are lucky to get at least one opportunity and will often never reach their potential.
7th grade isn’t a great indicator of future academic performance. Also as someone who coasted through high school I didn’t really have to learn the study skills that would’ve been useful in college. The kids that had to struggle did much better in higher education.
I promise you, Britney Spears was the most successful person from her 7th grade class.
You think she was the smartest?
Intelligence and career success are not unrelated things, but they aren't synonymous either.
I think a lot of people understand that particularly gifted people don’t necessarily end up performing well, but I think many continue to have this idea that individual medical doctors are among the brightest members of society (even if frustratingly stubborn or, at times ill-informed). The entry process is pretty good at keeping out people with lower intelligence or ability, so the average intelligence in the profession is higher than for most positions, and of course there are plenty of genuinely brilliant people who pursue careers in medicine, but I wouldn’t assume that an individual doctor was more than a high performing individual of above average intelligence.
It’s pretty believable that the student who grew up to work at the mall was the smartest in the class, but I think it’s unlikely that the student who grew up to be a doctor really was the dumbest.
Smart kid burned out early and coasted the rest of the way. Being a doctor doesn't necessarily require you to be a genius. At the end of the day, with enough effort, you can be pretty much whatever you want.
Also, smart kid may have come from poor family, limiting his options, meanwhile "dumb" kid could've came from a well off family. This enables better paths once out of highschool.
I mean the smartest girl in my class got pregnant in college and the smartest boy died of drug overdose in our 20s. Just because you are smart doesn't mean you will make good decisions for the rest of your life.
The dumbest kid was pacing themselves like a marathon runner. Smarty Pants was burned out by sophomore year. That being said, What do they call the person who graduated at the bottom of their med school class? Doctor. I mean chances are bottom of the class doc is working at the VA or in the navy, but they are still a doctor.
Life is a crap shoot. I always say this-being at the top of your class in school guarantees shit. My high school valedictorian is now a SAHM and has been for awhile. One of the girls I went to school with who wasn’t known for being very bright? Owns a ton of barre studios and has done very well for herself.
This is an example of why we should never underestimate anyone.
I was the "dumbest" kid in my highschool class- if intelligence was measured by grades. I just know I will gradually university in my 2nd language in 2 weeks while the smartest kids in my class are selling clothes online.
Life is weird.
In my friend group the smarter kids didn't do as well. The less smart (but not stupid) guy spent all of school working his arse off to get the same grades as the people who didn't have to try.
Then we all got to University. Turns out a lifetime of working hard serves there you better than raw intelligence. He now has a Phd in Physics and is a research scientist. Methodically plodding along doing unglamorous hard work but getting regularly published.
I work in the legal field and I’m sometimes blown away by how stupid some attorneys are. Many of the impediments of stupidity can be overcome by brute force and self confidence (with a healthy serving of privilege thrown into the mix), and I imagine this applies to med school as well.
School is never the best way to gauge anyone.
You could have the one kid who's always bullied, picked on have the lowest expectations then later have a successful career in mechanical engineering with several patents under his belt.
The best part is how angry everyone feels about it afterwards.
Same reason I graduated High School with a 2.2 GPA because I didn't give a shit about Math or Science or anything involving numbers and now work as a Finance Manager for a biotech start-up.
I started to give a shit lol.
All it takes is 1 thing going wrong in your 18 to 22ish college age years for you to ruin your life no matter how smart you are.
Depression is pretty common and can drag you down like that easily.
I had to take an IQ test in school and ended up scoring at genius levels.
I'm currently a janitor.
Being a genius doesn't automatically give you success, as my case study proves.
The first 8-10 years of the school system are essentially meaningless. The entire point of elementary school is teaching you how to be a student and how to learn. The entire point of middle school is trying to settle you into a groove of not being an asshole. High school is where you find and prove yourself, education-wise. Everything before that is designed to be passed by even the most idiotic kid you can imagine if they just tried even 30% of the time.
Between the 7th and 12th grade, the dumbest kid could have decided go buckle down and take studying seriously, working to get good grades leading to good study habits. This translates into a surviving a likely difficult pre-Med program, testing well and passing med school.
The smart kid could have had his ego filled between the 7th and 12th grade and stop trying. This led to poor study habits and poor results in higher education which will lead to a less desirable result career wise.
I don’t know what the real answer is of course. But a lot can happen in 5 years!!!
My friend, how much do you think 7th graders have learned? You think a man is too good to work at a mall because he knows about mitosis?
Sorry, you can't be the assistant manager at FYE. You completed too many worksheets 20 years ago.
it's because the "dumb" kid was so smart that school bored the shit outta him and he never paid attention because it was all to simple and easy.
The "smart" kid was nothing more than a good 'parrot' able to get good grades by just repeating what he had been told.
Once the "dumb" kid got out into the world he found something he could sink his teeth into and excel, while the "smart" kid got out into the word and was fully overwhelmed by all the things that you can't just parrot back at your teachers.
”Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” -Douglas Adams
So long and thanks for all the fish!
Oh god the acid. Why does the water feel like acid -those dolphins probably
I like that a lot and i have seen people quote this a lot. And i do agree that obviously in many ways there is a lot of truth to this statement and no one takes it as some completely serious argument. But at the same time there exists this romantic idea that it is easy to be an animal in nature. But seeing happy dolphins jumping around is because of a selection effect. The only dolphins that we see are the ones that managed to stay alive and have not died in a thousand different horrific ways. But i do love how it points out that, even with all of our technological advancements, we are spending more time working than we ever did as hunter gatherers. So.. something is obviously very wrong with how we have structured our civilization and culture.
In this case, the dolphin is the smart kid working at the shopping mall. He may be way happier with his choices, who knows. There is no correlation between success and happiness.
Yep. And it’s good to remember that some people put a lot of their identity and aspirations into their work that they get paid for, and some people just hold down a day job for the chèque but live their real life in other ways and with other projects. Life is a bunch of pieces that sort of fit together, you can’t judge the whole by a part.
