All my kids are extremely smart (if I do say so myself), and they've grown up hearing that (1) intelligence is merely a convenience, not a virtue; and (2) persistence is a far more valuable trait for reaching one's goals.
A psychology professor once told us about an experiment to correlate IQ with school grades. Teachers were provided with the IQs at the start of the term, and it was believed that children with (apparently) high IQs were treated differently. He said that in one class, the teachers were provided with locker numbers instead of IQs (they happened to range from 100 to 130) and at the end of the term, locker numbers correlated highly with grades received. Maybe this is a 1965 version of fake news, but I kind of hope it's true.
IQ calculation is fun, but like your zodiac sign, can be explained to fit whatever you want it to. Poor grades? Because you have a low IQ.... or because you have such a high IQ that you're bored. High grades? Because you have a high IQ....or because you work hard in spite of your low IQ. And then there's the question of whether or not grades are actually predictors of success. I think this is one piece of our everlasting quest to figure out the recipe.
When our firstborn was in kindergarten, she'd already been reading for 3 years, and was quite bored, so the school gave her an IQ test to see if maybe she should be moved to 1st grade. The version of the Stanford-Binet had 20 questions, each worth ten IQ points. She got 19 right. Of course we wanted to know which one she had missed. It was this: "Mr. and Mrs. Smith and their children went on a picnic. An animal came by, and the Smiths had to burn their clothes. What happened?" We asked our daughter what her mental processes were. She said, "Well it couldn't have been a skunk, because they would just have had to boil their clothes in tomato soup." 5-year-old outsmarts Stanford-Binet!
Another question on that test was, "Every morning I leave my house and walk one mile uphill to work. Every evening I leave my office and walk one mile uphill to home. What do you think about that?" When my cousin Ezra took the test, he said nothing and just stared at the test-giver. Later, his mother, who was present, said to him "Why didn't you say anything?" Ezra replied, "What could I say? The guy was obviously crazy."
