good thing I never got too much praise as a kid

Okay, sarcasm. It gets me every time.

But seriously, folks, here's an intriguing article about the effects of different types of praise on kids. Praising a kid's intelligence, it seems, renders them less likely to put forth any effort because intelligence is something we either have or we don't. But praising a kid's effort makes them far more willing to try, try again, to believe that this effort thing is valuable. The implications of this piece for the work we do as writing teachers are huge, not the least of which being our understanding of why some students cheat. "Students turn to cheating because they haven't developed a strategy for handling failure. The problem is compounded when a parent ignores a child's failures and insists he'll [sic] do better next time... A child deprived of the opportunity to discuss mistakes can't learn from them."

Even better, think about this in the context of grade inflation: "teens, Meyer found, discounted praise to such an extent that they believed it's a teacher's criticism--not praise at all--that really conveys a positive belief in a student's aptitude."

A friend once told me that she remembers thinking, as a college student who'd gotten back a paper with quite a bit of criticism, that she respected her teacher for respecting her enough to teach her.

A big part of the reason I'm blogging this piece, of course, is that it affirms all of my own experiences, affirmation being akin, of course, to praise.