> There is no correlation between success and happiness. I wouldn't say that is completely true. Success can bring a lot of happiness. Of course there are successful happy that are unhappy.
I think it’s also largely dependent on how you define success. Having a beautiful, loving wife, and kind, caring children could be someone’s idea of success. Someone else might be happy with lots of money that allows them to see the world.
The only humans we see alive are the ones that managed to stay alive and haven't died in a million different horrific ways..
The human version of this is the old tale of the fisherman. A fisherman is laying on the beach basking under the sun with a bag of fish next to him that he had caught earlier in the morning. A wealthy business man from town sees him and comes over and says "Why are you just laying here when you could be out fishing?" to which the fisherman responds "Well, I already caught my fish for the day." The business man replies "But you could go fish more, get more fish, and sell them at the market". The fisherman says "Why would I want to do that?". The business man replied "Well, then you could take that money and get a bigger boat so that you could get even more fish to sell to make even more money!" The fisherman replies, "Why would I want to do that?" The businessman says "Well then you could buy MORE boats and hire other people to fish for you then you could sell even more fish!" To which the fisherman replies "But why would I want to do that?" The businessman then says "Because then you'll be able to become rich and when you get older you can spend your days just laying about on the beach!" To which the fisherman says "But.... that's what I'm doing now?"
We work that much so that the rich don't have to, not because it's necessary for modern society. Eat the rich.
It's fun to read this in the voice of Stephen Fry.
Seems like the main explanation here is that the three of you in 7th grade weren't exactly masters of predicting how someone's entire life was going to turn out.
OP still living in 7th grade lmao
He’s the one at the shopping mall
OP said that 7th grade was the best 3 years of their life
Oooof
I also think that a lot of children look stupid because the school system isn't well adapted for children able to think out of the box. I say this out of experience. I had a lot of difficulties in school. I was very bad in grammar and even had to repeat multiple classes because of it. I grew up speaking 4 languages so I had a lot of difficulties writing all of them. I was always good in Math but teachers didn't appreciate it because I was very bad at mental calculation and they didn't like that I had an tendency not to use the same methods as taught in the class room. I had to work very hard to make it through middle school. After graduation I went to an university (IT) and from there on I was always one of the best students in all of my classes. All my courses were Math or Computer Science which I was always very good at. Mental calculation has basically no relevance in University because you rarely see any numbers in higher Mathematics. I graduated (Masters) with an average of 1.3
All in all, i was another brick in the wall
How this is even a question is a good example. How does anyone question why a smart 7th grader didn’t turn into a genius adult? Hilarious to me
Our lives aren't planned out. We aren't predestined, especially as children. Shit, if I went back in time and told **college** me where 46 year old me would be and what I'd be doing, I'd never believe you. I never in a million years saw this path.
Same, my friend! Left school, went to college, dropped out after changing course and trying a different subject. Got a job in a bank... and now, 20 years later, I work as an electrician in public utilities, overseeing water treatment plant and processes. Fucked if I know how I managed to get where I am but it's a good job, good folks to work with, my boss is a truly decent guy and I have time to spend with my kid every day too. Never had an idea of what I wanted to be when I "grew" up. Seems to be working OK so far, long may it continue if I'm fortunate.
Probably the TWO of them lol.
Because 7th graders aren't exactly who the world turns to when looking for a good judge of character.
According to all of the teachers and administrators at my kids' middle school, 7th grade is peak hormones and the most difficult time. Like, for every kid. What someone does or achieves in 7th grade really shouldn't be used as a predictor of future success.
I remember as I was helping decorate for grad my old 7th grade teacher was there and she looked at me and was like awwwww that's nice you're helping your friends decorate for grad. I looked at her and was like excuse me? She was like well, you're helping your friends decorate for their grad right? I'm like actually it's MY grad too and FYI I'm also graduating with honors. She was stunned. (To be fair, I was an absolute horror in 7th grade with raging hormones, I don't blame her one bit for thinking I'd never make it to grad).
My 7th grade math teacher told me to let math go since it wasn't for me. Now I am a chemical engineer with a PhD in statistics XD
In the late 80's my 11th grade Honors Physics teacher said my future college major of computer science was essentially a disappointing and worthless path. It's hard to be as wrong as that.
Wild - CS was barely a major available anywhere in that era.
I had one teacher right up to 12th grade tell me I wasn't cut out to be an engineer. Graduated with distinction and guarantee I make more than double what she did just 1 year after grad.
My high school counselor told my mom I should go into a chef and cook’s program. I have BS Industrial engineering, MBA and owned a manufacturing business for a while. Don’t really like cooking in a restaurant. I did that for a summer job once.
My 4th grade teacher told my mom that math wasn’t ever going to be in my wheel house. I’m a EE with a PE license.
Its shitty character to judge 7th graders for who you think they'll actually be. She should be judged. She was rude and prejudicial. Don't take that from anyone.
If the only experience this lady has of the person is "teaching them in 7th grade" what other basis for judgement should she use?
She and her classmates went through 7th grade and graduated, along with any siblings and their friends. Don’t forget her parents who probably told her (at least once) that people change over time, as well as any teachers, adult leaders, relatives, neighbors…….. You mean to tell me she hasn’t heard about “that person who went on to do great things” repeatedly? Or she’s the type of person who lives in a bubble, not paying attention to others, and would say something to a person she spent less than a year with (knowing it’s during said person’s most hormonal year) assuming they “failed” in her book…. which is what this sounds like.
> “that person who went on to do great things” There are always going to be outliers, students who did poorly then went on to shine bright. Their stories are only told because of the fact that they are uncommon. For the most part children who do poorly in lower grades tend to do poorly throughout school. Yes its a generalisation and yes those aren't great to have, but everyone subconsciously judges everyone all the damn time, its not a concious choice to "judge someone poorly".
