Hello all! I'm so sorry for not posting anything in a rather long time... I've been caught up at work and school and yeah... Really haven't had much time to write. But, the long wait is over, here is another post for your visual consumption!
As of late I've been feeling challenged, I've been feeling pushed towards a degree and career in a field I'd always been intrigued by but never thought much about. I've had my focus turned towards the brilliant degree that is psychology. Previously, if you follow me on instagram, you'd have noticed that my lovely girlfriend got me a great book for christmas. Well, she followed that up on valentines with another very good book. Both of these books delve deep into psychology subjects, and as she said, I devoured them. Well, I've found myself diving head first into psychology and truly loving it. Now, onto the subject of this post...
All through school you hear from fellow classmates and teachers about your abilities. You either hear, "Wow Billy, very smart of you, wonderful job!" and you receive high praise and high expectations, or, you hear your teachers say, "Good job Billy" and hand back a paper with a decent grade on it. Or, if you're like me, you often hear from teachers, "I don't think you understand the subject matter, you need to try harder." Often times followed by low expectations on your projects or homework. Well, for the longest time I'd grown up thinking I wasn't smart enough and wasn't going to amount to much because I never seemed to understand the subject matter.
So here I am, 19 going on 20, feeling like I'm not really smart enough or able enough to complete higher education. My girlfriend however has implemented in me a thought of having the ability, a thought of being smart enough. Lately, after receiving booth these amazing books and practically devouring them and learning from them, my girl listens to me go on and on about them. She then informs me of how smart I am. She convinced me to take an IQ test, if you can believe the scores that are earned have any relation to a persons intelligence, and well, to her amusement I scored fairly high on them. Now that I am in college, the one psych class I've taken, the professor would respond to my papers with high praise, and I felt good and felt as thought they expected that so I fulfilled that in the ensuing papers.
I'm not telling you all of this to toot my own horn, or to make myself sound like some kind of brainiac nerd because I identify as the furthest thing from. Yes, I've grown a knack for reading and I have a book list that would make most heads turn, but you can thank my girl for that. I tell you this in hopes that some parents, teachers, and even students will read this and learn something. My hope is that they'd learn to be a generous support system for young students. I'm not talking about a personal support where you help through life, as much as that is needed, educational support is needed more. Students struggle for a few reasons, focus is lost, motivation is killed. Students, especially younger children thrive off of what teachers and parents think and show. We subliminally communicate expectations that other unconscious minds pick up on, and kids minds can easily pick up on the supposedly unbiasedness of teachers. Students who constantly fail will see in the teacher a low expectation, they'll be ridiculed by their smarter classmates and they'll begin to think they'll end up flipping burgers. That was me.
Studies have proven the fact, that the "naturally" born gifted children weren't born that way, they were nurtured that way. Parents often times have expectations for their children, and the kids can read that on an unconscious level and they more than often achieve the expectations. They give 50 kids an IQ test, and handed the results to the teacher and marked 25 of the children as "extremely gifted" one year later, the same scientists give the same test to the same kids, on average, the kids gained about 5 points on the test. But those 25 that were labeled and viewed as gifted received higher expectations from the teachers and parents, their test scores improved on average by 20 points and at most 40 points. You can't tell me that supporting and having expectations for your kids doesn't help.
I'm not by any means saying that by simply having expectations for your children or students they'll achieve them, because there are always exceptions to the rule. But, if you consciously make an effort to support your children and have high expectations, your unconscious mind will send messages to theirs, and they'll be more likely to succeed in reaching your expectations. So there we go, some food for thought, and if you don't believe me you should, because I went from a kid who was close to flunking out of high school, to someone who is actively thinking about working to achieve a PhD in psychology. I went from reading a book in a year to reading 2 books in the past month by simply receiving support and receiving high praise along with high expectations from people I care about most.
Thank you for reading, hope you enjoy. I'll try not to have as long a wait before my next post!
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