The (Inverse) Power of Praise

There is much truth in New York Magazine's observations. Teachers are constantly reminded that praise must be appropriate. I have seen a boy who's IQ measured 141 ("genius" by both North American and UK standards) fail to produce the work required. But I am not convinced that this was totally the function of a superiority complex; there were visual anomalies and differences in perception that could have accounted for his lack of performance. He also had directional problems and was totally double-jointed. A talented gymnast.
As a "Special Educator" who has worked at both ends of the "intelligence spectrum", I have seen much more damage done by telling the underachieving child that he is "stupid" or "lazy". School systems just aren't keeping up with information now being uncovered by scientists re how neurologically different we each really are. In articles on the Learning Disabilities Resource Community website a few years ago, I identified three indicators of learning differences that I had consistently found over 40 years of experience - including 10 in International postings, the last three of which were in China. The traits common to children with "learning differences" seemed to be closely linked to lateral dominance issues, eye function, and... double jointedness. Work is being done that validates the first two of these conditions. No one has yet looked at "hyper-mobility" ("double-jointedness") of joints, although Occupational Therapists recognize that the child whose muscles are too tight or too loose, may have difficulty handling writing tools. Additionally, one London specialist suggests that looseness of muscles in other parts of the body, may signal possible looseness of eye muscles, making it more difficult for a child to maintain the binocular frontal focus required for tracking lines of print.
The human being is a very complicated machine. Given what fMRI's are revealing about the variability within the brain, educators should be very careful about labeling children at all. In my own educational practice, I find that talking about brain differences - even with very young children - helps them to accept others and themselves.
There seems to be enough scientific evidence already to suggest that we forget the old two-dimensional "smart-dumb" model, and begin to think of that "bell curve" in three dimesional terms, with an infinite number of individual skills scattered around its rim. The child whose brain has to use five times the capacity to complete a language task is actually working harder than the "gifted" child. Who deserves praise?
Perhaps it's time to re-think this whole "schooling" thing...