Why are some children are pushed to learn whereas others can achieve the same results naturally?

Parent Cafe
1

My friend has really pushy Asian parents who force her to study for APUSH using review books a year before she actually takes the class, so she can pull off high 90s it straight away.

On the other hand, my parents are really chill with me and through hard work (studying 10 minutes a day every day) I achieved similar scores as her in APUSH, without needing to do extra work a year ahead of time.

Are her parents’ parenting tactic better than my parents’ tactic or vice versa? Why is it that she is forced to learn whereas I don’t really do that much work and still get the exact same final average in the high 90s? If I used her tactic, would my grade in the class be better than hers? But will I be sacrificing my happiness for a better grade? Also, do you think she’s academically gifted or is that something forced out of her? Or is there no such thing as being academically gifted? Is it only just hard work that makes a difference?

These are just hypothetical questions. I’m extremely curious as to what others think about this issue.

2

Different people have different skill sets. Some people are able to pick up certain subjects easier than others. Some people may struggle with one subject and excel at another. Different people learn different ways. So while one person may need to study something repeatedly to fully understand it, someone else reaches full understanding with less study. More studying for the second person may not make a difference. So ultimately, the answer to your questions, like many posed on this board, is it depends.

3

Because people are not the same.

4

People are not the same – this goes for both students and their parents.

5

hi fluffybear,
Here are a few of my thoughts on your questions:

  1. How much time one needs to spend on APUSH depends on the knowledge one has of American history going into the class. You may know a lot from your outside reading, which might have covered American historical periods. You may have gone on family vacations that took you to historical sites. You may have seen movies or plays that relate to American history, and retained the information from them (with luck it was correct, unlike some of the information in . . . ahem . . . Patriot).

  2. There is productive extra studying and unproductive extra studying. Productive extra studying involves gaining a deeper knowledge of the topic and a better internal “database” of interrelated facts. This takes work and thinking to build up. A person who studied a lot extra and spent the time productively–for example, by reading college-level texts about specific periods or important people in American history–would wind up with much better understanding of American history than can be gained in 10 minutes per day, even if one knows a lot going into the topic. However, this depth of understanding might not be obvious from early test results. People read questions wrong, make dumb mistakes, have a short memory lapse, didn’t study one particular detail, have to deal with poorly constructed questions . . . if you both are scoring in the high 90’s, it is likely that the points that each of you is missing fall into this category.

  3. I don’t normally think of the review books as productive studying early in the year. They become productive as a review, which is their purpose. Better to go for depth and integration of knowledge. Really good review books might help with this, but a lot of them hit unrelated sets of high points.

  4. The period from about 1870 to 1928 is important in American history. However, this is often the era where knowledge is the weakest. For current students, 1946 to about 1980 may also be a weak point. Depending on what periods your course is covering, the difference between prep-study and 10 minutes a day as you go along may not be evident yet.

  5. You might absorb information from class lectures and discussions better.

  6. I do think there are conceptual gifts–the ability to read more complicated texts, the ability to integrate new information better into one’s overall knowledge base, the ability to recall facts quickly, the ability to discover inter-relations among cause and effect, the ability to understand that any particular event in American history may have multiple causes and multiple effects, and that there can be long chains of interconnected causes and effects, logical reasoning ability, the ability to empathize with the people you are studying (to improve your understanding of them), the ability to free yourself from your current perspective and truly see events with others’ eyes . . . Any of these can be improved with practice and time, so hard work does play a role. But at any given instant in time, people are where they are.

  7. Whether someone is gifted or not is independent of whether the person’s parents “demand” a certain amount of studying.

6

It’s impossible to know how well your friend would do if her parents didn’t force her to do all that studying — but IMHO you are the one who is much better off, because you have had the opportunity to develop a study pattern that works for you and does not require expenditure of unneeded time and energy. Part of your success might simply be an approach where you are more efficient at the initial “intake” stage – that is, you make sure you focus on, understand, and integrate what you read or hear in a lecture the first time around. And you likeliy have developed a very efficient approach to studying if you are only spending 10 minutes, likely taking an approach of focusing on main ideas and concepts, rather than getting bogged down in details; or else prioritizing areas of difficulty rather than spending time reviewing what you already know.

You might also have figured out along the way the value of mental down time (sleep and/or relaxation) to give your brain a chance to integrate what you have learned. That is, some of us figure out that we do better if we study for a short time and then get a good night’s sleep than if we study for hours, and miss the sleep. (During sleep, short term memories are consolidated into long term).