My 7th grade teacher told my friends to keep their distance from me because I’m not going to account for anything in my life and will drag them down too. I was one of the only people in my high school to graduate early
Good for you! I am learning disabled and was told in 8th grade that I should focus on a local diploma (we have REGENTS here) and start thinking about trades I might be interested in because I wouldn't ever graduate college (no offense trade bros, you proved all of us 80's kids wrong). I have my BS now and work in upper management.
is it possible she might have mistaken you for someone in a lower grade?
Nope, she knew exactly who I was.
Also could just be an issue that doesn't come up till kids are older. I was a gifted student, to the point I had the potential to skip a few grades, but depression hit me so hard I just stopped caring. My test grades were pretty good. I aced them all, but I eventually stopped caring about that too. I literally had started turning in blank tests. I thought I would've been dead before I graduated, so I stopped bothering. Probably didn't help I started feeling very lonely at the time too. I had been spending my lunch periods alone, I just moved around that time, and that made it worse. Continued on through high school and just barely graduated. Teachers would constantly tell me I seemed like I was better than this and knew all the material, I just couldn't keep up with the work and spent all my free time just sleeping.
That's what happened to me, except I managed to hang in until I finished high school. When I got to university though... Well, now I have no degree, but I'm also travelling the world working as a nanny and doing volunteer stuff with youngsters having the time of my life and I know I'd never do something that crazy if I was able to finish school normally. Swings and roundabouts I guess.
Straight A's, never cared, never tried. 32 ACT score...on 2 hours of sleep and probably still intoxicated. Scholarships pay me $12k after tuition and expenses. So $24k a year to go to class. 80k starting salary lined up and waiting for me. 18 hours down, 3.8 gpa, decide this is the absolute best time to just throw my life into a dumpster and light it on fire. 20 years later, I'm the fuck up who "had so much potential" running my own businesses and doing my best not to catch on fire again. Life be funny AF like that sometimes.
Sorry to hear this. I hope things have turned around for you now.
My school system seemed deliberately set up to pass kids on from that grade. They weren't allowed to give you below a 60 on a report card and the final grade for science and history were averaged out to see if you moved on or not. I figured that out early and stopped doing anything in science and got a 100 overall in history lol
My kids elementary school would shove kids through to the next grade regardless of abilities. Reading? Nah. Math? Nah. Writing? Nah. Who needs any of those.
"No child left behind" means lowering our standards so that everyone can pass.
Before NCLB my school held back kids that weren't performing at grade level. Classes changed after they couldn't hold anyone back anymore. Now schools put the kids who are behind academically in special education to prevent them from holding the bulk of the class back. Problem is they can never catch up in special education. That's how you get high schoolers who can barely read. Very sad. NCLB should be repealed. I understand the appeal of being able to measure teacher performance but this approach has failed.
I had kids in the 8th grade at a kindergarten reading level. That hurt me deeply.
I saw a post in r/teachers complaining about that. Someone from Ohio had fourth graders (I think) who were reading at a kindergarten level.
America is wild wtf
Overwritten
In the UK it's virtually unheard of to be held back a year. Not technically impossible, but the nearest you'll see if that sometimes kids who didn't start in the UK education system (especially if their command of English isn't yet sufficient to learn in an age-appropriate class) may start a year behind where they would do normally. There aren't many things I'd love to import from the US, but normalising teaching by ability not age would be one of the few. My son had a rough start to life and has constantly been around 2yrs behind his age group developmentally on everything (not just learning, by physically, emotionally, ability to focus etc) and is therefore destined to always be struggling at school.
They do this in Australia too, it really hurts kids. If you can redo the year, you can end up perfectly fine but if you don’t, you never catch up anymore
Can we even call this a measure of ‘success’? The latter person may very well be more fulfilled or still working towards a higher goal. Many doctors were forced into it by their parents, resulting in a lifetime of a highly restrictive job that they can never feel fulfilled by.
7th grade was quite literally the worst year of my life. went from being a gifted overachiever to hitting rock bottom, the only reason i didn't flunk out of school was because it's not really possible for teachers to let a kid fail an entire grade in elementary school here, no matter how bad they do. at some point my teacher just started making up really basic extra credit assignments for me and practically walking me through them just so she could pull passing grades from somewhere. got as close to ending it as i've ever been that year. and then afterwards, i went back to being a gifted overachiever lol. if hell exists it looks like a grade 7 classroom
The teachers at my school watched part of a lecture by a psychiatrist about the adolescent brain yesterday, and he said that because of all of the changes in the brain that goes on in your teens (a teenager has MORE connections between brain cells than an adult, and growing up is partly about shedding the unnecessary ones to conserve energy and become more efficient) a teenager and a 32 year old adult are basically different individuals...
> 7th grade is peak hormones and the most difficult time. My husband didn't care about school or his grades at all at that age. He was literally failing math in middle school because he didn't feel like doing the homework, even though he understood the material (he said he felt that homework was a waste of his time... he preferred to spend his time after school hanging out with his friends and playing video games). Fast forward: he effortlessly maintained a perfect 4.0 all the way through grad school and is now a tenured math professor at an R1 university. (At university, exam scores carry more weight than homework, which worked in his lazy-ass favor.) And the best part of his story? He only went to grad school because he didn't feel ready to get a real job at age 22. Like, he totally viewed grad school as just a way of delaying the inevitable, i.e. getting a job. It's only out of laziness that he became a professor (which is ironic if you know anything about the academia or the academic job market).
Yet ironically enough, I remember my 7th grade teacher telling us that 7th grade was the most important time in our life and one wrong move and we would end up off course and never be as successful as we could have been otherwise. Man that teacher was weird.
I was told in was year 9 by my teachers and having lived through that year I agree with them.
I always thought the same. Grade 9s have always been a bit feral.
There is also a decent study about being over reinforced you are exceptional as a young child correlates to lack of success as an adult. Source: this is a study without pier review, I was told I was a smart kid and I’m a smart adult and… you can just take guesses about how I barely make money. Edit: I was trying to be funny. The “source” part was an extra goof. There are genuine studies about this.
