Determination and hardwork vs G&T

[KatyMac]

DD is G&T (apparently)

She works bloody hard, concentrates and plans, practises and learns what she is taught

Which comes first I wonder the ability or the determination or do they grow symbiotically?

Cory -

There were hundreds of composers who worked as hard as Mozart, some of them worked themselves into their graves. They none of them wrote his music. But evidently, Mozart himself had to work like a packhorse to write Mozart's music: he couldn't have done it if he had never gone near a piano.

That's a difficult comparison because composing and the judgment of it is partly a subjective thing. Also the desire to even DO it (rather than just stick to playing someone else's music) is highly personal. And finally, the amazing output of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert is partly a result of the Viennese cultural development of the time, which is not a cultural "readiness" that all composers are born into.

But further to my points in the post above: there can surely have only been a tiny number of composers who were trained as Mozart was during the critical period of early childhood. Never going to school, but instead being taught JUST music all day, every day, from a live-in expert father who had the knowledge and motivation to tailor everything to the development of the individual child. In fact I don't know of any that were.

Admittedly this may make no difference to your overall point - in that if someone hasn't had those experiences and been that fortunate with factors of early childhood outside their control, it may be that they'll never get beyond a certain point with an ambition they develop later in life, even if they do work very hard at it.

Confidence - do you have any links to the "critical periods" thing that you mention? That's something that makes sense to me, but I've not read anything formal on the subject.

There are some children who seem to be incredibly good at everything they try though and do a huge range of things at a very high level. They aren't putting hours & hours into everything (or probably anything), so they must have some sort of innate ability, at least to pick up new things very fast.

Can there be a "keep the brain ticking over theory" ? If you are frequently reading and thinking about things you will get through more things faster and question them in greater detail. 24 hours a day you can get in a lot of practice.

The critical period in acquiring foreign languages has been studied lately and iirc the findings indicate that this is far more limited than was previously thought: it mainly applies to accent and intonation, but not to fluency of expression, grammatical correctness or ability to understand the finer nuances. Which seems to bear out what I see in the ML department: many of our students, not to mention our academic staff, learn to speak their languages very well indeed but of course most of them will have started after the critical period.

There are certain phonetical features which are difficult to acquire after a certain age, e.g. the musical accent in some Scandinavian languages. But no reason you shouldn't be able to write a novel or a scholarly tome in a language you took up in your late teens, provided you put the work in.

About confidence's point, yes there is something in it, no doubt Mozart's childhood did account for some of that- though apart from the sheer quality of the instruction I am not sure he was that unique: there were quite a few children pushed to become infant phenomena in the 18th and 19th centuries and the idea of a one-sided education was far less outrageous then than it would be now. I should have chosen some better example.

As a university teacher I find it is not always those with the academically most privileged backgrounds who do best. Sadly, it is not always the ones who work hardest either.

So those of you who think it is entirely or 99% about application- what would you do if you were faced with a student who worked harder than anybody else on the course, literally every waking hour, who was desperate to do well, but who simply could not understand the flaws in his own reasoning? After you have put in hour after hour of (unpaid) tutorials and they are still not getting it, what would you do? Whose fault is it? What would you tell them? To sleep less and work even harder? How far would you go on pushing the idea that application is all?

Remembering that we see a fair few nervous breakdowns and even attempted suicices, usually among students who have been led to believe that if you only work hard you will get top results.

I have no qualms about being firm with lazy students, but there are times when I feel the kindest thing is to tell them either that "I can help you to do better than you are doing now but more than that I cannot promise" (so not the First they think they Must have) or even "are you sure you are in the right place here?"

Going back to Mozart (despite misgiving) don't you think it was a two-sided thing: his dad was encouraged to put in all that work because he could see he was getting somewhere? Would he have been encouraged to carry on if his son had been tone-deaf?

Roisin -

I became interested in the Critical Period hypothesis mostly when investigating the teaching of absolute pitch. As you probably know, noone has ever been able to "learn" absolute pitch as an adult, and the prevailing assumption still is that some people are just "born with it".

There is however a large body of material challenging that assumption, postulating that it can be learnt, but only during a critical period that various people place as ending between about 5 and 7. You can read about some of this here:

www.wehearandplay.com

www.aruffo.com/eartraining

This also strikes a chord with me about truly outstanding classical musicians generally, and I can't help feeling something similar must apply regarding the sheer speed and fluency of aural and motor training necessary to become a world-leading concert pianist or violinist (although I haven't looked into this side of it). When you look at the biographies of such people, they ALL seem to have started learning by the age of about 4 or 5, and then usually with either a parent who was an expert teacher, or a much more famous teacher than most beginners get.

