"I Wasn't Told This Before College" #3: If You Got Grit, Flaunt It

HEREIN LIES THE BEST LESSON A FORMER GIFTED KID CAN LEARN AND TEACH

  In the two years preceding college, I worked as an "Instructional Assistant" at a branch of the Kumon Math and Reading centers. "Instructional Assistant" being a fancy word for "tutor", I spent three afternoons a week teaching kids age 3-18 math, checking on stocks of worksheets, and convincing children that I had the power to tell Santa if they didn't do their math homework.
  Shortly before getting a job there, I was required to do a summer assignment for my AP Psychology class. The subject matter involved watching a video on Angela Duckworth's "Grit Versus Intelligence". (This is the shorter version. The original is twenty minutes long.) 
  Basically, she said that intelligence isn't enough. You've got to be able to work hard if you want to do well both academically and in the real world. Her term for that is "grit".
  That kind of totally messed up everything I knew in my life of being a "gifted kid".
  She described her experiment in which she gave a group of  kids a simple math test. Half of the kids were told " you must be so smart," when they completed it, and the other half were told "you must have worked so hard." When given a slightly harder test, the children told "you must be so smart" shut down when they couldn't figure something out, whereas the kids who were told "you must have worked so hard" were able to, well, work hard and solve the harder questions.
  I remember immediately texting my mom and verifying if that had ever happened to me when I was younger. She said not only did it happen, but it happened a lot. 
  THAT is the worst part of being labeled a "gifted kid". Our identity, especially as an elementary aged child, is so wrapped up on being "smart". And because we are "smart", we just seem to know everything. No one ever feels the need to teach us how to work hard. I intended on changing that in both myself and in others. And I ended up with the perfect opportunity.  

  The concept of "grit" was still bouncing around my head when I got the job at Kumon, and I immediately recognized the problem in some of the kids I worked with. 
  Kumon has it's own way of teaching. Students are required to do a packet of Kumon specific work when they come to the center, and take a packet for each day they are not at the center. Many students use it as a way to relearn the basics in order to succeed in higher levels, but some use it to keep themselves challenged outside of school.
  A few late elementary/ early middle schools students were stuck. A few levels ahead of the ones typical for their grade level, they kept repeating the same worksheets over and over again because they didn't know how to do it. But it wasn't just that they didn't know. It's that they didn't try.
  I'll admit it (thought it was never a secret) that I was never completely on board with the "one way to teach them all/ one-way-of-mind them/ one way to bring them all/ and in mathematics bind them" way of thinking. It had never worked well for me, so I determined it probably didn't work well for them.
  Quietly, I started to teach them outside of the typical parameters, and praised them with "you must work so hard." There was immediately a change. They were more interested in working (well, kind of), and their grades began to improve. Suddenly, they weren't just scrawling down any old number. Instead, they actually wrote out their work (!) and slowly but surely moved on in levels. It was so cool to watch them learn how to work. Even if they did diss The Lion King. I don't know what's the motto with them. (If you don't get that line, I'm revoking your Disney fan card.) 

  "Grit" is something I haven't mastered completely yet. Though I now know that one should never attempt to college without knowing how to work, I am starting to get the hang of it. I showed "grit" when training for marching band tryouts, and even though I didn't make it, I proved to myself, my brother-in-law who helped me train, and the rest of my family and friends that if I want it enough, I can do work for it.
  College is teaching me that more and more every day. Obviously since I'm here, I want to do well, get my degree, get into grad school, etc., and I am willing to work hard to do that, but it's tough. "Gifted kids" rarely know how to study or work hard because we never have to. College rips off the label of "token smart kid" and tosses us into a whole world of General Chemistry I's and Spanish III's where we actually have to do a lot of work to even get the minimum of a passing grade. 
  A chem professor who came to my dorm to talk about studying said that for every credit hour a class is worth, you should be doing three times that in hours per week to average a C. That seems like a lot if you consider a 5 credit class, but it's worth it. Be "gritty" because doing the dirty work will get you a lot farther than knowing what challenge with a reporter Calvin Coolidge won.

MORAL OF THE STORY: work hard because it'll get you a lot more out of life than knowing that Calvin Coolidge, notorious for not saying much, was told by a reporter that she could get him to say more than two words during a party at the White House. He replied with the words "you lose", his only words all night.