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A slightly different take on Tough's Big Idea is voiced by Joe Nocera in today's New York Times:
Tough argues that simply teaching math and reading--the so-called cognitive skills--isn't nearly enough, especially for children who have grown up enduring the stresses of poverty. In fact, it might not even be the most important thing.Notice how quickly Nocera slips from the obvious--that teaching teach math and reading isn't nearly enough--to the ridiculous. To say that learning to read and do math might not be the most important elements of success is like saying that adequate food and shelter might not be the most important elements of staying alive (after all one must also breathe oxygen). When it come to essential elements, it's pointless to quibble over what's most important.
In interviews Tough is careful to admit that, while schools need to do more to encourage persistence and curiosity, there are no clear studies on how to do this. Refreshing though this caveat is, it, too, raises the question of what this book has to offer that's new and plausible, or at least useful.
There is one disturbing answer to that last question. To the careless reader who approaches the book from the perspective of the dominant educational paradigm, it offers yet another reason to water down academics in favor of "the whole child." The connections between grit and academic rigor, and between curiosity and well-taught academic subjects, should be as obvious as the inherent importance of grit is. Indeed, I'm guessing these connections are obvious to most people. But they clearly aren't obvious to many of those wielding the greatest power over whether or not our children succeed.
21 comments:
I'm not a huge KIPP fan, but what I thought they had proved was that toughness/high expectations *was* helping care for the whole child.
(I know that some people think that KIPP hasn't really proven anything because it self-selects for families who are interested and they can kick kids out.)
I can see how to encourage persistence (teaching problem solving to everyone, for example, and giving kids really hard problems that they haven't seen something exactly like before). I'm not sure how you teach curiosity. I think you can encourage curiosity by allowing time for and asking kids to wonder and notice. The problem is that it's all fake if it's not really something that the kids are interested in. And, no matter what you do, *all* the kids won't be inspired by the same things. So, the curiosity program can end up driving out curiosity and teaching kids to spout BS to please teachers.
it might not even be the most important thing.
I'm SO glad you wrote this. I read Nocera's column today and flipped over the same line.
"the most important thing"?
really?
Whatever happened to Necessary but not sufficient?
To say that learning to read and do math might not be the most important elements of success is like saying that adequate food and shelter might not be the most important elements of staying alive
LOVE IT!!!!!
btw, Morningside actively & accountably teaches the necessary noncognitive skills: SKILLS, not 'character' and not 'grit.'
They spend the whole first month of the school year teaching the kids how to manage their papers & their work & how to chart their own learning.
"Of course IQ means little if you don't apply yourself; of course intelligence leads nowhere interesting if you lack curiosity."
Actually, intelligence can get you a middle class (or better) lifestyle if you have other skills (including being really smart.
But ... I think the implicit model that Nocera (and maybe even Paul Tough) is pushing is flawed. They both seem to be looking for "the most important thing." I don't think that they should.
Imagine if success (in whatever you care about ... sports, business, life, school) is correlated with the area of a square. You have two axes for your square. One is intelligence and the other is 'hard work.'
Which axis is "most important"?
The question is flawed. A better question is: For a given amount of effort, which one should I be working on to make the most progress?
You may not be able to do much about your IQ, so working hard is what makes sense.
Now ... lets make this more realistic. What we *really* have is an N-dimensional trapasoidal prism with lots of axes:
*) Native smarts (IQ)
*) Working hard
*) Education
*) Personal charisma
*) Physical attractiveness
*) Knowledge of social norms
:
:
For some people (in, say, business), taking one more accounting class isn't going to be as useful as learning to dress well. The marginal gain for that next class is so small (and, in my example, they dress so poorly).
And note that businesses often encourage employees to join organizations like toastmasters ... even if they are in positions like engineering! You can get more and better work done if you can communicate well with a group.
What *IS* useful is identifying the axes that matter, figuring out which ones you can improve, and then figuring out the most "bang for the buck" AT A GIVEN TIME.
Which axis to tweak will probably change over time. As you get really good at something it becomes harder to get equivalent improvements with equivalent effort.
This doesn't really seem to be rocket science ...
