Subject: Confidence
Author:
Posted on: 2010-09-14 19:45:00 UTC
I completely agree about the self-confidence thing. I myself have gotten bad scores on tests before due to overconfidence and optimism. Kids are taught nowadays "do your best," which is laudable, but it needs to be followed by, "make your best better."
Another short non-Sue killing mission: Loyalty Summary of the story: The A-Team gives Frankie a lesson on loyalty. Summary of the mission: Tasmin and Allison have to remind the Team 'that is not what loyalty is about'.
It seems that ever since Cassie set the challenge to write non-Sue mission the badficcers in my main fandom have stopped writing Sues. Odd coincidence.
That overconfidence thing you said in the mission is something I have said for a long time. I saw a study once (sorry no link), that talked about those programs and pointed out that often times the kids that scored the highest on the tests were the biggest troublemakers, rule breakers, and lowest achievers. They often failed at everything, but were totally happy about themselves while they were doing it.
Self-confidence of the healthy kind does not come from being told you're doing great when your not. I've always believed it comes from knowing that you are competent. People look at me funny over this sometimes, but my kids (age 9 & 10) know how to run all the major appliances in the house, how to take care of their own things, how to cook several basic meals, and how to take care of several other types of things. They know they can do these things. They do not feel helpless to meet their own needs, and they don't get to feel that sense of entitlement that I am their maid. If they decide they want to learn something like cooking or sewing or whittling, then I will help them with it, teach them how, give them room to make their mistakes, and then give them pointers on how to continue to improve.
They might not score the absolute highest on the self-confidence tests, but they have a more realistic confidence.
Which is what I was thought, and which I do keep hearing (skilled people get better jobs, etc.). It's a bit disheartening that in actual fact, people that are best able to boast about their skills get the job. Not necessarily the people that would be best at the job.
I completely agree about the self-confidence thing. I myself have gotten bad scores on tests before due to overconfidence and optimism. Kids are taught nowadays "do your best," which is laudable, but it needs to be followed by, "make your best better."
I've been criticized for writing PPC fics and for giving negative feedback in general a few times and the argument used was "It's a good thing you are not a teacher."
While I understand the part where a teacher shouldn't make fun of his students (some do, though), most of what I say is not even that far removed from what my Math teacher said when I failed to solve (a-b)^2 correctly, "At least you are consistent." (Then he proceeded in showing how it should have been done.)
About the confidence programs, that is. That statistic is probably related to the rampant sense of entitlement among us, too. Do you have a link to anything about that? Was there a study of some sort?
As for the story... yeah, wow. How wrong can you get? O.o Nicely done! I like that Frankie was let be at the end, and the justification for it was funny. {= )
~Neshomeh
The article I read was in a Dutch newspaper, so, I'm guessing not much good to you. It references an article that was published in Review of General Psychology September issue. I can only access abstracts of that journal. There is one article with a promising title: Mean-Level Change in Self-Esteem From Childhood Through Adulthood: Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies. The abstract doesn't seem to confirm what the newspaper article said.
(Funny coincidence, I've just returned from a lecture about how newspapers often don't properly quote research, but rather go for the big headlines).
And what can I say about Frankie? I haven't met a A-Team fanfic writer that liked him.