p. 10 Amazing:
In the late 1980s, around the same time that the Raging Rooks were learning chess in Harlem, the state of Tennessee launched a bold experiment. At 79 schools - many of which were low income - they randomly assigned over 11,000 students to different classrooms in kindergarten through third grade. The original goal was to test whether smaller classes were better for learning. But an economist named Raj Chetty realized that since both students and teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms, he could go back to the data to analyze whether other features of classrooms made a difference.
Chetty is one of the world's most influential economists. He's the winner of the MacArthur genius grant. And his research suggests that excellence depends less on our natural talents than we might expect.
The Tennessee experiment contained a starling result. Chetty was able to predict the success that students achieved as adults simply by looking at who taught their kindergarten class. By age 25, students who happened to have had more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers.
Chetty and his colleagues calculated that moving from an inexperienced kindergarten teacher to an experienced one would add over $1000 to each student's annual income in their twenties. For a class of 20 students, an above-average kindergarten teacher could be worth additional lifetime income of $321,000.
Kindergarten matters in many ways, but I never would have expected teachers to leave such a visible mark on their students' salaries two decades later. Most adults hardly even remember being five years old. Why did kindergarten teachers end up casting such a long shadow?
The intuitive answer is that effective teachers help students develop cognitive skills. Early education builds a solid foundation for understanding numbers and words. Sure enough, students with more experienced teachers scored higher on math and reading tests at the end of kindergarten. But over the next few years, their peers caught up.
To figure out what students were carrying with them from kindergarten into adulthood, Chetty's team turned to another possible explanation. In fourth and eighth grade, the students were rated by their teachers on some other qualities. Here's a sample:
Chetty is one of the world's most influential economists. He's the winner of the MacArthur genius grant. And his research suggests that excellence depends less on our natural talents than we might expect.
The Tennessee experiment contained a starling result. Chetty was able to predict the success that students achieved as adults simply by looking at who taught their kindergarten class. By age 25, students who happened to have had more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers.
Chetty and his colleagues calculated that moving from an inexperienced kindergarten teacher to an experienced one would add over $1000 to each student's annual income in their twenties. For a class of 20 students, an above-average kindergarten teacher could be worth additional lifetime income of $321,000.
Kindergarten matters in many ways, but I never would have expected teachers to leave such a visible mark on their students' salaries two decades later. Most adults hardly even remember being five years old. Why did kindergarten teachers end up casting such a long shadow?
The intuitive answer is that effective teachers help students develop cognitive skills. Early education builds a solid foundation for understanding numbers and words. Sure enough, students with more experienced teachers scored higher on math and reading tests at the end of kindergarten. But over the next few years, their peers caught up.
To figure out what students were carrying with them from kindergarten into adulthood, Chetty's team turned to another possible explanation. In fourth and eighth grade, the students were rated by their teachers on some other qualities. Here's a sample:
- Proactive: how often did they take initiative to ask questions, volunteer answers, seek information from books and engage the teacher to learn outside class?
- Prosocial: How well did they get along and collaborate with peers?
- Disciplined: How effectively did they pay attention - and resist the impulse to disrupt the class?
- Determined: How consistently did they take on challenging problems, do more than the assigned work, and persist in the face of obstacles?
When students were taught by more experienced kindergarten teachers, their fourth-grade teachers rated them higher on all four of these attributes. So did their eighth-grade teachers. The capacities to be proactive, prosocial, disciplined, and determined stay with the students longer - and ultimately proved more powerful - than early math and reading skills. When Chetty and his colleagues predicted adult incomes from fourth-grade scores, the ratings on these behaviors matter 2.4 times as much as math and reading performance on standardized tests.
