See, my parents actually tried what yours did, but the problem was that things I cared about wanting to do mostly came very easily to me, which was sheer coincidence. Like, I wanted to play the flute also, and my school did not participate in state-level flute stuff, so I was first chair in my school at flute on, literally, half an hour of practice a week, which was as much as I enjoyed. My schools did foreign languages via immersion, so I didn't wind up studying vocab lists. That sort of thing.
So it wasn't until college that I hit something I really wanted to do and that needed work for me to be good at it-- Ancient Greek-- and I had no idea how to do the work. It was horrible trying to learn to do that on the fly.
I have been seriously wondering ever since whether kids ought to be pushed to do something that has a competency threshold and that they are not naturally talented in until they reach the point of competent enjoyment. Because if my parents had done that it would have solved ninety percent of the problems I had in college.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-04-11 07:32 pm (UTC)So it wasn't until college that I hit something I really wanted to do and that needed work for me to be good at it-- Ancient Greek-- and I had no idea how to do the work. It was horrible trying to learn to do that on the fly.
I have been seriously wondering ever since whether kids ought to be pushed to do something that has a competency threshold and that they are not naturally talented in until they reach the point of competent enjoyment. Because if my parents had done that it would have solved ninety percent of the problems I had in college.