<p>I think kids shouldn’t worry so much about other kids :-)</p>
<p>There are kids who excel at the regimentation of high school, there are kids who are motivated by the carrot/the grade, there are kids who are bored, there are kids who are the dreamers. You can’t pass judgement on kids because of their GPA as it says nothing about their intelligence nor about what their future contributions might be in the world and it says absolutely nothing about what might happen when they get to college.</p>
<p>Lazy is lazy. Is there an adult who isn’t occasionally bored by their job or by tasks that need to be done? Diaper changes, cleaning the toilet, washing the dishes, folding towels, and cleaning hair out of the trap are boring, and repetitive, and don’t require great intelligence, but they still need to be done. Boring paperwork never ends, for any job. </p>
<p>The excuse of smart but lazy won’t get you far in life.</p>
<p>Formal education does have a way of destroying a smart child’s excitement with learning. And really smart children tend to be internally motivated; the motivation of getting an A or praise from the teacher for accomplishing shallow, repetitive busywork is alien to them.</p>
<p>Sometimes, if an adult doesn’t step forward at the right time, these kids lose hope: they need to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel to continue to stay motivated. My younger son, during his first semester of high school, expressed frustration nearly every day about the snail’s pace of teaching and the endless repetition of cookie-cutter homework problems that tested endurance rather than ability.</p>
<p>Second semester, I took my son down to the nearby state university and talked to a professor to let him sit in on a class and take the tests if he decided to stick with it. If successful, he could officially sign up for the class and get credit the following semester; if not, he could walk away, with a least a sense that it wasn’t always going to be mindless busywork. This decision was an inflection point in his life, and he was visibly excited with finally having a real challenge. He stayed in the class, finished first in a class of 90 students, and became willing to play the “grade game” to enhance his future opportunities for real learning.</p>
<p>The OP: “how do you feel about the students in high school who say that they’re smart, but say they’re just lazy …?”</p>
<p>Yes, formal education does have a way of dulling excitement and bringing on boredom. But that wasn’t the OP’s question. Is it EVER smart to use laziness as an excuse???</p>
<p>I think “lazy” often becomes shorthand for “I don’t buy into the system the way it’s designed and can’t be motivated to work hard for something I see little value in.”</p>
<p>Image for a moment that you were required to sit in a class and watch Barney the Dinosaur reruns continuously, then get tested on the minor details. Wouldn’t your mind wander? Wouldn’t you rebel?</p>
<p>^ Such reactions are understandable. I empathize with being bored. And I’m among the worst at suffering fools gladly. But these are life skills. Imagine going for a job interview … perhaps for that important first job. When asked to talk about you academic history your respond “Well I was a lot smarter than most of my teachers. They didn’t respond well to that. Some of my history is due to the fact that I’m easily bored. Worst is when I’m asked to do something that doesn’t excite me.” Those statements may be true, true, and true. But they indicate a very poor understanding of how 95% of the world works.</p>
<p>Yes, to some extent. But as an adult you do have choices: you can leave the job you hate if you’re willing to deal with the consequences of finding another, perhaps at lower pay or at a more distant location. Young people have to show up and submit, but they can also be passive-aggressive about doing so. Thus, I think it can be beneficial to make the case that “behaving as expected” now can lead to rewards they appreciate later – this gives them “ownership” in their decision to conform.</p>
<p>There are many flavors of smart/“lazy”. Sometimes a kid has been so very bright that he never learned how to be organized. Then in tough hs classes, “wing it” methods don’t work so well and grades suffer.</p>
<p>Yep, both of mine. They could look at a math concept or physics formula once and remember it forever, but not be able to find their homework in their backpacks when it came time to turn in said homework. By the end of a semester, the collection of misc. papers in their backpacks was a 3-inch-thick brick of bent and frayed edges crumbled together; looked like something an archeologist might treasure.</p>
<p>I don’t think I was “lazy” in high school. More like very disorganized. I received a “D” one 9 weeks in 8th grade English (followed by many C’s) because I didn’t turn in homework assignments. I received a 5 on AP English and a perfect reading comp. score on the ACT. Why was I so disorganized? My home life was chaotic and I have never been diagnosed, but I think I might have ADD.</p>
<p>Just anecdotal but I have heard many stories like mine.</p>
<p>It’s a lot harder to be smart, lazy, and give the impression you are always about to save the world so you can’t be bothered with minutiae. I.e. Wally in Dilbert. That’s where the smarts come in. </p>
<p>Or, as the old Soviet proverb went, “As long as they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work”. In order to overachieve at work, I would need to work super uncompensated overtime hours to show my fealty to the kingdom. I prefer to work European hours (true to my birth country’s standards), produce as much as my buddies who work an extra 2 hours a day unpaid, and enjoy the fruits of my labor.</p>
<p>Microprocessors are pretty good in power management, dropping from two or four cores down to one and reducing clock speed to save energy. Humans should be like this, too. I can ‘overachieve’ and gain an extra 10%-15% in pay (which will likely evaporate if I move to a more expensive part of the US, or won’t make a noticeable impact to my quality of life) or I can cruise along, do my normal work, and enjoy life.</p>
<p>In high school, a peer once came up to me with an annoyed attitude and said, “I could be as smart as you if I tried.”</p>
<p>Lazy is lazy. I have a kid with disabilities who gets better grades than kids who are way smarter than she is. But she works really hard, and is motivated to overcome her deficiencies. Her main strategy is to keep plugging away for as long as it takes to learn the material. A lazy person takes a reason for academic difficulty and turns it into an excuse, thus causing the difficulty to perpetuate. A diligent person takes action to change his circumstances. </p>
<p>There are some home life situations which are so horrific and damaging that the above doesn’t apply.</p>
<p>I would send such a person a copy of Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset, and hope that he reads it and sees himself as having a “fixed mindset”. (not good)</p>
<p>Several of my children’s teachers have told me that the most intelligent students in their classes are usually also the most disorganized students. They are not lazy. On the contrary, they are perfectly willing to work – and work hard. However, they often can’t find their homework assignments in their backpacks, or they leave assignments at home, or they can’t do assignments at home because they misplace necessary handouts. Online access to classroom documents and homework assignments, and the ability to e-mail homework to teachers, usually helps these students immensely.</p>
<p>Laziness is a entirely different problem from disorganization. Disorganization needs a sympathetic plan with coping strategies. Laziness needs a “get over it and get working” approach.</p>
<p>We’re perilously close to redefining “lazy.” Here’s the dictionary definition:</p>
<pre><code> la·zy/ˈlāzē/ … adjective: Characterized by lack of effort or activity.
</code></pre>
<p>I understand a Parent’s motivation to discover WHY there is a lack of effort or activity in a child’s life. It’s entirely appropriate a Parent do that for a child that’s not performing.</p>