How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough Page B
Authors: Paul Tough
Ads: Link
agility. They were the students who were able to recover from bad grades and resolve to do better next time; who could bounce back from unhappy breakups or fights with their parents; who could persuade professors to give them extra help after class; who could resist the urge to go out to the movies and instead stay home and study. Those traits weren’t enough by themselves to earn a student a BA, Levin knew. But for young people without the benefit of a lot of family resources, without the kind of safety net that their wealthier peers enjoyed, these characteristics proved to be an indispensable part of making it to college graduation day.
The qualities that Levin was noticing in his college graduates overlapped considerably with the set of abilities that James Heckman and other economists had identified as noncognitive skills. But Levin liked to use a different term: character strengths. Since KIPP’s beginnings, in a middle-school classroom in Houston in the early 1990s, Levin and KIPP’s cofounder, Michael Feinberg, had explicitly set out to provide students with lessons in character as well as academics. They filled the walls with slogans like “Work Hard” and “Be Nice” and “There Are No Shortcuts,” and they developed a system of rewards and demerits designed to instruct their students in not only fractions and algebra but also teamwork and empathy and perseverance. At KIPP Academy, kids wore T-shirts with the slogan “One School. One Mission. Two Skills. Academics and Character.”
Levin and Feinberg originally came to Houston as part of the third Teach for America cohort; they were brand-new Ivy League graduates and relatively clueless teachers. Early on, they borrowed academic tricks and tactics from innovative educators they met, especially a woman named Harriett Ball, a veteran teacher down the hall from Levin’s classroom whose chants, songs, and drills made it easier to teach every academic subject, from multiplication tables to Shakespeare. But when it came to teaching character, Levin told me, he and Feinberg found no equivalent mentor. The absence of any established structure for teaching character, or even talking about it, meant that each year, the discussions at KIPP schools would start from scratch, with teachers and administrators debating anew which values and behaviors they were trying to nurture in their students, and why, and how.
In the winter of 2002, as the first KIPP Academy graduates were making their way through high school, Levin’s brother, a money manager, gave him Learned Optimism, a book by Martin Seligman,a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Seligman is one of the main scholars behind the school of thought known as positive psychology, and the book, originally published in 1991, is the movement’s founding text, teaching that optimism is a learnable skill, not an inborn trait. Pessimistic adults and children can train themselves to be more hopeful, Seligman says, and if they do, they will likely become happier, healthier, and more successful. In Learned Optimism, Seligman wrote that for most people, depression was not an illness, as most psychologists believed, but simply a “severe low mood”that occurred “when we harbor pessimistic beliefs about the causes of our setbacks.” If you want to avoid depression and improve your life, Seligman counseled, you need to refashion your “explanatory style,” to create for yourself a better story about why good and bad things happen to you.
Pessimists, Seligman wrote, tend to react to negative events by explaining them as permanent, personal, and pervasive.(Seligman calls these “the three P’s.”) Failed a test? It’s not because you didn’t prepare well; it’s because you’re stupid. If you get turned down for a date, there’s no point in asking someone else; you’re simply unlovable. Optimists, by contrast, look for specific, limited, short-term explanations for bad events, and as a
The qualities that Levin was noticing in his college graduates overlapped considerably with the set of abilities that James Heckman and other economists had identified as noncognitive skills. But Levin liked to use a different term: character strengths. Since KIPP’s beginnings, in a middle-school classroom in Houston in the early 1990s, Levin and KIPP’s cofounder, Michael Feinberg, had explicitly set out to provide students with lessons in character as well as academics. They filled the walls with slogans like “Work Hard” and “Be Nice” and “There Are No Shortcuts,” and they developed a system of rewards and demerits designed to instruct their students in not only fractions and algebra but also teamwork and empathy and perseverance. At KIPP Academy, kids wore T-shirts with the slogan “One School. One Mission. Two Skills. Academics and Character.”
Levin and Feinberg originally came to Houston as part of the third Teach for America cohort; they were brand-new Ivy League graduates and relatively clueless teachers. Early on, they borrowed academic tricks and tactics from innovative educators they met, especially a woman named Harriett Ball, a veteran teacher down the hall from Levin’s classroom whose chants, songs, and drills made it easier to teach every academic subject, from multiplication tables to Shakespeare. But when it came to teaching character, Levin told me, he and Feinberg found no equivalent mentor. The absence of any established structure for teaching character, or even talking about it, meant that each year, the discussions at KIPP schools would start from scratch, with teachers and administrators debating anew which values and behaviors they were trying to nurture in their students, and why, and how.
In the winter of 2002, as the first KIPP Academy graduates were making their way through high school, Levin’s brother, a money manager, gave him Learned Optimism, a book by Martin Seligman,a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Seligman is one of the main scholars behind the school of thought known as positive psychology, and the book, originally published in 1991, is the movement’s founding text, teaching that optimism is a learnable skill, not an inborn trait. Pessimistic adults and children can train themselves to be more hopeful, Seligman says, and if they do, they will likely become happier, healthier, and more successful. In Learned Optimism, Seligman wrote that for most people, depression was not an illness, as most psychologists believed, but simply a “severe low mood”that occurred “when we harbor pessimistic beliefs about the causes of our setbacks.” If you want to avoid depression and improve your life, Seligman counseled, you need to refashion your “explanatory style,” to create for yourself a better story about why good and bad things happen to you.
Pessimists, Seligman wrote, tend to react to negative events by explaining them as permanent, personal, and pervasive.(Seligman calls these “the three P’s.”) Failed a test? It’s not because you didn’t prepare well; it’s because you’re stupid. If you get turned down for a date, there’s no point in asking someone else; you’re simply unlovable. Optimists, by contrast, look for specific, limited, short-term explanations for bad events, and as a
Similar Books