-Mark Roulo
Eh. Based on the reviews, it has a pretty limited definition of "success" - a student is successful if they go to college. For the connection (or lack thereof) between IQ and success, that's been mined long ago in The Millionaire Next Door (among others).
For one thing, high IQ folks who do well in school tend to continue in school whether it makes sense or not -- we get used to summers off and the academic calendar, so the world outside of the academy is hard to imagine. Then too often we get annoyed that the world outside of the academy isn't as impressed by our credentials as they "should be."
I've actually read a review copy of Grit's book through Amazon Vine and I have to say that I really liked it. His whole point is that "character" is actually teachable skills. It sounds to me that there is actually a lot of overlap between the kind of things that Morningside is doing with its students and what Grit thinks will help students succeed.
He definitely does NOT argue in favor of watering down academics. The educational romantics would HATE the approach he calls for because it's very much old-school self-discipline and he bashes a lot of the self-esteem B.S. so in vogue.
Interesting, Crimson Wife. These things did not come across in the interviews I heard Tough give. Perhaps he doesn't want to alienate anyone on the air?
My biggest concern is about how he will be misread by those who don't read him carefully, or only hear or read *about* the book.
"Indeed, I'm guessing these connections are obvious to most people. But they clearly aren't obvious to many of those wielding the greatest power over whether or not our children succeed. "
Not only that, but "most people" don't know that they are not on the same wavelength as "those with power."
That is, many parents in my district have no clue about the changes in instruction and content that have taken place in the last 5-6 years in our district. They would assume that the administration still requires/believes in the same things they do -- learning basic skills, being taught a concept by a teacher, not just working in groups, etc.
"He definitely does NOT argue in favor of watering down academics. The educational romantics would HATE the approach he calls for because it's very much old-school self-discipline and he bashes a lot of the self-esteem B.S. so in vogue."
I'd still be very wary unless I had actually seen both the planned curriculum and seen it in action. Many things sound great, rigorous, and academic when being described to an educated audience. What happens in the classroom is often unrecognizable though!
The Millionaire Next Door
oh my gosh!
I loved that book----!
I don't remember the book talking about IQ, though...(not that it didn't --- I just remember all the frugal Scots wives sitting at their kitchen table clipping coupons...)
Absolutely.
I sometimes think that the entire category of "Columnist" should be abolished, unless we pass a law requiring columnists to write ONLY about fields they know.
We've got David Brooks and Tom Friedman writing awful stuff about education --- now Joe Nocera, too?
No!
Please!
Stop!
"The Millionaire Next Door
oh my gosh!
I loved that book----!"
I would have been more impressed with it if the authors had demonstrated that they understood compound interest.
But they don't.
As illustrated by their formula to determine if some of is an "Under Accumulator of Wealth" or a "Prodigious Accumulator of Wealth" or an "Average Accumulator of Wealth".
When I am dictator of the world, people who don't understand how compound interest works will not be permitted to write books on personal finance.
-Mark Roulo
"I sometimes think that the entire category of "Columnist" should be abolished, unless we pass a law requiring columnists to write ONLY about fields they know."
Amen. I think that the generalist column-writer has been rendered obsolete by blogs. With thousands of free uninformed voices on the internet, who needs columnists?
One of the follow-up books to the Millionaire Next Door has a hilarious treatment of high-end vodka. I quote a bit here:
http://xantippesblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/weekend-notes.html
"Not only that, but "most people" don't know that they are not on the same wavelength as "those with power.""
Back when my son was in first grade, I wrote to a few people on our school committee and told them that they should hand out Hirsch's books ("What your First (Second, Third,...) Grader needs to know") to all parents and tell them that that is NOT the education their child will receive. I never heard back from them.
When he was in fifth grade, it got to the point where the school had to have a parent/teacher meeting about Everyday Math; how it did not seem to get the job done; how it did not ensure mastery of the basics for many. The discussion remained at a high level and most talked about the importance of balance. Nobody talked about why bright kids were still adding 7+8 using their fingers in fifth grade. Nobody asked what some parents were doing at home.
It seems that many people can't handle details. They start at the top and look for "the" problem. I don't know why that is. Does it relate to a writer trying to find a "hook"? They've taught this to my son. "Find the hook" and build your writing around that. I don't like that. It makes him less scientific. The writing becomes more important than the facts. Reality is distorted to fit the hook.
