Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Nine out of 10 Americans agree on a few things, according to pollsters, reports AP. Nearly all believe in God, country and teaching sex education in public schools. More than 90 percent:
—admire those who get rich by working hard.
—think society should ensure everyone has equal opportunity to succeed.
—think it’s important to get more than a high school education.
Americans also believe it’s their duty to always vote, though voter turnout doesn’t reflect that.
Educators are focusing more on perspiration than inspiration these days, looking for ways to teach determination, resilience and grit.
Can technology teach grit? asks Anya Kamenetz. A new U.S.Department of Education report touts the potential of new technologies to provide optimal challenge (not too easy or hard), “promote academic mindsets, teach learning strategies, promote the development of effortful control, and provide motivating environments.”
Some of these tech tools and applications attempt to teach strategies like mindfulness (including meditation), metacognition (knowing about knowing), and growth mindset (the belief that one can change one’s own abilities by working harder.)
Penn psychologist Angela Duckworth believes grit is “more essential to academic achievement” than intelligence, writes Kamenetz.
. . . while teaching 7th-grade math . . . she noticed that some of her strongest performers weren’t necessarily the smartest kids, and some of the smartest kids weren’t necessarily doing that well.
“I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn, if they worked hard and long enough,” she said. “ I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational and psychological perspective.”
When I was in fourth grade, my teacher told my parents I wasn’t quick in learning math, but I sunk my teeth in like a “bulldog” and held on till I got it. I scored a gritty 4.5 on Duckworth’s eight-question grit quiz.
Does confidence really breed success? “What’s really become prevalent over the last two decades is the idea that being highly self-confident – loving yourself, believing in yourself – is the key to success,” says psychologist Jean Twenge. ”Now the interesting thing about that belief is it’s widely held, it’s very deeply held, and it’s also untrue.”
About nine million young people have filled out the American Freshman Survey, since it began in 1966.
It asks students to rate how they measure up to their peers in a number of basic skills areas – and over the past four decades, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of students who describe themselves as being “above average” for academic ability, drive to achieve, mathematical ability and self-confidence.
More students say they’re gifted in writing ability, yet test scores show writing ability has gone down since the 1960s, says Twenge.
And while in the late 1980s, almost half of students said they studied for six or more hours a week, the figure was little over a third by 2009 – a fact that sits rather oddly, given there has been a rise in students’ self-proclaimed drive to succeed during the same period.
Self-esteem doesn’t lead to success, says Roy Baumeister, a Florida State professor who’s studied the topic for years. ”Self-control is much more powerful and well-supported as a cause of personal success,” he says.
In one study, university students who’d earned C, D and F grades “received encouragement aimed at boosting their self-worth.” They did worse than students with similar grades whose self-esteem had been left alone. ”An intervention that encourages [students] to feel good about themselves, regardless of work, may remove the reason to work hard,” writes Baumeister.
France’s president, Francois Hollande, wants to ban homework because some children get more help from their parents than others. Is this The End of Homework? asks Louis Menand in The New Yorker.
It’s not true that homework is just “busywork, with no effect on academic achievement,” writes Menand.
According to the leading authority in the field, Harris Cooper, of Duke University, homework correlates positively—although the effect is not large—with success in school. Professor Cooper says that this is more true in middle school and high school than in primary school, since younger children get distracted more easily. He also thinks that there is such a thing as homework overload—he recommends no more than ten minutes per grade a night. But his conclusion that homework matters is based on a synthesis of forty years’ worth of research.
U.S. students aren’t doing more homework than they were in the 1940′s, according to researchers. A majority of students, including high-school seniors, spend less than an hour a day on homework during the school week.
Finland has the most successful educational system in the world, according to The Economist, writes Gill. ”Students there are assigned virtually no homework; they don’t start school until age seven; and the school day is short.”
The No. 2 country is South Korea, “whose schools are notorious for their backbreaking rigidity.” South Korean kids don’t just do homework: 90 percent study with private tutors or go to cram schools.
Yet both systems are successful, and the reason is that Finnish schools are doing what Finns want them to do, which is to bring everyone up to the same level and instill a commitment to equality, and South Korean schools are doing what South Koreans want, which is to enable hard workers to get ahead.
Americans “want everyone to have an equal chance to become better-off than everyone else,” writes Menand.
