On My Mind: Outliers

I've said some of this before, but you know I'm on vacation when I:

• write on our blog
• exercise!
• read!
• respond to anyone on facebook

Spring Break is this coming week, so you'll hear from me!

Taylor's brother Ryan was in town for a few days. Those boys stayed up till 1 or 2 each night playing games! I'm not much of a game person (though I do like "Guillotine", which was among their games), so while they played I read. I finished Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: The Story of Success. His most basic argument is that success is due not only to hard work, ambition, and intelligence; it is also inextricably tied up with family, birthplace, and even birth date. Those things open the doors and give the opportunities that make the difference between Chris Langdon, perhaps the smartest man in the world -- yet one whose impoverished background and a series of unlucky incidents denied him the chance to flourish to his highest potential -- and Robert Oppenheim. Langdon is smarter than Oppenheim, but doors were closed in his face repeatedly, whereas Oppenheim had the background and charisma and luck to have doors opened (and major infractions, such as trying to poison his tutor!! ignored).

To make his cultural argument, Gladwell asserts that the very agricultural system of rice paddies is one of the reasons for Asian success (not some genetic predisposition for math). Unlike our Western wheat and corn-based agriculture, where fields mush lie fallow (this fact influenced our very idea of how "much" kids can learn at a time!), rice has 2-3 growing periods in a year and a very short winter season. You don't turn to fancier equipment and bigger fields to increase your rice cultivation (the population squeeze makes that impossible). You weed more meticulously, cultivate a better fertilizer, watch the level of water more carefully.

These traits are vitally important to success. Gladwell discusses the TIMSS, a test taken to compare the educational achievement of one country with another. Interesting: Students must also fill out a questionnaire beforehand -- one with 120 questions! It's so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank. Researchers realized that the "countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job solving the math problems" (italics mine). In other words, what is more important to success on this test? Math mathematical ability, or the ability to concentrate and focus and endure? I have a student right now who is pretty bright but who simply fills in the bubbles randomly -- he's unwilling to concentrate and focus on the task. I have many students for whom diligence is the bigger problem than brains when it comes to their success (or lack of it).

Another study Gladwell cited really made me think. I teach school, and sometimes I'm so worn out by spring that I rejoice in summer. (And I spend the first month just catching up on errands that have accumulated over 10 months! Such is Spring Break, too!) But research shows that the main reason lower class kids are falling behind high and middle class kids is NOT because the schools are failing them. It's because of what happens (or does not happen!) during the summer.

The test scores of lower and middle class kids actually rise at a faster rate than those of upper class kids during the school year. But if you compare June scores to those the next September, you find that lower class kids's scores have dropped, whereas upper class kids' scores have risen over the summer. Clearly, upper class kids are given enrichment outside of school that lower class kids are not getting. (This came up in a NYT article I read later, too.)

This is validation as a teacher. Teachers and schools are blamed for students' achievement. For the most part, however, what makes the difference is the opportunities their parents are giving them.

Anyway. I could go on forever when I've read an interesting book. In any case, I recommend this one! You can also see his website on it.