Think about how surprising that is. If you want to forecast the earning potential of fourth graders, you should pay less attention to their objective math and verbal scores than to their teachers' subjective views of their behavior patterns. And although many people see those behaviors as innate, they were taught in kindergarten. Regardless of where students started, there was something about learning these behaviors that set the students up for success decades later.
p.29 On writing:
If writing isn't your preferred mode of learning, the greatest discomfort of putting your thoughts on a page is probably writer's block. As Steve Martin joked, "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol." There's a reason we don't talk about dancer's block or carpenter's block. Writer's block is actually a thinking block: you're stuck because you haven't figured out what to say. Some novelists get in the groove by typing sentences from fiction they've loved. I get my ideas churning by answering a few emails: it's like a warm-up to give me momentum. If writing becomes a regular routine, eventually words start to flow as fluidly on the page as they do out of your mouth. Psychologists have found that when people were randomly assigned to scheduled daily writing sessions, their output quadrupled - and even scheduling 15 minutes a day was enough to make progress. And now we have artificial intelligence (AI) chat bots to help. In preliminary experiments, randomly assigning professionals to use tools like ChatGPT and Bing boosts both the quality and quantity of their writing - especially for poor writers-by shifting effort from rough drafting to idea generating and editing. For the record, I didn't write a word of this book using AI. Though that's probably what an AI would tell you.
If writing isn't your preferred mode of learning, the greatest discomfort of putting your thoughts on a page is probably writer's block. As Steve Martin joked, "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol." There's a reason we don't talk about dancer's block or carpenter's block. Writer's block is actually a thinking block: you're stuck because you haven't figured out what to say. Some novelists get in the groove by typing sentences from fiction they've loved. I get my ideas churning by answering a few emails: it's like a warm-up to give me momentum. If writing becomes a regular routine, eventually words start to flow as fluidly on the page as they do out of your mouth. Psychologists have found that when people were randomly assigned to scheduled daily writing sessions, their output quadrupled - and even scheduling 15 minutes a day was enough to make progress. And now we have artificial intelligence (AI) chat bots to help. In preliminary experiments, randomly assigning professionals to use tools like ChatGPT and Bing boosts both the quality and quantity of their writing - especially for poor writers-by shifting effort from rough drafting to idea generating and editing. For the record, I didn't write a word of this book using AI. Though that's probably what an AI would tell you.
re: taking breaks
p. 102 Taking breaks has at least three benefits. First, time away from practice helps to sustain harmonious passion. Research indicates that even micro-breaks of five to ten minutes are enough to reduce fatigue and raise energy. It's not just about preventing burnout: research reveals that when we work nights and weekends, our interest and enjoyment in our tasks drop...
Second, breaks unlock fresh ideas.
Third, breaks deepen learning....it's well established that we can avoid that forgetting curve with spaced repetition - interspersing breaks into practice.
p. 103 Relaxing is not a waste of time - it's an investment in well-being. Breaks are not a distraction - they're a chance to reset attention and incubate ideas. Play is not a frivolous activity - it's a source of joy and a path to mastery.
p. 104 Worthwhile practice is where progress is made. It's about quality, not quantity. You need to feel there's a shift - something is different when you walk out of the room.
re; deliberate play
The real outcome is her enjoyment. Without enjoyment, potential stays hidden.
On reading:
p. 172
p. 172
If we want our kids to enjoy reading, we need to make books part of their lives. That involves talking about books during meals and car rides, visiting libraries or bookstores, giving books as gifts, and letting them see us read. Children pay attention to our attention: Where we focus tells them what we prize.
p. 174
One of the great failings of English and literature classes is forcing students to slog through the "classics" rather than giving them the opportunity to choose books that pique their interest. Research reveals that when students get to pick their own books and read in class, they become more passionate about reading. It's a virtuous cycle: the more they read for fun, the better they get and the more they like it. And they more they like it, the more they learn-and the better they perform on exams. A teacher's task is not to ensure that students have read the literary canons. It is the kindle excitement about reading.
...to make it engaging and interactive, whenever students were passionate about a book, the floor was theirs to tell their classmates about it.
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