The Success of Failure
STORY HIGHLIGHTS: link: www.cnn.com/2012/01/20/living/jennifer-egan-creativity-failure/index.html?hpt=hp_c3
When Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan writes a novel, it may go through 50 or 60 drafts.
The first one begins simply. She sits down with a legal pad and an open mind, deliberately creating by hand. She attempts to write about a half-dozen pages a day. At some point, the first draft is done.
Then comes, as she puts it, the "unpleasant tasks."
She types the whole thing. She reads it. Almost invariably, she says, "it's terrible." But in her review, she gives herself concrete ways to fix it -- edits, outlines (the one for her book "Look at Me" ran to 80 pages), discussions with other writers. All of which leads to more drafts, more frustration, more refinement.
Egan knows what she's in for.
"The key is struggling a lot," she says.
The struggle, of course, is often about fear: the fear of getting it wrong, of hitting a dead end, of wasting time. Of failing.
Failure. It's such an ugly word, isn't it? It reeks of cancer, of loss: the sense that what once went wrong cannot be set right, that the world has come to an end, that failures are failures forever -- that it's not just the project that failed, but you. Successful people, we imagine, are somehow blessed with more optimism, bigger brains and higher ideals than the rest of us.
Jennifer Egan describes her creative growth -- and success -- as "incremental all the way." But it's not true. Successful people -- creative people -- fail every day, just like everybody else. Except they don't view failure as a verdict. They view it as an opportunity. Indeed, it's failure that paves the way for creativity.
John Seely Brown is the former head of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the Xerox lab responsible for digital printing, the computer mouse and Ethernet. He says "trafficking in unlimited failure" let PARC's employees invent once-unimaginable technologies.
"My mantra inside PARC, which was never particularly appreciated in corporate headquarters, was at least 75% of the things we did failed," he says.
Investment manager Diane Garnick, who taught a course on failure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put it succinctly. "We learn more from our failures than we could ever learn from our successes," she told the site Bodyhacker.
Ups and downs
Egan, 49, would probably be described as a success. The Chicago-born, San Francisco-bred author won the Pulitzer last year for her novel "A Visit from the Goon Squad." Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker. She's a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine and the author of several other highly esteemed works, including "Look at Me" and "The Keep."
Her demeanor is welcoming and considerate, but her eyes miss nothing, displaying a determined curiosity. She works from a cozy Brooklyn brownstone she shares with her husband, theater director David Herskovits, and their two grade-school sons, whose exuberant artwork decorates the ground floor.
Her life has had its ups and downs, but she retains an even-keeled perspective, describing her creative growth as "incremental all the way."
Such a long-term outlook is key to coping with failure. Not necessarily getting it right the first time? That's fine -- you're recording something, anything, so that other ideas can rise to the surface. Hitting a dead end? Take a breath, take time to understand and try something else. That's your creative drive kicking into gear.
Robert Epstein, a former editor of Psychology Today and founder of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, likens the process to being stuck in a locked room. The doorknob isn't responding. You turn it, you jiggle it, you lift it. Nothing.
"When you're ineffective and you can't turn that knob, lots and lots of different behaviors and thoughts and ideas all pop up simultaneously, more or less -- and that's the stuff of creativity," he says. "That's where the inner connections occur."
The wonderful thing about such creative sparks is they'll feed off one another. The terrible thing is that emotions might take over and reduce you to mush. Epstein observes that the person in the locked room eventually starts banging on the door and, if left long enough, cries for his or her mother.
Egan can relate.
If you're not failing, you're not pushing hard enough.
IDEO's Iain Roberts When she was a teenager, she took a year off between high school and college to travel in Europe. It was great at first. "The exaltation of being propelled alone into a totally alien place was really remarkable," she says.
But, eventually, the aloneness became too much. She suffered panic attacks and ended up calling her parents to help get her home.
So Europe didn't work out, not in the way Egan imagined. On the other hand, she found a new passion: writing. She kept a journal -- she still has it -- and the pleasure she got from developing her thoughts on paper prompted her to consider writing as a career.
Having 'grit'
That's not what she thought she'd be doing while growing up. She considered a career as a doctor -- one of her grandfathers was a surgeon -- but a teenage bout of squeamishness ruled that out. As for the creative arts, "I wasn't a standout amazing kid," she says. "My creativity has always felt like a secret to me."
