angela duckworth

first intro’d to Angela at the ted talks ed pbs special:

notes:

angela lee duckworth – i was convinced my kids could learn math – 7th grade – (cringe – oh my math) if they worked long and hard enough, in ed – the one thing we know how to measure best is iq – (but what if there’s more) – in every study – who is successful here and why (are all these places in assumed success places? westpoint, national spelling bee, teachers – varied places?) – 1 predictor of success – grit – patience and perseverance – grit questionaires – grittier kids more likely to graduate (but is that our success?) – how to build grit in kids – (i don’t know – but talent doesn’t make you gritty – we need to be grittier about getting our kids (authentically) gritty)

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and now she is one of the MacArthur 2013 fellows:

Angela Duckworth is a psychologist whose studies are clarifying the role that intellectual strengths and personality traits play in educational achievement. Duckworth’s work primarily examines two traits that she demonstrates predict success in life: grit—the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward long-term goals—and self-control—the voluntary regulation of behavioral, emotional, and attentional impulses. A major difference between the two qualities is that grit equips individuals to pursue especially challenging aims over years and even decades, while self-control operates at a more micro timescale in the battle against what could be referred to as “hourly temptations.” –

here she is talking about her vision:

notes:

grit – sustaining commitments? tendency to retain loyal vs switching around.. maybe we rethink grit?

would explain her inverse measure between grit and talent..

Peter Gray, James Paul Gee, et al’s – and our findings – maybe we don’t need to learn be taught grit.. we just need to be set free – to find the thing we can’t not do – and then from our passion/hunger grit emerges… (it can’t not, ie: Satori, Lucas)

what if grit is the result of finding/facilitating passion, and not a tool/skill needed to get (compulsory/supposed to) things done. seems a lot of research is spent on an ecosystem (that we’ve manufactured) that focuses on figuring out some extrinsic motivation to learn some assumed skill base.

what if keeping jobs and earning money isn’t our definition of success.

at 4:35 on ted- perhaps we know a way to develop authentic grit..

perhaps.. a better ecosystem to/of research..

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perhaps how we define grit … makes all the difference.. no?

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