Tag: grit

Grit versus Passion

David Brooks argues that grades discourage students from following their passions (they have to spread their attention to keep up their GPA). And grit is easier to have if you’re following your passion.

Suppose you were designing a school to help students find their own clear end — as clear as that one. Say you were designing a school to elevate and intensify longings. Wouldn’t you want to provide examples of people who have intense longings? Wouldn’t you want to encourage students to be obsessive about worthy things? Wouldn’t you discuss which loves are higher than others and practices that habituate them toward those desires? Wouldn’t you be all about providing students with new subjects to love?

In such a school you might even de-emphasize the G.P.A. mentality, which puts a tether on passionate interests and substitutes other people’s longings for the student’s own.

— Brooks (2016): Putting Grit in its Place

Learning to Learn from Your Mistakes

When students are able to recognize mistakes and analyze them, they will learn faster and deeper. Jonah Lehrer summarizes a new study that shows that people learn faster when they spend the effort to learn from their mistakes.

When people notice that they’ve made an error, they have an instinctive negative reaction. Then we have the choice to either ignore the error or spend some time considering it – and learning from it. Guess who learn faster?

This research is based on Carol Dweck’s work on mindset, which shows that it’s better to praise effort rather than intelligence. A willingness to work hard (grit) is a much better attitude for learners. It turns failures into learning experiences, while focusing on intelligence actually discourages people from trying things at which they might fail.

… people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.

— Lehrer (2011): Why Do Some People Learn Faster? in Wired.