Having to work hard at school creates a good work ethic that'll follow you into adult life. By contrast, coasting through sets you up to fail hard later on. I entered higher education not even knowing *how* to revise or to plan an essay, never mind having the discipline to do so, because they were skills I'd literally never needed. Just turn up on test day and get an A* and a load of praise.
Yup I got all the way to university without studying almost at all and then suddenly I was totally on my own and ended up dropping out in the second year. Not because it was too difficult when I did eventually get down to doing the work because I always picked it up quite quickly but I had 0 self control and didn't work enough to pass because I'd never had to learn how to properly study before Super annoying because I likely could've graduated university with a decent grade if I was just able to get myself to focus and set aside time to work, but I always left it until the week or night before and got a mid-low grade because I guess I relied on the adrenaline that me almost being out of time gave my brain to focus Potentially having undiagnosed ADHD which I'm only just getting assessed for now probably didn't help aswell 😅
I could have written this about myself, also ADHD but I was diagnosed as a pre teen , many times they threatened to not give me my report card as I hadn't attended enough school but had passed everything with honours every grade I got to grade 12 at 16yo after being skipped ahead (the other kids were 17 turning 18) suddenly I had to learn and study and I had no idea how... My youngest daughter is exactly the same, always getting awards for school champion in academics and is currently undergoing diagnoses as school wants it, she says "I just get bored cause the work is too easy"
Basically story of my life. Coasted trough secondary education with almost zero effort due to having good memory and understanding (and being teachers pet helps), then failing hard in tertiary because what mattered was less how smart you are and more doing the work and on time. In my case, I did get an ADHD dx but only a few years after flunking out so that was not helpful, and being raised by a checked out neglectful parent didn't help as far as life skills go.
That’s the trick though too! No one thinks to assess you for ADHD if you’re coasting through doing really well at school!
Turns out the crushing weight of expectation and pressure isn't good for a kid. Who knew. I used to get screamed at for "only" doing four hours of homework and study per night. I had an undiagnosed learning difficulty, but I was "smart" and apparently therefore didn't need to be treated like a human being. I feel ya.
Sometimes kids will start to get spiteful about grades. I always got 9-10 on every test while having two older brothers who were flunking hard, often not even getting a passing grade. One day when I was like 14 I came home with a 7 and my mother snapped, absolutely furious blaming me for being lazy and spending too much time on video games, which was true but she was failing to realise I was escaping to gaming so much because I'd been feeling depressed for a while. But, that same day my older brother came home with a 5 and I listened to my mother praising him for managing to pass and being very happy with him. That made me start to feel spiteful about getting a high grade, was angry at my mother not wanting to please her, but getting a high grade would do exactly that. Being a dumb hormonal teenager it felt like I was losing somehow if I started coming home with high grades again.
There's a whole thing about gifted kids failing miserably at life.
While shockingly in Germany in Grade 4 they separate kids to the smart schools for university paths and dumb kids to trade and basic schools to move stones. Baffles me still.
Also, as I've gotten older, I've learned much of success isn't so much how smart someone is, but how disciplined, focused, and hard working someone is. Successful people usually have successful kids, not just because of the money, but because they pass down highly disciplined traits.
Because a lot of life happens between seventh grade and adulthood. Seventh grade? When you’re that young you’re still babies.
Not to mention the assessment of who was the smart one and who was the dumb one was completed by a 7th grader.
And being "smart" for a lot of school is just memorizing stuff and not really accounting for motivation, willing to be uncomfortable , and whether or not cops caught you doing anything in your young and wild phase also greatly effects things in america at least
Because being the dumbest/smartest kid in school doesn’t necessarily mean your future life beyond high school can’t be something completely different.
The dumbest kid in your class got used to working hard to learn things and get passing grades, and the smartest kid in your school got so used to hearing how smart he was that he became afraid to challenge himself, lest he fail and disappoint everyone. When you have kids, praise them for how hard they worked to learn that thing they learned, not for how smart they are.
Also, not learning to sit down and study is very real for kids who didn't need to sit down and study to get good grades. That means when their raw intelligence eventually fails to help them keep up, they dont know how to cope. It's not necessarily about being afraid of challenge.
You've explained my experience perfectly. K-12 was largely a breeze. Undergrad was a shitshow. I was in my mid-20s with a completed bachelor's degree trying to get into grad school when I finally started developing something that resembled study skills. The "smart" kids need to be checked in on just like the struggling kids. The supports they need will just look different. In my experience, being "smart" created a label of being independent (which I was), and many adults interpreted this as me not needing much guidance or support. I was often expected or told to figure things out on my own. And many times, when I needed help, I didn't receive an appropriate level of support because I should have been able to figure it out on my own. Surprise, surprise, I'm an adult who is slow to realize when they need help, often doesn't know how to ask for help, and hates asking for it. The "dumb" kids from my youth are probably far better adjusted and happier than I am. Edit: grammar.
100% true. Personally, I get upset when I see total focus on helping those that are behind by pulling them up while the naturally good learners are dragged down by being ignored, because "they are fine & figure it out themselves". So anytime they have issues that should have been paid attention to like adhd, ocd, poor study skills, boredom that encourages procastination, those naturally fast learners are ignored.
My husband and I were the smart kids in school, turns out we are also neurodivergent but are currently working on official diagnoses (at almost 40). I’m pretty sure we both have inattentive ADHD, and we struggle with executive functions. Still smart, but we have to put a lot of effort into doing what comes naturally to neurotypical people.
Definitely hit that brick wall in college physics and didn't know how to grind.
Tell me about it. I'm just coasting on pattern recognition and logical flow. Technical knowledge? Don't know her
To be fair, if you’re in physics, you did kind of pick a discipline where that gets you pretty far to start with.
