Struggle For Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning : Shots - Health ... - 1 views
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In 1979, when Jim Stigler was still a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he went to Japan to research teaching methods and found himself sitting in the back row of a crowded fourth grade math class.
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and one kid was just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed, so the teacher said to him, 'Why don't you go put yours on the board?' So right there I thought, 'That's interesting! He took the one who can't do it and told him to go and put it on the board.'"
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the kid didn't break into tears. Stigler says the child continued to draw his cube with equanimity. "And at the end of the class, he did make his cube look right! And the teacher said to the class, 'How does that look, class?' And they all looked up and said, 'He did it!' And they broke into applause." The kid smiled a huge smile and sat down, clearly proud of himself.
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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."
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For the most part in American culture, intellectual struggle in schoolchildren is seen as an indicator of weakness, while in Eastern cultures it is not only tolerated, it is often used to measure emotional strength.
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to understand why these two cultures view struggle so differently, it's good to step back and examine how they think about where academic excellence comes from.
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American mother is communicating to her son that the cause of his success in school is his intelligence. He's smart — which, Li says, is a common American view.
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children are not creative. Our children do not have individuality. They're just robots. You hear the educators from Asian countries express that concern, a
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"So the focus is on the process of persisting through it despite the challenges, not giving up, and that's what leads to success," Li says.
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Obviously if struggle indicates weakness — a lack of intelligence — it makes you feel bad, and so you're less likely to put up with it. But if struggle indicates strength — an ability to face down the challenges that inevitably occur when you are trying to learn something — you're more willing to accept it.
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American students "worked on it less than 30 seconds on average and then they basically looked at us and said, 'We haven't had this,'" he says.
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Westerns tend to worry that their kids won't be able to compete against Asian kids who excel in many areas but especially in math and science. Jin Li says that educators from Asian countries have their own set of worries.
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"The idea of intelligence in believed in the West as a cause," Li explains. "She is telling him that there is something in him, in his mind, that enables him to do what he does."
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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.