Even in the 5 paragraph opinion essays he has to write, he has to take a position. You can't say maybe yes and maybe no. You can try to restate the question, but you might lose your hook and/or flunk.
Of course, some have their philosophical assumptions and then only see the reality that reinforces them. "Research shows" is a classic approach. Our schools implemented full inclusion and differentiated instruction first and have been trying to justify them ever since. When questioned by others, they demand the research proof they didn't need when they made the original decision.
They push critical thinking but ...
"It seems that many people can't handle details. They start at the top and look for "the" problem. I don't know why that is. "
Yes! And when they find what they determine to be "the" problem, they find "the" solution and require it to be used in every situation, whether or not it fits.
6th grade students are struggling with X. So, we're going to reconfigure Kindergarten on up to address this. My older children were writing stories -- beginning, middle, end little stories -- in kindergarten. They'd tell them to their teachers and illustrate them. They could tell you about cause and effect in their own story and begin to see how other stories were built and try it out.
My younger child got to kindergarten after the new curriculum was introduced. He didn't write stories. He got to write "non-fiction" in this exact format:
I like cats.
FIRST, they are ______ (fluffy).
NEXT, they are ______ (cuddly).
LAST, I like to pet them.
CLEARLY, cats are the best pet.
Kids were made to fit anything and everything into this format. In later grades, you'd add one more sentence after each line. Every paper had those capitalized words (or one of the others offered -- many used Clearly you can see or Clearly I have shown).
Now, you can see how they got to this format, you can understand why they wanted to teach something like this. But in the end, they removed everything except writing like this from the school day.
I find most kids in middle and high school now STILL using short and stupid sentences after first, next, then, last/finally, clearly as their ONLY structure for writing. Not surprisingly, one very rarely sees an interesting turn of phrase, let alone something readable. And they hate writing.
Sigh
"I sometimes think that the entire category of "Columnist" should be abolished, unless we pass a law requiring columnists to write ONLY about fields they know."
Combine this with the Murray Gell-Mann amnesia effect, and it's time to just walk away from the other columnists, too.
Even in the 5 paragraph opinion essays he has to write, he has to take a position. You can't say maybe yes and maybe no. You can try to restate the question, but you might lose your hook and/or flunk.
Bingo! This is why SAT reading is so foreign to most kids. A while back, Catherine posted a link to an article that compared twelfth graders' writing to that of professional writers. One of the biggest differences found was that the professional writers' writing was filled with statements of concession (although, admittedly, granted, etc.) while the twelfth graders' writing had almost none. If kids are taught to think in black and white, it never occurs to them that adult authors might spend a lot of time discussing ideas they *don't* agree with and that it's possible to agree with some parts of an idea and reject others. That's why Passage 1/Passage 2 absolutely kills kids on the SAT: when the authors clearly disagree, at least a question or two will usually ask what they agree on. Kids aren't used to thinking that way because they've been taught that it's either one or the other.
"It seems that many people can't handle details. They start at the top and look for 'the' problem. I don't know why that is."
I went to a picnic over the weekend for families of members of my son's basketball league, many of whom have or had kids in the middle school my son just entered. They told me that my son's algebra teacher is well known for not teaching much of anything all year long. She has them doing magic square puzzles, which was a second grade Singapore Math exercise. A lot of her students will have to repeat algebra. Parents have been trying to get rid of her for years, apparently, to no avail. She's shielded by the union.
And then there's my son's new "science" teacher, whose idea of teaching science has been, so far, to have the students draw pictures of themselves looking like scientists. "Color the whole page. If there's any white left on the page, you lose points!" While his Asian cousins learn about matter, energy, forces...my son learns how to turn white paper into non-white paper, one sheet at a time, with colored pencils.
I couldn't take it. I blurted out, "What is wrong with these people? Why don't they stop wasting time and teach these subjects?"
The thought suddenly occurred to me that I ought to know the answer by now. Was my question just rhetorical? No, for a moment there, I was starting over again from scratch, wailing about the absurdity, and looking for "the problem," so I could just go and fix it. Yeah, I should get right on that....
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