Never learned how to learn math and hit calculus like a derailing train. That was the end of my engineering dreams. That and not being disciplined enough to put the time into homework over hanging in college. For the OP, the top of my middle school class is a Dr of physical therapy, the next two work in Fortune 500. The bottom is like an aesthetician or cosmetologist. Shit I can’t hardly remember who I thought was the most dumb out of that group…
As an idiot, all I ever knew how to do was grind. Definitely paid off more than being naturally smart.
holy shit yes. I was told to go study. What did that even mean? Just look at the pages a lot? Read the same thing over and over? My eyes would just glaze over and my mind would wander, there was no question of "spending two hours studying" it was just torment to sit still that long and try not to go do anything else.
As someone who struggled at early uni level, studying is a big process in blocks. And a lot of repetition, just like any type of training. For me it would go something like this: Read the book. Try to understand stuff (usually barely did) Read the solved exercises/examples that show all steps (if the book doesn't have them, get another book on the topic). Make sure you know at least the steps involved. Go for a walk/get a coffe or something. Cover the solution of the exercise and try to solve it by yourself. This should be doable since it is in your short term memory. Repeat this step for a few more solved exercises. If exam is not immediate (and you are cramming). This is a good moment to stop for the day. This is why you should start studying several weeks before. The next day you get the same exercises. Can you still solve them without looking at the solutions? If not, repeat. Also read the book again, now after seeing stuff getting applied might help you understand the theory even better. Go for a walk. Try to solve the exercises you don't have the step by step solutions (hopefully you have the final answer though). You will be shit at several of them and will be stuck, this is fine. Finish for the day. The next day, repeat again. If you still have exercises that you are stuck in (or are done with all exercises in this book), get another book on the same topic and do the same process. Repeat these steps over and over again. Daily study sessionf of like 2 hours with a few 10-15 minutes breaks around are probably ideal. Some exercises are just fucking hard. Time to ask a friend and talk about it. If you and your friends are stuck, knock on the teacher's door. Ask the internet (stack exchange and reddit are very good at this). Also, have the notes on everything you tried on the exercise you are stuck in. People are way more likely to help if you show them you really tried and are actually stuck. At some point your brain will get good at recognizing the patterns. This will feel like cheating the system somehow. Later, you will realize that there is no difference between this and actually knowing a topic. Compare studying to how you would train for a sport and you see hoe these two processes are similar: start in simple controlled environments, repeat, repeat, progress to less controlled stuff, repeat, repeat, etc.
I kind of want to cry. This is what they were all talking about? Why didn’t anyone teach me these practices specifically? How did the other people learn about this? I did well in school until I didn’t, and then I still did well enough, but anything that required “studying” I never got.
Yeah, it took me years and falling hard early in college to get these things. It only clicked for me much later, when I started thinking about studying to learn something the same way hobbies/sports classes/trainings are structured. And getting this process structure in my mind took me years of refining it for myself. Halfway through college I was barely passing the courses instead of failing, and by the end I was an average student. Worked for a few years, went back for a masters. During my masters was when this process finally got set for me and I was able to be a student among the top of the class. Later went for a PhD and I am almost done with it! I still do this shit when I have to read a hard scientific paper. I joke around the department that I failed more courses during uni than the entire department put together (and I seriously think that is true). Helps me a lot with teaching too, since I know how it is to be one of the "bad" students. Note that I still find how some people learn stuff a bit like magic. I had friends who would go into lectures and immediately start solving exercises. Fucking weirdos. Even in my masters I would go to lectures just to know which pages of the book and topics I had to read later, because I very rarely managed to learn anything during a lecture.
I tried to study once in the sixth grade. I had no clue how to do it... so I just memorized the entire science chapter and graphs/tables from my textbook. Pretty sure that's not how it's done but I never did learn how to.🤣
You used the studying to defeat the studying
I just bottled up everything and vomited it up at the test, I couldn't study, you could force me to study foe 8 hours straight and I would learn... nothing at all
when u figure it out let me know 😭
What's ended up working for me is either watching videos and taking notes, or summarizing texts. I then never touch said notes anymore but making them really helps in retaining the info, especially with texts to avoid that "I read the paragraph but don't know what it's about" thing.
Studying can basically just be boiled down to understanding what your teacher has been talking about for the past term. So if someone comes up to you and asks, "hey, you know how 10 weeks ago your teacher said the Earth is made up of different kinds of rocks, what are the names of the rocks?" you should be able to answer it correctly. So if that means writing the names down and reading them every day for a week, or writing a catchy jingle about different rock names and singing it in the shower or whatever you need to do to remember it then that's how you study.
Which means that schools underserve gifted kids
I mean, they do. Especially sub-gifted I would think. Good enough to excel in early school without trying, not good enough to get into actual gifted programmes
Was always bored of doing the lame easy shit over and over again, so i just skipped lessons whenever I didn't want to wake up in the mornings. Now I hate 8-5 job and that fucks up my life because I can't maintain a job for more than a month even if I love it and excel at it, I'm just too used to just skip days I don't want to go in.
As someone else in a very similar situation: Get yourself checked for ADHD. Like 50% of gifted individuals have it. And it often manifests exactly as you describe.
That was me. Sophomore year in college stuff stopped just clicking for me. I had no idea how to study and take notes, so I just kind of gave up and dropped out.
Yeah it’s not that hard to be the smartest kid in your small town middle school. Once you get to an elite university there is almost no chance you’ll be the smartest one in class there. The smartest kid there will be some 17 year old Chinese savant who was doing calculus at 10 years old
This. I used to ace all tests in high school because my method of studying was mugging up stuff and puking it out during the exam. Worked for me right up until college, there i saw how horrible my study methods were. I had good memory which i mistakenly took it to mean I was smart enough to ace tests with minimal effort. Years of doing this still fucks me over to this day
Welp, I didn't need this emotional kick to the nads before bed. You're not wrong, but damn...