Supporters of homework say that it’s a way of getting parents involved in their children’s education by bringing school into the home, and that has to be a good thing. But it’s also likely (contrary to President Hollande’s assumption) that the people most hostile to homework are affluent parents who want their children to spend their after-school time taking violin lessons and going to Tae Kwon Do classes—activities that are more enriching and (often) more fun than conjugating irregular verbs. Less affluent parents are likely to prefer more homework as a way of keeping their kids off the streets. If we provided after-school music lessons, museum trips, and cool sports programs to poor children, we could abolish homework in a French minute. No one would miss it.
Homework isn’t the root of all evil, but it’s often counter-productive, writes Peter DeWitt, an elementary school principal, in Ed Week.
If we really want students to be engaged with learning, we should allow them the autonomy to self-explore at home one their own and not give them death by ditto because it makes us feel better about the assignments we provide.
DeWitt quotes teacher Mark Barnes, who thinks homework “fails our students.” Assigning homework “is undermining effective 21st-century teaching and learning,” writes Barnes. “Most teachers link homework to grades so the students who don’t do homework don’t learn the material — mainly because not enough teaching is being done in class — and many would-be learners grow to hate school because they wind up with poor grades and, ultimately, feel like failures.”
A Marxist slogan popular in my college days — Dare to struggle, dare to win! — applies to education, according to an NPR story. Struggling in school is seen as a problem in the U.S., but not in Asia.
“I think that from very early ages we [in America] see struggle as an indicator that you’re just not very smart,” Stigler says. “It’s a sign of low ability — people who are smart don’t struggle, they just naturally get it, that’s our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity.”
In Eastern cultures, Stigler says, it’s just assumed that struggle is a predictable part of the learning process. . . . struggling becomes a chance to show that you, the student, have what it takes emotionally to resolve the problem by persisting through that struggle.
In a study, Stigler asked first-grade students to solve an impossible math problem to see how long they’d struggle with it. In the U.S., the average was less than 30 seconds. The Japanese students worked for an hour, until researchers told them to stop.
U.S. teachers should teach students to struggle, Stigler believes.
. . . in the Japanese classrooms that he’s studied, teachers consciously design tasks that are slightly beyond the capabilities of the students they teach, so the students can actually experience struggling with something just outside their reach. Then, once the task is mastered, the teachers actively point out that the student was able to accomplish it through the students hard work and struggle.
“And I just think that especially in schools, we don’t create enough of those experiences, and then we don’t point them out clearly enough.”
Getting parents to change their beliefs about learning will be difficult. Americans try to build their children’s confidence by telling them they’re smart or talented. ”As soon as they encounter a something that’s difficult for them to do, that confidence evaporates,” says psychologist Carol Dweck. Praising the struggle – ”Boy, you worked on that a long time and you really learned how to do it” — gives children the confidence to cope with difficulties.
Admission to New York City’s elite high schools is by test score only. Asian-Americans, who make up 14 percent of public school students, qualify for a majority of seats, reports the New York Times in Asians’ Success in High School Admissions Tests Seen as Issue by Some..
Civil rights groups complain low-income families can’t afford test prep. The city started free test prep programs for blacks and Hispanics, but was forced to open them to all students. Now 43 percent of participants come from Asian families.
Ting Shi, whose immigrant parents work long hours in a laundromat, used free test prep to qualify for Stuyvesant, the most elite high school. It’s 72 percent Asian, only 4 percent black and Hispanic.
In Asia, tests are “viewed not so much as measures of intelligence, but of industriousness,” students tell the Times.
Most of our parents don’t believe in ‘gifted,’ ” said Riyan Iqbal, 15, the son of Bangladeshi immigrants, as he and his friends — of Bengali, Korean and Indian descent — meandered toward the subway from the Bronx High School of Science one recent afternoon. “It’s all about hard work.”
No student, they said, was off the hook. Riyan, the son of a taxi driver and a Duane Reade cashier, and his schoolmates said their parents routinely plied them with motivational tales about the trials they endured back home, walking to school barefoot, struggling with hunger, being set back by floods and political unrest. “You try to make up for their hardships,” Riyan said.
Story ends with Emmie Cheng, a Cambodian emigre, who runs a shoe importing company. She spent $2,000 this year on tutoring programs and prep classes for her daughter Kassidi.
Cheng’s “father and four brothers died of starvation during Cambodia’s civil war.” In the U.S., her mother worked in a garment factory. “This is the easy part,” Cheng said.
Pushing black students to earn science and engineering degrees has been a priority for Freeman Hrabowski (black guy with Polish ancestor), who’s run University of Maryland Baltimore County for 20 years, reports the Baltimore Sun. I was struck by the account of Hrabowski’s talk to predominantly low-income, black and Hispanic eighth graders at a Maryland middle school.
