meh, i believe in mind over matter. i believe in self confidence.
someone is told that they scored high on an IQ exam, then i think that person will one day have a very high intelligence quotient, if by sheer will.
I believe that, too. My wife is an example. She has dyslexia, but no one knew it and was constantly told that she just couldn't do well in school. She even had two different teachers tell her to give up on going to college, since she's just not going to make it. Guess what - she's also stubborn as a fence post and went to college for over two years, although didn't finish - after she learned about dyslexia, she dropped out and got a job doing what she liked to do. She is extremely intelligent, but had trouble with lessons, reading, (I don't have to tell you) and taking tests. When I met her, she was twenty six and just starting to realize that she wasn't as stupid as she had always been told, but see - it took years for her to get over the negative responses she had suffered, coming from every direction, even from teachers.
A similar thing happened to my husband, who also has dyslexia, DirtDawg. His mother would literally cry while she tried to help him with his spelling words and she became convinced school was just too difficult for him. She advised him to go to truck-driving school because he likes to drive and because she was convinced that he would never make it in university. He always said, "No, Mom, I'm getting a Ph. D. like my Dad."
He was even more stubborn than your wife and despite some really good grades in college mixed with some truly awful grades as an undergraduate, he applied to graduate school in Mathematics. At first he was rejected because of his GPA, so he appealed and was admitted, provisionally. He was told that he was
the person with the lowest undergraduate GPA ever admitted to graduate school at that university. The reason why they admitted him was because he had extremely high grades in all the Mathematics classes he would need to satisfy a Master's degree, which he had already taken as an undergraduate, and he also had some stellar letters of recommendation from many of the professors in the Mathematics department. He earned his Master's degree in Mathematics in near record time. This included writing an original mathematical proof in his Master's thesis.
He has earned a Ph. D. now and of course he is a gifted mathematician. He is brilliant. I have tried to help him learn to spell some of the words he uses most often and he has learned to spell some of them. While of course he always uses a spell checker, I still proofread all the important documents that he writes because spell checkers can make mistakes.