I think the only risk for you is that you might be relying heavily on your own inherent “smarts” and not have developed strong enough study skills to get you through college, when the intellectual demands and workload is far beyond what you could manage with your current study habits. But I think there is a bigger risk for your friend, who may falter in the future when her parents aren’t around to micro-manage her studies, or may have learned to “study” in a way that is not conducive to long-term learning – for example, to memorize a lot of facts without really understanding their significance.

But bottom line - I’d suggest just continuing with what works for you and don’t worry about your friend.

7

@calmom makes a good point. The progression from high school to college to graduate school/law school/whatever can put you in an increasingly competitive environment at each stage. Solid study skills are critical; so is mental health and knowing when to give yourself a break.

8

I don’t know if you have ever had an IQ test, but IQ can impact how fast someone learns. A particularly brilliant person with IQ over 140 can memorize a lot of things the first time they hear it, while someone else with a still high IQ of 120 might have to study to memorize the same thing. Dropping further down the IQ range would mean even more studying is required to achieve the same memorization.

Some people also have a knack for some subjects and not others. Math might be easy to one person and grammar could be difficult. Subjects like history that require a lot of memorization of facts might be a challenge for some people. So it could be that they need much more repetition to learn something that another person could master quickly.

People also have different goals. For example, one of my daughter’s classmates in high school was aiming for Valedictorian, which she ultimately achieved. For her, it wasn’t enough to make all As. My daughter made all As and took 15 AP courses, but she was still not in the top 10 at her school. To be at the top required making very high As in the upper 90s for all courses. That girl studied a lot more than my daughter, and was much more diligent about always completing homework and turning it in on time, because she wanted to be Valedictorian. That required more effort and studying on a daily basis throughout high school for her to wind up at the top. Since the Valedictorian also plans to become a doctor, her study skills and diligence will pay off throughout college, because it takes very high grades in college in difficult science courses to get into medical school.

Because everyone has different strengths and goals, they should not be judged one way or another for how long it takes them to learn something, or for wanting to do extra studying to be SURE they have mastered the material. Some people do not want to risk a low grade (or even a B or a low A) because of their personal goals, so they might study extra just to be 100% sure they have it mastered.

The parents who are pushing for extra studying to ensure mastery probably have legitimate reasons for doing so. It could be that they know their child needs that much studying to learn. It could also be that they want to remove risk of anything less than an A because they cannot afford to send their child to college without an academic merit scholarship, or perhaps their child wants to go to a top tier university. Their child may also want to become a doctor eventually or pursue some other career requiring very high grades throughout college, and they want to instill good study habits early on.

If you look up the actual data on Asians, the “pushy Asian parents” as you put it are having tremendous success across generations. Asians make more money than other races in the USA on average because they are successfully pursuing difficult careers requiring exceptional academic achievements. Asian students dominate National Merit Finalist rankings and national science awards compared to their percentage of the population. They now make up around 20% of Ivy university students and around 40% of top California universities like Berkeley. Asians are doing something right. So what appears “pushy” to you could be the secret to long-term success.

Of course, not all Asian parents are “pushy” and not all Asians are high achieving, and plenty of parents of every race could be perceived as “pushy” whether it relates to academics or sports or performing arts. Would you view this all differently if it were a friend accomplished in sports whose parents insisted they practice their sport for an hour a day? What if the parents insisted their musically inclined child practiced playing their instrument for an hour a day? What if this family were not Asian and were some other race, would you have the same reaction?

It’s really best to just focus on yourself and what works for you and your goals, and not criticize or question what effort another person and family puts into academics.

9

Yes, people are gifted in different areas. I could make straight As without much effort, but I couldn’t do a cartwheel to save myself! I hated gymnastics units in PE! And I had a very talented friend, who could draw cars, planes, etc. to perfection, but she barely passed each math class.

10

It seems like there is no evidence that your friend wouldn’t still have gotten a high A without all the prep. Some people prep more than they need to for tests.

(From what I’ve heard, many APUSH teachers require students to outline the whole textbook with a sentence or 2 per paragraph. Not something you can likely do in 10 minutes a night or in advance if you don’t have the same textbook. Not that I think this is a useful study technique for the current APUSH test … or anything at all like a college class.)

Personally, yes I do think there is such a thing as being “academically gifted.” But this experiment design doesn’t really reveal that characteristic.

11

Why waste precious time & energy comparing yourself with your friend? There are so many different factors…culture, life experiences, abilities, schema, motivations, socioeconomics, etc. Do you. The only person you should be competing against is yourself.

12

Echo what others said about people being different and having different talents/proficiencies/speeds.

