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Gene Ellis

What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ret-to-success-is-failure.html

Duckworth

shared by Gene Ellis on 15 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In the winter of 2005, Randolph read “Learned Optimism,” a book by Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who helped establish the Positive Psychology movement.
  • Seligman and Peterson consulted works from Aristotle to Confucius, from the Upanishads to the Torah, from the Boy Scout Handbook to profiles of Pokémon characters, and they settled on 24 character strengths common to all cultures and eras. The list included some we think of as traditional noble traits, like bravery, citizenship, fairness, wisdom and integrity; others that veer into the emotional realm, like love, humor, zest and appreciation of beauty; and still others that are more concerned with day-to-day human interactions: social intelligence (the ability to recognize interpersonal dynamics and adapt quickly to different social situations), kindness, self-regulation, gratitude.
  • Six years after that first meeting, Levin and Randolph are trying to put this conception of character into action in their schools. In the process, they have found themselves wrestling with questions that have long confounded not just educators but anyone trying to nurture a thriving child or simply live a good life. What is good character? Is it really something that can be taught in a formal way, in the classroom, or is it the responsibility of the family, something that is inculcated gradually over years of experience? Which qualities matter most for a child trying to negotiate his way to a successful and autonomous adulthood? And are the answers to those questions the same in Harlem and in Riverdale?
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  • According to a report that KIPP issued last spring, only 33 percent of students who graduated from a KIPP middle school 10 or more years ago have graduated from a four-year college.
  • As Levin watched the progress of those KIPP alumni, he noticed something curious: the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.
  • “The thing that I think is great about the character-strength approach,” he told me, “is it is fundamentally devoid of value judgment.”
  • Duckworth’s early research showed that measures of self-control can be a more reliable predictor of students’ grade-point averages than their I.Q.’s.
  • People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit.”
  • Last winter, Riverdale students in the fifth and sixth grades took the 24-indicator survey, and their teachers rated them as well. The results were discussed by teachers and administrators, but they weren’t shared with students or parents, and they certainly weren’t labeled a “report card.”
  • Back at Riverdale, though, the idea of a character report card made Randolph nervous. “I have a philosophical issue with quantifying character,” he explained to me one afternoon. “With my school’s specific population, at least, as soon as you set up something like a report card, you’re going to have a bunch of people doing test prep for it. I don’t want to come up with a metric around character that could then be gamed. I would hate it if that’s where we ended up.”
  • She and her team of researchers gave middle-school students at Riverdale and KIPP a variety of psychological and I.Q. tests. They found that at both schools, I.Q. was the better predictor of scores on statewide achievement tests, but measures of self-control were more reliable indicators of report-card grades.
  • The CARE program falls firmly on the “moral character” side of the divide, while the seven strengths that Randolph and Levin have chosen for their schools lean much more heavily toward performance character: while they do have a moral component, strengths like zest, optimism, social intelligence and curiosity aren’t particularly heroic; they make you think of Steve Jobs or Bill Clinton more than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi.
  • The topic for the assembly was heroes, and a half-dozen students stood up in front of their classmates — about 350 kids, in all — and each made a brief presentation about a particular hero he or she had chosen:
  • I came to Witter’s class to observe something that Levin was calling “dual-purpose instruction,” the practice of deliberately working explicit talk about character strengths into every lesson.
  • It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we all know — on some level, at least — that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can.
  • The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph explained. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”
Gene Ellis

Optimism about an end to the euro crisis is wrong - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...9a-11e3-86ef-00144feab7de.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Adjustment is the key to ending the eurozone crisis. The optimists are saying that this process of regaining competitiveness is now taking place.
  • This judgment is profoundly wrong.
  • In other words, the eurozone is adjusting at the expense of the rest of the world.
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  • But while the eurozone is a fixed-currency regime internally, it is nothing of the sort externally. The currency does exactly what textbooks say it should: it keeps on rising, thus offsetting the improvements in the current account. Last week the euro rose to more than $1.38 against the dollar.
  • The main problem with the rise in the euro’s external value is that it makes the internal adjustment harder. The crisis countries need to lower their export prices but the higher value of the euro raises the prices of exports to outside the eurozone.
  • It essentially says internal adjustment is not really happening.
  • Second, the prices of Spanish tradeable goods would have to fall against those of non-Spanish tradeable goods elsewhere in the eurozone.
  • Put bluntly: the scale of necessary adjustment is absolutely enormous. The IMF does not believe that this is going to happen.
  • In a monetary union adjustment is hard without any transfers and without a fiscal union.
Gene Ellis

Dani Rodrik on the promise and peril of social-science models. - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...peril-of-social-science-models

shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • We have neither the mental capacity nor the understanding to decipher the full web of cause-and-effect relations in our social existence. So our daily behavior and reactions must be based on incomplete, and occasionally misleading, mental models.
  • Social scientists – and economists in particular – analyze the world using simple conceptual frameworks that they call “models.”
  • Useful social-science models are invariably simplifications. They leave out many details to focus on the most relevant aspect of a specific context.
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  • But, as inevitable as simplification is for explanation, it is also a trap
  • Unfortunately, economists and other social scientists get virtually no training in how to choose among alternative models. Neither is such an aptitude professionally rewarded. Developing new theories and empirical tests is regarded as science, while the exercise of good judgment is clearly a craft.
  • The philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished between two styles of thinking, which he identified with the hedgehog and the fox. The hedgehog is captivated by a single big idea, which he applies unremittingly. The fox, by contrast, lacks a grand vision and holds many different views about the world – some of them even contradictory.
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