When you look at how obsessive those kids who learn music and go on to become professionals can be, it's hard to work out why others don't start say at age 9 or 10 and just "catch up", becoming famous soloists a few years later in their lives. But it doesn't seem to happen.

As Cory alluded to the other main area of research about it is in language learning, where the critical period is said to close around puberty. It's true as she says that this mostly applies to accent and speaking fluency, rather than understanding of grammar etc. But that doesn't negate the point, and it is interesting considering the connection with music.

gelatinous -

There are some children who seem to be incredibly good at everything they try though and do a huge range of things at a very high level. They aren't putting hours & hours into everything (or probably anything), so they must have some sort of innate ability, at least to pick up new things very fast.

But how can you possibly say that when, at the time you observe them and make that judgment about their learning speed, they've already amassed several YEARS of experience - the most potent and formative years of a person's life? It just doesn't make sense to think you can judge them like it's some kind of "blank slate", just because they're having their first formal music or French or maths lessons. The emotional background to learning (which is everything at that age) and relevant habits of mind are already deeply formed by experience.

Could this be to do with the way children learn?

DD can watch a routine and replicate it in several different genre, she is creative producing new choreography; but all her (dance) teachers have mentioned they are surprised with how much attention she pays to her lessons, how she applies what they say, and how she keeps on at it until she gets it right

Cory -

So those of you who think it is entirely or 99% about application- what would you do if you were faced with a student who worked harder than anybody else on the course, literally every waking hour, who was desperate to do well, but who simply could not understand the flaws in his own reasoning? After you have put in hour after hour of (unpaid) tutorials and they are still not getting it, what would you do? Whose fault is it? What would you tell them? To sleep less and work even harder? How far would you go on pushing the idea that application is all?

I think this is a very interesting point and an area of much potential confusion. You said above that those with the most "academically privileged backgrounds" tend to do best, and in my experience as a teacher of much younger age groups I would certainly agree with that.

However, I don't think it follows from this that those from such backgrounds must have better "innate" abilities. By far the most logical explanation, to me, is that learning works best in a certain order, with high-level specialist learning sitting on top of already-developed general abilities and attitudes. In my area of music this goes something like:

1. Substantial exposure to high quality musical experience (ie, music played well in tune, in time etc.), deeply embedded in family life, formative relationships with parents etc.

1. Valued and supported experience in general music-making with an emphasis on the ear (singing etc.)

1. Formal instruction in reading music and playing an instrument.

The specifics would be different for other subjects but I suspect the principle is similar. Now the problem with formal education is that people go into things at a certain age and have to do what they have to do in that course. So two people might be in year 1 of a music degree, intensely studying step 3 above; but one of them had a full, generous grounding in steps 1 and 2 while the other didn't.

If the Critical Period hypothesis is correct, then this would be exacerbated because the necessary experience amassed in steps 1 and 2 would not only be missing, but could never be caught up, to the level of those who had it at the right time. I'm sure this is so in the oral aspect of foreign languages for example, where a student who took up the subject in late teens will NEVER speak as well as someone who had a parent who spoke it or lived in the country in infancy, no matter how hard they work. Nobody thinks that's because the luckier student has some "innate" superiority in their ability to speak that specific language though. They just had the right experience at the right time.

That's why I said in response to one of your posts above that the difference may not matter that much. I think when people argue for nurture over nature, what they are sometimes trying to argue is that "anyone can achieve anything if they work hard enough". Most people who have worked in education know that that's not true, but it may well be that nature and genetics is not the reason that it's not true.

And while I realise I've been wittering on a while here I'll also mention one other factor: that the brain is known to be highly adaptable and actually grows differently according to training and experience. So it may well be that when you're teaching two twenty-year-olds, one of them has genuine physical advantage in their neural processing over the other, that the other can't possibly catch up with. Again however, that doesn't mean that it was innate at birth. The organs that you're comapring have had two decades of growth already formed by completely different experiences.

Could this be to do with the way children learn?

DD can watch a routine and replicate it in several different genre, she is creative producing new choreography; but all her (dance) teachers have mentioned they are surprised with how much attention she pays to her lessons, how she applies what they say, and how she keeps on at it until she gets it right

Yes. That's a lot of what I mean about internal motivation. My DD is the same about music. Completely freakish for a 5-year-old.