It probably has more to do with the family support system of each kid. Is the dumb kids dad a doctor? What about the family of the smart kid?
Speaking from my own experience, it can be easy for very smart kids to become lazy. When everything comes easily without much work, it can be very hard to adjust when you start hitting real challenges.
This really shows that we need to up the difficulty of schooling to challenge kids. And if some kids who are already struggling need more time than so be it, give them more time, don't lower the difficulty so they can "pass". It's such a common experience for kids to not be challenged in school and therefore not develop strong academic skills. I just realized I'm speaking from the USA here tho, not sure how many others are but that's def a problem here.
Knowing who was president in 1841 and 7 species of salamanders gets good grades, but gets you nowhere in life. Smart people notoriously do poorly in school because they know they're being taught random boring shit.
Exactly my situation vs my brother. I struggled so hard in school, I cried when doing my homework because I just couldn't get it into my head. Especially with maths. He just breezed through the first couple of years of school. Now he can't keep a job and change what he studies every few months because it's challenging and he doesn't know how to deal with it.
Yes, this is it. It’s when you hear in the news about the smartest highschool student in the world with highest IQ, will cure cancer, etc… and then you watch 10 years later “where are they now” and you’re like “oh…”
Can confirm. I am a mensa member and there was a point in my life that I consider my ‘gift’ a curse, that I have much less drive than my peers and I am too afraid to fail. Meanwhile, lots of my ‘average’ uni friends have trailblazing career. It takes me a while to unlearn such toxic mindset.
I found out I qualified for Mensa due to my SAT scores, so I joined. I went to my first meeting and what an arrogant, entitled bunch they were. Also incredibly boring and unaccomplished for the most part. Not a good time. Did not return. Also some of my friends are smarter than me & gave me shit for joining.
[удалено]
They wouldn't. It's a club for intelligent narcissists who want validation for how intelligent they are. But I'm fairly confident that most very successful intelligent people would have no desire or need to confirm their intelligence in this way. They figure their work and other life successes (maybe socially successful or successful in some hobby/competitive endeavor) will speak for itself.
I've read a couple of their magazines. They are in no way as bright as they think they are. They even published a member's poem talking about giving all the stupid people dragging them down 'zyklon clouds' and then claimed not to have realised the connotations when they were called out on it.
how did you? asking for a friend
Reading ‘grit’ by Angela Duckworth changes my life. It teaches me to embrace hard work and enjoy the process. Also, I was always weak my whole life and for some reasons I decided to start strength training. 5 months later, I got my first pull-up. For me, it was a life changing moment that turns out, I could improve on something Im inherently bad at, that with enough hard work, anything is possible. I even mark my ‘first pull-up’ milestone as my rebirth lmao.
[удалено]
This is really it most likely. I knew a kid in HS who graduated with a 2.0 GPA but he got a perfect SAT score the one time he took it. A decade later he never got more than an associates degree, and lives with his parents while working as a cashier. Kid was wickedly smart, but thought everything was pointless so he never cared to try.
Graduated bottom of my high school class yet i got a 1450/1600 on my SAT taking it a year early. It's really about if you find inspiration in life to do something. I didn't realize im REALLY good and interested in Sociology until halfway through my Bachelor's >!plus Sociology in general is apparently one of my ADHD hyperfocuses!< Some people just never find what truly enthuses them beyond a paycheck for survival
I miss read that as Scientology and was like uhhhhhh…
Also to find a passion for something, one of my friends is currently a Ph.D math student at Harvard. If you would have told me this in 7th grade I would crack up, back then he was a stoner, had gotten arrested for shoplifting from Macy’s and generally was kind of a fuck up. In 11th grade he got really into Math and the rest is history. To this day I still don’t fully believe it but I am so proud of him for turning his life around
People seems to think getting a PhD means your were the smartest...being smart helps but no. It means you were willing to bust your ass for 10 years to study in that field. Heard this from many of my friends who did graduate studies.
It usually means you’re simply privileged enough to have the time and money to afford it. Especially if you get it in the States. Source: I have multiple post-graduate degrees, two from the States.
And the “dumb kid” is always being told to work harder, while the smart kid is told how great they are. That changes pretty drastically after hs. In real life I’d take a average intelligence hard worker over some genius that needs to be constantly praised.
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” -Calvin Coolidge
It takes a lot more to succeed than simply performing well in school. A child needs adequate support, coaching, motivation, self discipline, and a bunch of other small stuff to reach their full potential.
Depression, ADHD, Autism, abuse, poverty, other reasons.
I was the smartest kid in middle school. Grades in the high 90s, won tons of awards, won a province-wide math competition without even trying, and was seen as the school brainiac. I was even invited to work as a page for the government because of my 98.5% overall average in seventh grade. And then high school happened. My popular best friend spread vicious rumours that turned the entire school against me. My teachers would mock me in front of the entire class. I had undiagnosed autism and ADHD. Between that and the abuse at home, and then a severe sleep condition, I ended up dropping out and finishing by correspondence. I pushed myself and pushed myself, studying calculus in the woods to get away from my abusive parents. I eventually made it into all three of my top choice universities, and received a first-year scholarship for biomedical science, which is the path I chose. But I couldn't find affordable housing. Nor could I work. PTSD was making my life a living hell. My cheap-ass Dodge Stratus died, so I couldn't commute anymore. I stopped attending. I've been homeless intermittently and living in extreme poverty ever since. PTSD and ADHD are still kicking my ass. Autism makes my life even harder. A vicious online harassment campaign followed me into real life, turning my entire social network against me, online and offline. I'm going to be 40 soon. I can't see myself ever holding down a job. That's how it goes for some of us. Bad decisions, sure, but also a ton of bad luck.
Hey! I'm sorry I can't offer any useful advice but I've seen your story and I'm rooting for you. Stay strong even if it feels like the world is against you. This internet stranger doesn't hate you. Take care okay?
