Wrong Type of Praise?

This is awesome. My friend is in this video telling a little untruth to her daughter. From what I understand her children have ribbed her about it pretty hard. I wonder if she realized she was part of the experiment. I'm definitely taking this video into consideration on my parenting style. We recently had a very poor parent teacher conference. In less than fifteen minutes our son's teacher mentioned structured preschool three times. We are still a little unclear on if she was suggesting we should have put him in structure preschool or if she was suggesting we should pull him from school and put him in now. It was very discouraging. We came home and evaluated what she had said. With somethings we agree with her. He is shy and immature. This manifest itself in the fact that he doesn't sit perfectly in his chair at all times and is timid about projects. With some things we totally disagree. One frustrating aspect was the fact that she marked him incapable of doing things that we have proof that he does, which means he either does not do these things at school or she isn't spending enough time with him to actually see him do them. Also frustrating is to have a teacher prepping you for holding your child back at the end of the year when two months in he is already capable of doing all the things you were capable of doing at the end of a year of kindergarten. Thank you no child left behind legislation. We have conflicting views on how to deal with his "issues". She wants me to make home life more structured to match school and to push him to work more on his penmanship. I think that is nuts. I have been inspired by this tape though. I liked how the Hong Kong mom's responded to their children's bad test scores. They helped them find ways to learn the material so their children could do better. We are trying something similar at home and with very little effort are seeing big pay outs. We've started journal writing at home. Invest in some five cent notebooks and you are set. Friday night E spent a significant amount of time writing stories about making a pizza and checking a video out from the store...the two fun things we did that day. I'll also made some simple flash cards with scrapbook paper I never use. We've also been working on following directions and I've been working on stressing, "Good effort" versus "You are so smart." Because I do think he is so smart...but apparently that doesn't help a child to hear :)