However, being creative doesn't require being Mozart. Stubbornness and practicality play a role, too. Studies of grade school and college students indicated they owed their academic success to such characteristics as curiosity, self-control and what psychology professor Angela Duckworth termed "grit" -- even if they were of average intelligence.
Besides, failure seems to loom around every corner, especially for creative types like writers. "I think it's totally rational for a writer, no matter how much experience he has, to go right down in confidence to almost zero when you sit down to start something," author John McPhee once observed.
That's not necessarily a bad thing if it's kept in perspective.
In 1989, when she was 27, Egan sold a short story to The New Yorker, then and now one of the most prestigious magazines in the world. But there was a catch. Her story, "The Stylist," was much better than anything else she had written -- and she knew it. Her other submissions met with disappointment and rejection.
She felt like -- that word again -- "a failure."
"That story really hung over me, and it cast a very long shadow," she recalls. "I thought I'd never top it."
How to combat such a feeling? Keep moving.
Egan worked to improve. She wangled a residency at the artistic retreat Yaddo in upstate New York. She went to conferences. She even revived a novel she'd attempted years earlier. It all contributed to her development. By 1995, after building up credits in a variety of publications, she was back in The New Yorker and had published a short story collection as well.
Plugging away -- with no guarantee of success -- is not advice people like to hear. Iain Roberts, a principal with the design consultancy IDEO, says some clients have to be educated that "you have to be OK with failing." Clients naturally want to play it safe, but sometimes the most interesting ideas are out on the fringes. For example, he says, a cell phone provider might want to focus on established users, but what about trying to market to people who don't own cell phones at all?
"It's always a risk," he says. But a necessary one: "If you're not failing, you're not pushing hard enough."
Giving up is not the end
Has Egan given up on projects? Of course. She said there were four chapters of "Goon Squad" she tried to write but just couldn't make work. She wasn't into that part of the story, so why would her readers want to join her there?
"That's different than being afraid of the material, or veering away from it but with a kind of excitement," she says. "It's just literally you'd rather do anything else." The feeling for her, she adds, is like "the kiss of death."
Orson Welles worked on his still-unfinished film "The Other Side of the Wind" for 15 years, until his death in 1985. Some creative people never let go.
Orson Welles filmed "The Other Side of the Wind" in 1970; he kept tinkering with it right up until his death in 1985. It's never been released.
Ralph Ellison labored over "Juneteenth," his follow-up to "Invisible Man," for years. The never-finished novel was finally published in 1999, five years after Ellison's death, after being edited down from a 2,000-page manuscript.
Axl Rose spent almost 15 years on Guns N' Roses' "Chinese Democracy," working on it long after the other original members had left the band. It was finally released in 2008.
Giving up can also be part of the creative process, says Dean Keith Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, and a creativity expert.
"Sooner or later, creators have to learn when an idea is going nowhere," he says.
But, he cautions, that point is hard to identify.
"The error is more often in the opposite direction: Not giving a new idea a sufficient chance for development. It is not easy to tell in advance which is going to pan out and which not," he says. The uncertainty cuts both ways: "Edison spent more time and money developing a means for separating iron ore than he did on the electric light bulb. The former was a dismal failure, the latter a brilliant success."
Egan agrees assessing progress isn't easy.
"A lot of it is trying to understand what kind of dead end it is, because they aren't all the same," she says. "With 'The Keep,' I was essentially at a dead end for the first many months of working on it, because I couldn't find a voice for it. And if you don't have a voice, you've got nothin'. You can try every bell and whistle and good idea in the world, but if the book doesn't have a voice, you don't have a book.
"But for some reason I kept hammering away at it, which certainly in retrospect could have been a terrible waste of time if I hadn't found a way," she said.
Egan is driven by a desire to make her work better -- right up to the finish line. If you decide the work has merit, there comes a point when you take what you have. Eventually the time for major creativity recedes and you're just trying to get to the finish line -- proofreading, refining, going over details. It can be grueling.
"At that point, disgust and ennui sets in," Egan admitted. "But I have a job to do. I can't walk away. I have a desire to make it better that drives me."
And then it's time to do it again, to climb back on the high wire and start from scratch. Scary? Absolutely. Failure is always scary. But, says Egan, it's where creative energy comes from: The awards and acclaim are wonderful, but the joy comes from the freedom she feels in trying the unusual.
Indeed, she says her recent books have been much more rewarding to write because of their challenges.
"And since then," she says, "I've had a lot more fun."
