​Most parents learn to correlate their children’s intelligence with the amount of appraisal received on behave of their professors and teachers. In elementary school, awards of all types help validate and expose a child’s talents. Coming into high school, my parents had grown accustom to honor roll awards, perfect attendance, advanced state test scores, and even transferring me to a Jr. High outside of my home district, so that I could attend a school with a specialized math and science program called GEMS. So imagine my parents surprise when in High School an entire year went by without receiving any awards. At the parent teacher conference my parents rushed to interrogate teachers and see what had happened to their star student. It was only through their explanation that my parents understood that in high school awards aren’t given on the regular and that my performance as a student was as it always had been, excellent.