For their part, the kids appear distracted or sleepy. So Hrabowski attacks. “How many of you are smart?” he begins. A few hands tentatively go up. “All right, tell me your name and tell me what you want to be when you grow up,” he says.
. . . Slowly but surely, his energy transfers to the students. Hands raise more quickly. Thoughts come out more forcefully. “How many of you study at home at night?” he asks. Only two hands go up. “Now there’s the issue,” he says. “I guarantee the people who study are going to be successful. Nothing can replace hard work.”
Only two students study at home? Is it uncool to admit to doing homework? Or are they really that lazy?
He offers $50 for the first person to solve a math problem, but threatens to charge $5 for a wrong answer. (Of 29 students, 20 have a dog and 15 a cat. How many have both?)
“You need to be pumped all the time,” Hrabowski tells the students.
When I go to South Africa or Asia, they say, ‘Bring it on.’ They’re focused. They’re hungry for it. How are you gonna be the best if you can’t match that?”
As a young black kid, he says, he yearned to show a dubious world he was as smart as anybody. To this day, he works 80 to 90 hours and reads three books in a typical week. “That’s what it takes to be the best,” he says.
Nobody gets the right answer, but Hrabowski forgives the $5 debts, reports the Sun. ( I think it’s a range from six to 15. Is that right?)
He gets them on their feet and leads them through one of his favorite refrains: “Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes destiny.”
Three students, all black boys, walk him to his car. He chastens them one more time about their study habits. “Rich kids work hard,” he says. “Most black kids aren’t working hard enough.”
Philanthropist Robert Meyerhoff “was struck by Hrabowski’s absolute faith that black men could thrive at the highest levels of academia if held to high enough standards from the start of college,” reports the Sun. With Meyerhoff’s money, UMBC recruits students of all races aiming for doctoral studies in science or engineering.
How many college borrowers are “underwater” on their student loans?
“Part of the American dream is that if you work hard, and you get an education and you apply yourself, you’ll be successful,” a Rutgers researcher tells NPR. A third of young college graduates don’t believe this any more.
It’s great if children “love learning,” but it’s not a goal, writes Mark Bauerlein on Brainstorm. In his State of the Union speech, President Obama called for parents to instill a love of learning — and to push “hard work and discipline” and achievement in math and science. Not all kids are going to love it.
How many conscientious, education-conscious parents who limit TV time and monitor homework end up with children who declare, “I hate math!”? Furthermore, if the “love of learning” message is explicit, young children may extend it into a new and damaging corollary: “If I don’t like it, it isn’t worth learning.” (I’ve heard this termed the “Sesame Street effect.”) That is, an absence of love turns into a justification for blowing off homework.
In addition to excess sentimentality, “love of learning” is too abstract, Bauerlein argues.
. . . children don’t love learning per se. They love history and stories and cell biology. They want to know about what happened at Little Round Top, or to find out how Odysseus escapes from Polyphemus, or observe a cell divide. In fact, the same student might love to collect and classify tree leaves and hate to read a poem. . . . In emphasizing love of learning, the process of education, we under-appreciate the specific content that inspires the feeling. We should, instead, urge parents to instill a love of numbers and words and ideas and natural things . . .
Parents should tell children that learning is important, not necessarily lovable, Bauerlein concludes.
President Obama’s back-to-school speech contained blatant lies, writes Ann Althouse, who objects to telling kids that “nobody gets to write your destiny but you,” and that “nothing — absolutely nothing — is beyond your reach, so long as you’re willing to dream big, so long as you’re willing to work hard.”
If you believe that, you are so dumb that your chances of controlling your own destiny are especially small. But it’s absurd to tell kids that if only they dream big, work hard, and get an education, they can have anything they want. Do you know what kind of dream job kids today have? A recent Marist poll showed that 32% would like to be an actor/actress. 29% want to be a professional athlete. 13% want to be President of the United States. That’s not going to happen.
Even young people with more modest dreams — like getting a decent law job after getting good grades at an excellent law school — are not getting what they want.
Obama doesn’t really believe this or “he’d be all about reducing the role of government and unleashing private enterprise,” Althouse writes. He doesn’t look at a poor person and “his life is what he made it.”
OK, it’s hyperbole to say you can do absolutely anything if you put your mind to it and you can all grow up to be Lady Gaga. (This is my only pop culture reference.) But people who think they can control their destiny do a lot better in life than people who think that what they do doesn’t make a difference. A sense of self-efficacy is very powerful. If you think hard work will improve your life, you’ll work harder and improve your life.
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