- Jennifer Egan won a Pulitzer for her novel "A Visit from the Goon Squad"
- First draft of works is always "terrible," she says -- but she improves it, over and over again
- Failure paves way to creativity: Focus on long-term success, learn from mistakes
- Egan describes road to success as "incremental"
When Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan writes a novel, it may go through 50 or 60 drafts.
The first one begins simply. She sits down with a legal pad and an open mind, deliberately creating by hand. She attempts to write about a half-dozen pages a day. At some point, the first draft is done.
Then comes, as she puts it, the "unpleasant tasks."
She types the whole thing. She reads it. Almost invariably, she says, "it's terrible." But in her review, she gives herself concrete ways to fix it -- edits, outlines (the one for her book "Look at Me" ran to 80 pages), discussions with other writers. All of which leads to more drafts, more frustration, more refinement.
Egan knows what she's in for.
"The key is struggling a lot," she says.
The struggle, of course, is often about fear: the fear of getting it wrong, of hitting a dead end, of wasting time. Of failing.
Failure. It's such an ugly word, isn't it? It reeks of cancer, of loss: the sense that what once went wrong cannot be set right, that the world has come to an end, that failures are failures forever -- that it's not just the project that failed, but you. Successful people, we imagine, are somehow blessed with more optimism, bigger brains and higher ideals than the rest of us.
Jennifer Egan describes her creative growth -- and success -- as "incremental all the way." But it's not true. Successful people -- creative people -- fail every day, just like everybody else. Except they don't view failure as a verdict. They view it as an opportunity. Indeed, it's failure that paves the way for creativity.
John Seely Brown is the former head of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the Xerox lab responsible for digital printing, the computer mouse and Ethernet. He says "trafficking in unlimited failure" let PARC's employees invent once-unimaginable technologies.
"My mantra inside PARC, which was never particularly appreciated in corporate headquarters, was at least 75% of the things we did failed," he says.
Investment manager Diane Garnick, who taught a course on failure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put it succinctly. "We learn more from our failures than we could ever learn from our successes," she told the site Bodyhacker.
Ups and downs
Egan, 49, would probably be described as a success. The Chicago-born, San Francisco-bred author won the Pulitzer last year for her novel "A Visit from the Goon Squad." Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker. She's a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine and the author of several other highly esteemed works, including "Look at Me" and "The Keep."
Her demeanor is welcoming and considerate, but her eyes miss nothing, displaying a determined curiosity. She works from a cozy Brooklyn brownstone she shares with her husband, theater director David Herskovits, and their two grade-school sons, whose exuberant artwork decorates the ground floor.
Her life has had its ups and downs, but she retains an even-keeled perspective, describing her creative growth as "incremental all the way."
Such a long-term outlook is key to coping with failure. Not necessarily getting it right the first time? That's fine -- you're recording something, anything, so that other ideas can rise to the surface. Hitting a dead end? Take a breath, take time to understand and try something else. That's your creative drive kicking into gear.
Robert Epstein, a former editor of Psychology Today and founder of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, likens the process to being stuck in a locked room. The doorknob isn't responding. You turn it, you jiggle it, you lift it. Nothing.
"When you're ineffective and you can't turn that knob, lots and lots of different behaviors and thoughts and ideas all pop up simultaneously, more or less -- and that's the stuff of creativity," he says. "That's where the inner connections occur."
The wonderful thing about such creative sparks is they'll feed off one another. The terrible thing is that emotions might take over and reduce you to mush. Epstein observes that the person in the locked room eventually starts banging on the door and, if left long enough, cries for his or her mother.
Egan can relate.
If you're not failing, you're not pushing hard enough.
IDEO's Iain Roberts When she was a teenager, she took a year off between high school and college to travel in Europe. It was great at first. "The exaltation of being propelled alone into a totally alien place was really remarkable," she says.
But, eventually, the aloneness became too much. She suffered panic attacks and ended up calling her parents to help get her home.
So Europe didn't work out, not in the way Egan imagined. On the other hand, she found a new passion: writing. She kept a journal -- she still has it -- and the pleasure she got from developing her thoughts on paper prompted her to consider writing as a career.
Having 'grit'
That's not what she thought she'd be doing while growing up. She considered a career as a doctor -- one of her grandfathers was a surgeon -- but a teenage bout of squeamishness ruled that out. As for the creative arts, "I wasn't a standout amazing kid," she says. "My creativity has always felt like a secret to me."
