全新英文每周一文，The Learning Myth: Why I'll Never Tell My Son He's Smart. 鍛鍊腦肌從這一篇文章開始！

                               每一次的挫敗，都是為了鍛鍊自己的腦袋。
學習若不挑戰苦差，或因東西難學而懈怠，人終將腦殘。

寫作沒梗是因為太少閱讀，這篇有很多句子很好用，抄下來！背起來！
保證下回考試時下筆如有神！

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The Learning Myth: Why I'll Never Tell My Son He's Smart

By: Salman Khan 可汗學院創始人 

可汗學院是由孟加拉裔美國人，麻省理工學院及哈佛大學商學院畢業生薩爾曼·可汗

在2006年創立的一所非營利教育機構。機構以加快不同年紀學生的學習步伐為使命，

通過網路提供一系列免費教材。教練也是訂購課程的會員，大家有興趣可以上網去看看!

My 5-year-­old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell­-tale signs 明確的徵兆/證據of a “growth­ mindset.” But this wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets 心態toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.

Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that the more you use it, the more it grows. They’ve found that neural connections form神經中樞連結的形成and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones.

What this means is that our intelligence is not fixed智能不是固定/不變的, and the best way that we can grow our intelligence is to embrace tasks where we might struggle and fail.

However, not everyone realizes this. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has been studying people’s mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth. Fixed mindsets 認為智能是無法改變的心態 mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not, that intelligence is fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability and intelligence can be grown through effort, struggle and failure. Dweck found that those with a fixed mindset tended to focus their effort on tasks where they had a high likelihood of success and avoided tasks where they may have had to struggle, which limited their learning. People with a growth mindset, however, embraced challenges, and understood that tenacity 不屈不撓 and effort could change their learning outcomes改變學習的結果. As you can imagine, this correlated with 關聯the latter group more actively pushing themselves 主動鞭策自己學習and growing intellectually.

The good news is that mindsets can be taught; they’re malleable可塑性/延展性. What’s really fascinating is that Dweck and others have developed techniques that they call “growth mindset interventions,” 智能開發成長心態(一種介入式研究)which have shown that even small changes in communication or seemingly innocuous 無害的comments can have fairly long­-lasting implications 含意for a person’s mindset. For instance, praising someone’s process (“I really like how you struggled with that problem”) versus praising an innate trait 與天俱來的特質or talent (“You’re so clever!”) is one way to reinforce a growth ­mindset with someone. Process­ praise 讚美過程acknowledges the effort; talent­ praise reinforces the notion that one only succeeds (or doesn’t) based on a fixed trait. And we’ve seen this on Khan Academy as well: students are spending more time learning on Khan Academy after being exposed to messages that praise their tenacity and grit 意志力and that underscore that the brain is like a muscle.

The Internet is a dream for someone with a growth mindset. Between Khan Academy, MOOCs網路開放學程(MOOCs, Massive Open Online Course 之縮寫), and others, there is unprecedented access to endless content to help you grow your mind. However, society isn’t going to fully take advantage of this without growth mindsets being more prevalent. So what if we actively tried to change that? What if we began using whatever means are at our disposal 竭盡所能使用手邊所有的方法與資源to start performing growth mindset interventions on everyone we cared about? This is much bigger than Khan Academy or algebra代數 — it applies to how you communicate with your children, how you manage your team at work, how you learn a new language or instrument. If society as a whole begins to embrace the struggle of learning, there is no end to what that could mean for global human potential.

And now here’s a surprise for you. By reading this article itself, you’ve just undergone the first half of a growth­-mindset intervention. The research shows that just being exposed to the research itself (­­for example, knowing that the brain grows most by getting questions wrong, not right­­) can begin to change a person’s mindset. The second half of the intervention is for you to communicate the research with others. We’ve made a video (above) that celebrates the struggle of learning that will help you do this. After all, when my son, or anyone else asks me about learning, I only want them to know one thing. As long as they embrace struggle and mistakes, they can learn anything.