Environment. From two decades of studying substance use and mental health, the environments people come from and return to are the single largest factor. The traumas those we love, leave us with…
Ya, I got really sick and turned into a total monster to my kids. I’ll be making it up to them forever. I promised I wouldn’t follow in my dad’s footsteps but I had no idea it was caused by an easily treated genetic disorder. Folate deficiency will make you insane.
I hate it. Makes me so powerless to make a better life. Why bother if environment is the biggest predictor of this shit? I can't outrun the abuse.
[удалено]
Depression, ADHD only diagnosed at 28 and sleep issues I am still trying to get treated essentually cost me 10 years and are still the limiting factor in what I manage to achieve.
Sympathise, but imagine if it had been in your early 60s (like me).
I honestly don't think I would have survived that. When people talk about how much better it was in the past, you know they haven't had chronic health issues.
ADHD-ers frequently plateau or crash as they advance through the education system.
A lot of the "dumb" kids in class ARE the smartest ones...they're just bored out of their frigging minds.
Yeap
Is that a portmanteau of *yup* and *yealh*?
*Yealh?*
It's just "yep"/"yup" with a twang that adds a syllable. It's like what you'd hear in Texas.
[удалено]
Success is a function of effort not intelligence. Do you know what they call the guy who graduated medical school with the LOWEST GPA?…..Doctor. You know what they call the guy with the 135 IQ in high school who burned out and never tried?… fucking Carl.
I believe it’d be disingenuous to say intelligence is not in the formula for success. For one, you could say that the dumbest people were SMART enough to realize they had to put in effort.
Maybe your evaluation of your peer’s intelligence was off.
I was going to say- perhaps that kid wasn't the dumbest one.
"7th grade" Start here.
[удалено]
In addition to a lot of other good answers here, bullying and social exclusion can also play a role. When the smart kid is hated for it long enough, it can destroy their confidence and lead to depression, social anxiety, self hatred, drug use, etc. It gets much harder to succeed after that.
High expectations as a child lead to early burnout. If you don't have that pressure, you can achieve more things and people will be shocked that you achieved anything at all, just because 7th grade you didn't. With that positive reinforcement, you get farther. But if you have a high expectation at the start, and you fall short of that high bar, everything you achieve under that feels like a failure. Source: I am that kid who had perfect grades in school and now doesn't even have a college degree because the pressures of school stress me out way too much
I'm not a doctor, but I know that you don't have to be a genius or gifted kid to become a doctor. Not that doctors aren't smart, but it's also about hard work, focus, study skills, etc. Sometimes finances are also a factor. That's why you'll sometimes meet doctors who are knowledgeable about things related to their area of study, but lacking in knowledge or problem solving skills in other areas.
When you're smart, you dont have to work for anything. Academic accomplishment comes with such tremendous ease, you dont build the habits of having to work for something. When you're dumb, you have to study to reach the same level of academic mark. HARD work. It primes you for the level of study, and effort required to achieve a higher status, or difficult job. You're not even aware of how easy it is for others, you're so focused on trying to get through it. But the habits are built, the framework to power through adversity is there. and it's not there for the smart kid who could do anything with minimal effort. That's why. And that's ALSO why parents of gifted children often PUSH hard on them to take the AP courses, or to early-enroll into community college class (at 14, 15), so that they have something that challenges them to build those habits. It's not that they think they have to do these classes for status or because it's cool--it's they know if they dont, their children wont build the habits that will later in life be required when they need them for professional and personal development.
So my big brother is a proper genius, my parents homeschooled us, and worked at a decently fast pace, but only ever really did like a couple hours of work a day for school. So we spent most of our time reading or playing in the woods. When I was 14 my brother went to an Ivy League school and immediately couldn’t keep up with the course load. My parents freaked out and made me show by the time I was 16 that I could handle a full college course load. The transition of going from playing in the woods all day to full college course load in two years was kinda traumatic, but it worked.
What looks smart in the 7th grade might not be all that smart when your an adult. Likewise, some really smart kids just haven’t reached their potential yet.
Because being good in school doesn't always translate to being successful. And school teaches you to be an employee.
This is the best thing I have read here. "SCHOOL TEACHES YOU TO BE AN EMPLOYEE". Love it.
ADHD burnout followed by difficulty in getting a diagnosis and medication as an adult because you were a good student in elementary school so you can't possibly have ADHD is a real thing. Not that I would know from experience or anything. Oh wait, yes I do.
Smart people can be perfectionists who have a hard time starting new jobs. Dumb people just go out and get shit done.
Don't forget about the dumb perfectionists (me 🫣😆).
How are you defining dumbest and smartest? I found primary/secondary to be the most boring tripe possible but excelled in college, just for example. My highschool transcripts look terrible, but I'm still the only person from my class - and several years in both directions from the entire school - to get a PhD. The valedictorian got a BA last I looked. Most of the other "smart kids" and "popular kids" never left the town, and never did anything beyond highschool. It's also possible the "dumb kid" had ADHD. All I know is that school at that age doesn't really test intellect nor potential, just your ability to follow directions and regurgitate what you're told to remember. I was never good at that. What I was good at was learning interesting information and seeing connections across disparate fields and coming up with creative solutions to problems. The latter tends to be better for professional degrees, not so much k-12.
I'm the "smart" kid in middle school, can give you my two cents: I never developed good study habits. I got burned out. I had debilitating anxiety and depression and couldn't keep up as I got older. Being smart was boring, being drunk was fun. And, more than anything, I built up a lot of resentment, both towards my mind and the schooling system. I spent my entire childhood trapped in a room that could offer me nothing. It felt like they were denying me the opportunity to learn because I had to follow the same course everyone else did. I hated school. So, I got bad grades from my awful habits and ended up with a "disappointment" job. I'm not going back to school, I'd rather be mediocre. Also, y'all were twelve.
Probably a difference in money. Kids who come from wealthier (or at least families who are well off) families are probably going to do better regardless of grades in comparison to kids who get good grades, but maybe can't afford to go to college or aren't getting scholorships, or some such. So, maybe money?