Many HS classmates and teachers at my STEM-centered public magnet were stunned that I could be such an academic laggard/slacker and yet, survive to senior year. In that environment, I had to work far harder to get 1/10th as far(If I was so lucky) while most classmates had no issues picking up the same concepts or working at the frenetic pace our HS teachers put us through.

On the flipside, undergrad was much more manageable and ended up being on the other side of the fence. Had an older classmate in college who despite repeating many classes I was taking with him, still struggled heavily with the weekly reading loads* which really puzzled me at the time as I had no problems finishing my weekly reading in time for class or understanding them well enough to contribute to the class discussions despite taking them for the first time…and doing so at a younger age than he did when he first attempted them.

A few years ago, he even asked me, “cobrat, how was it you managed to get through all those readings and pick up so much more from those classes we took?”

It was also interesting he was struggling with an intro CS course for non-majors despite it being considered a gut course by most students…including most non-technically oriented students. The hardest part of the course only covered the first three weeks of the material in the first semester CS intro course for majors. He later admitted the Prof passed him out of pity.

  • ~400-800 pages per week per intermediate/advanced seminar class times 2-4 of them or equivalents like foreign language or CS courses for majors. And I didn't realize you weren't supposed to read every page cover-to-cover like a novel until well after I graduated.

If memorization is all/most of what’s required to succeed in a college prep HS history class or worse, an AP course, that will leave students ill-prepared for actual college-level history classes not deliberately designed to be gut courses for non-majors.

Good college level history classes also requires one to be able to place those events in some contextual framework and critically think about and deeply analyze those events to come to a better understanding of not only what happened and its implications at the time, but also its effects through the years and beyond at the very minimum.

Several college classmates ended up crashing and burning when they found memorizing facts/dates wasn’t enough in our college-level history classes.

13

Why could Aaron run a 4.4 40 yard dash naturally and I needed to do plyometrics, stretch, and train to hit a 4.56? Different skillsets for different people, right? I confused as to what the point of your post was, if you study harder would you get even higher grades? Probably so!!

14

People are just different.

My sister and I were raised more or less the same. She dropped out of college and I’m getting a PhD. We’re just different people and we have been since birth.

Mr R and his brothers are very close in age. One is really good at art, one at science, and one at education. Two love doing theater, all love playing board games, but only one picked up foreign languages easily. If it was all parenting, they’d all similarly excel at the same things… but they don’t.

Honestly, IME, parenting has relatively little to do with it. Just my observation of families with multiple children.

15

For some, there comes a point of diminishing returns so more studying beyond that point won’t help.

If grades in undergrad were awarded based on how much study time/effort was put in, that older college classmate should have by rights graduated on-time with an A+ level GPA.

Instead, he put in at least 2-3 times the amount of study time I put in…and still failed/barely passed his courses and ended up being on the 7.5 year plan with one academic suspension and one parentally mandated gap year under his belt.

In contrast, the salutatorian of my HS graduating class who ended up at MIT by his roommates accounts, never pulled an all-nighter despite being an EE major, slept at least 8 hours every night, had plenty of free time to enjoy the parties at MIT/around Boston/Cambridge, and was perceived to be the type who can pull a 4.0 level performance without putting in more than an hour or two of studying each week*, and still managed to graduate near the top of his class with a BS and MS in EE in 4 years.

What would take yours truly a couple of hours of study and my older college classmate at least 6-8 hours would take my HS salutatorian friend less than 10 minutes to figure out.

  • Not actually that little, but that was the impression his longtime roommates who were simultaneously awed and jealous at how he pulled off having a very balanced and seemingly relaxed 4 years at MIT as an EE major.
16

10 minutes/day is hard work?

17

My favorite “oh my god this kid is a genius story” is my hall mate freshman year. I walked into his room and he’s literally clicking through our orgo class’s lectures at multiple slides/second on his computer. When I asked him what he was doing, he said “studying.” Pulled 95-100 on exams with class averages in the 50s or 60s.

18

These are just two different approaches. Perhaps your 10 minutes a day was effective for you, but would not be for your friend. If this pushing from the parents was consistent, then it might also backfire - was she prepping for the following history class while taking APUSH? If so, how did that prepping impact the time she spent on the course while she was actually taking it?

19

@QuantMech

What? Are you saying Mel Gibson didn’t singlehandedly defeat the British at the Battle of Yorktown by knocking the Tavington dude out with a McDonald’s Big Mac and hosing down the Redcoats with an M-60 machinegun? :smiley:

20

@fluffybear – how did you compare to your friend in other classes (e.g. biology, chemistry, physics)?