We tend to think of kids as being capricious, unwilling to concentrate and keep trying things etc. I think a lot of that is because they have their own areas of curiosity and knowledge of what is appropriate for them to learn, but spend most of their lives shoehorned into curricula and school structures designed on a "one size fits all" basis.

When you see the effect of internal motivation and external opportunity really come together, you realise they can be the absolute opposite of that.

Can anyone help me here I'm all in knots atm

Interesting theories and ideas. Have you looked at comparisons with social behaviour in companion animals? How about.....

Apparently if a cat or dog (especially cat) is not socialised with its own during their critical learning/socialisation period they will never become accepted or adapt properly. This is not too surprising, as with cats territorial rules are so complex researchers (of the human variety!) cannot comprehend them.

Interestingly black cocker spaniels have been frequently linked with aggression and as a breed are predisposed to absence seizures through out this socialisation period.

I think we (as with almost all animals) are absorbing so much information when young and have brains that have been shown to continue developing to 16 + years of age.

Not that most other animals are "young" at 16 years of age .

confidence your posts are very interesting, it's a fascinating topic, especially as I have a musical child whose abilities seemed to spring from nowhere. I do agree it's not necessarily innate - I thought soon after I posted that it could be something to do with early brain development instead, but once it's there it does seem to confer a big learning advantage on the lucky few and then it's largely irrelevant whether it's due to nature or nurture, (if the window for acquiring it has passed or the mechanism for acquiring isn't known or replicable).

confidence, I think you missed a couple of things in my posts.

You claim I said that the language window affects speaking fluency; what I actually said was:

"it mainly applies to accent and intonation, but not to fluency of expression"

Also that I had said that ime those from the most academically privileged backgrounds tend to do best; what I actually did say was:

"As a university teacher I find it is not always those with the academically most privileged backgrounds who do best."

So quite the opposite.

Re the language window:

Scandinavian students - who are generally praised for their language foreign language skills- do not actually start learning their languages at a younger age than British students. When I was at school in Sweden the norm was to take up English at age 11, French (or German) at 13, and then your third foreign language at 16. But we were still expected to become far more fluent even in our third foreign language than most British students in the language they start in junior school.

As a latinist, I have often been told by British colleagues that of course you can't learn Classical languages after the age of 11. They are astonished when I point out that none of their Scandinavian colleagues (who have a very good reputation in the field) will have started Classics before Sixth Form.

In this case, it is clearly not about talent but about expectations.

Interesting. But when Swedish students take up English at school at 11, would this really be their first introduction to English? Given the strong presence of it in the media etc, and the fact that most Swedish adults (the kids' parents) speak it fluently, wouldn't they likely have had some years of informal oral learning of it before that?

The critical period hypothesis for language learning is interesting because it appears to be almost but not quite 100% true. That is, almost nobody who takes up a language in adulthood ends up speaking it with native accent and intonation, but there have been occasional cases of people who have. This is unlike absolute pitch, where there's no case of an adult ever having learnt it. (I mean genuine, fluent absolute pitch, since some adults manage to learn a sort of half-way version of it).

I agree, Katy

My dc do very well at school, other parents often say, Ooo what do you feed them or similar, and comment on how bright they are, and I point out over and over, that actually, they work bloody hard.

Just read the the thread and agree too that there are differing levels of "innate" ability that can't be explained away.

Not sure about that, confidence. My nephew is just starting English at school and apart from hearing the odd song on the telly (which he won't have understood) he won't have had much exposure. His parents know English, certainly, but it's not something they'd ever use in a family setting unless they had foreign visitors.

In my day, there was limited exposure to English and virtually no exposure to French or German. There were no exchange programmes, very little French or German music on the radio, very little French or German on the telly. Even today, French and German isn't something you hear on an everyday basis in Sweden. We did several years of determined grammar slog and then perfected our accents and fluency through inter-railing and/or taking au pair jobs.

It needs both. My nephew is G&T but simply refuses to work and will leave school with no A levels. He is breathtakingly bright though.

I on the other hand was/am fairly bright but also in the 'worked bloody hard, concentrates and plans, practises and learns' camp.

Once I got to university I met people who were true G&T who worked a few hours a day but not hard and yet sailed out with First class degrees whereas my slogging hard work got me a mid 2:1.

Fair enough cory. I'm certainly no expert on languages so wouldn't claim to be able to judge the validity of the critical period idea in that respect.

Fascinating posts, Confidence. Lots to consider there.