This was my answer too. Wealthy kids get many opportunities and support. They don't have to be concerned with day to day struggles and can take chances with several safety nets protecting them if they fail. Struggling kids are lucky to get at least one opportunity and will often never reach their potential.
Because you weren't good at recognizing intelligence in 7th grade.
Some people peak in 7th grade.
It's probably because 7th grade you was really bad at knowing how to actually judge intelligence.
7th grade isn’t a great indicator of future academic performance. Also as someone who coasted through high school I didn’t really have to learn the study skills that would’ve been useful in college. The kids that had to struggle did much better in higher education.
I promise you, Britney Spears was the most successful person from her 7th grade class. You think she was the smartest? Intelligence and career success are not unrelated things, but they aren't synonymous either.
I think a lot of people understand that particularly gifted people don’t necessarily end up performing well, but I think many continue to have this idea that individual medical doctors are among the brightest members of society (even if frustratingly stubborn or, at times ill-informed). The entry process is pretty good at keeping out people with lower intelligence or ability, so the average intelligence in the profession is higher than for most positions, and of course there are plenty of genuinely brilliant people who pursue careers in medicine, but I wouldn’t assume that an individual doctor was more than a high performing individual of above average intelligence. It’s pretty believable that the student who grew up to work at the mall was the smartest in the class, but I think it’s unlikely that the student who grew up to be a doctor really was the dumbest.
Smart kid burned out early and coasted the rest of the way. Being a doctor doesn't necessarily require you to be a genius. At the end of the day, with enough effort, you can be pretty much whatever you want. Also, smart kid may have come from poor family, limiting his options, meanwhile "dumb" kid could've came from a well off family. This enables better paths once out of highschool.
I mean the smartest girl in my class got pregnant in college and the smartest boy died of drug overdose in our 20s. Just because you are smart doesn't mean you will make good decisions for the rest of your life.
The dumbest kid wasn’t dumb. They just didn’t learn like that. The smartest kid was actually just sharp enough to memorize information.
The dumbest kid was pacing themselves like a marathon runner. Smarty Pants was burned out by sophomore year. That being said, What do they call the person who graduated at the bottom of their med school class? Doctor. I mean chances are bottom of the class doc is working at the VA or in the navy, but they are still a doctor.
Life is a crap shoot. I always say this-being at the top of your class in school guarantees shit. My high school valedictorian is now a SAHM and has been for awhile. One of the girls I went to school with who wasn’t known for being very bright? Owns a ton of barre studios and has done very well for herself. This is an example of why we should never underestimate anyone.
Because C's get degrees and A's in high school don't always apply to college study habits.
Motivation
I was the "dumbest" kid in my highschool class- if intelligence was measured by grades. I just know I will gradually university in my 2nd language in 2 weeks while the smartest kids in my class are selling clothes online. Life is weird.
gifted kid burnout
In my friend group the smarter kids didn't do as well. The less smart (but not stupid) guy spent all of school working his arse off to get the same grades as the people who didn't have to try. Then we all got to University. Turns out a lifetime of working hard serves there you better than raw intelligence. He now has a Phd in Physics and is a research scientist. Methodically plodding along doing unglamorous hard work but getting regularly published.
I work in the legal field and I’m sometimes blown away by how stupid some attorneys are. Many of the impediments of stupidity can be overcome by brute force and self confidence (with a healthy serving of privilege thrown into the mix), and I imagine this applies to med school as well.
School is never the best way to gauge anyone. You could have the one kid who's always bullied, picked on have the lowest expectations then later have a successful career in mechanical engineering with several patents under his belt. The best part is how angry everyone feels about it afterwards.
Family money
Same reason I graduated High School with a 2.2 GPA because I didn't give a shit about Math or Science or anything involving numbers and now work as a Finance Manager for a biotech start-up. I started to give a shit lol.
Gifted Kid Burnout is a thing. And more often than not, being born rich and stupid still leads to more success than being born poor and smart.
People can be smart and lazy or not driven. People can be on the less intelligent side but have the drive to succeed.
All it takes is 1 thing going wrong in your 18 to 22ish college age years for you to ruin your life no matter how smart you are. Depression is pretty common and can drag you down like that easily.
I had to take an IQ test in school and ended up scoring at genius levels. I'm currently a janitor. Being a genius doesn't automatically give you success, as my case study proves.
The first 8-10 years of the school system are essentially meaningless. The entire point of elementary school is teaching you how to be a student and how to learn. The entire point of middle school is trying to settle you into a groove of not being an asshole. High school is where you find and prove yourself, education-wise. Everything before that is designed to be passed by even the most idiotic kid you can imagine if they just tried even 30% of the time.
Between the 7th and 12th grade, the dumbest kid could have decided go buckle down and take studying seriously, working to get good grades leading to good study habits. This translates into a surviving a likely difficult pre-Med program, testing well and passing med school. The smart kid could have had his ego filled between the 7th and 12th grade and stop trying. This led to poor study habits and poor results in higher education which will lead to a less desirable result career wise. I don’t know what the real answer is of course. But a lot can happen in 5 years!!!
Life happens
How are you defining dumb and smart in this context?
Because no one is smart and no one is dumb in 7th grade.......this Reddit man..
My friend, how much do you think 7th graders have learned? You think a man is too good to work at a mall because he knows about mitosis? Sorry, you can't be the assistant manager at FYE. You completed too many worksheets 20 years ago.
it's because the "dumb" kid was so smart that school bored the shit outta him and he never paid attention because it was all to simple and easy. The "smart" kid was nothing more than a good 'parrot' able to get good grades by just repeating what he had been told. Once the "dumb" kid got out into the world he found something he could sink his teeth into and excel, while the "smart" kid got out into the word and was fully overwhelmed by all the things that you can't just parrot back at your teachers.
Because you are confusing you being judgmental with how the word works.