However, being creative doesn't require being Mozart. Stubbornness and practicality play a role, too. Studies of grade school and college students indicated they owed their academic success to such characteristics as curiosity, self-control and what psychology professor Angela Duckworth termed "grit" -- even if they were of average intelligence.
Besides, failure seems to loom around every corner, especially for creative types like writers. "I think it's totally rational for a writer, no matter how much experience he has, to go right down in confidence to almost zero when you sit down to start something," author John McPhee once observed.
That's not necessarily a bad thing if it's kept in perspective.
In 1989, when she was 27, Egan sold a short story to The New Yorker, then and now one of the most prestigious magazines in the world. But there was a catch. Her story, "The Stylist," was much better than anything else she had written -- and she knew it. Her other submissions met with disappointment and rejection.
She felt like -- that word again -- "a failure."
"That story really hung over me, and it cast a very long shadow," she recalls. "I thought I'd never top it."
How to combat such a feeling? Keep moving.
Egan worked to improve. She wangled a residency at the artistic retreat Yaddo in upstate New York. She went to conferences. She even revived a novel she'd attempted years earlier. It all contributed to her development. By 1995, after building up credits in a variety of publications, she was back in The New Yorker and had published a short story collection as well.
Plugging away -- with no guarantee of success -- is not advice people like to hear. Iain Roberts, a principal with the design consultancy IDEO, says some clients have to be educated that "you have to be OK with failing." Clients naturally want to play it safe, but sometimes the most interesting ideas are out on the fringes. For example, he says, a cell phone provider might want to focus on established users, but what about trying to market to people who don't own cell phones at all?
"It's always a risk," he says. But a necessary one: "If you're not failing, you're not pushing hard enough."
Giving up is not the end
Has Egan given up on projects? Of course. She said there were four chapters of "Goon Squad" she tried to write but just couldn't make work. She wasn't into that part of the story, so why would her readers want to join her there?
"That's different than being afraid of the material, or veering away from it but with a kind of excitement," she says. "It's just literally you'd rather do anything else." The feeling for her, she adds, is like "the kiss of death."
Orson Welles worked on his still-unfinished film "The Other Side of the Wind" for 15 years, until his death in 1985. Some creative people never let go.
Orson Welles filmed "The Other Side of the Wind" in 1970; he kept tinkering with it right up until his death in 1985. It's never been released.
Ralph Ellison labored over "Juneteenth," his follow-up to "Invisible Man," for years. The never-finished novel was finally published in 1999, five years after Ellison's death, after being edited down from a 2,000-page manuscript.
Axl Rose spent almost 15 years on Guns N' Roses' "Chinese Democracy," working on it long after the other original members had left the band. It was finally released in 2008.
Giving up can also be part of the creative process, says Dean Keith Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, and a creativity expert.
"Sooner or later, creators have to learn when an idea is going nowhere," he says.
But, he cautions, that point is hard to identify.
"The error is more often in the opposite direction: Not giving a new idea a sufficient chance for development. It is not easy to tell in advance which is going to pan out and which not," he says. The uncertainty cuts both ways: "Edison spent more time and money developing a means for separating iron ore than he did on the electric light bulb. The former was a dismal failure, the latter a brilliant success."
Egan agrees assessing progress isn't easy.
"A lot of it is trying to understand what kind of dead end it is, because they aren't all the same," she says. "With 'The Keep,' I was essentially at a dead end for the first many months of working on it, because I couldn't find a voice for it. And if you don't have a voice, you've got nothin'. You can try every bell and whistle and good idea in the world, but if the book doesn't have a voice, you don't have a book.
"But for some reason I kept hammering away at it, which certainly in retrospect could have been a terrible waste of time if I hadn't found a way," she said.
Egan is driven by a desire to make her work better -- right up to the finish line. If you decide the work has merit, there comes a point when you take what you have. Eventually the time for major creativity recedes and you're just trying to get to the finish line -- proofreading, refining, going over details. It can be grueling.
"At that point, disgust and ennui sets in," Egan admitted. "But I have a job to do. I can't walk away. I have a desire to make it better that drives me."
And then it's time to do it again, to climb back on the high wire and start from scratch. Scary? Absolutely. Failure is always scary. But, says Egan, it's where creative energy comes from: The awards and acclaim are wonderful, but the joy comes from the freedom she feels in trying the unusual.
Indeed, she says her recent books have been much more rewarding to write because of their challenges.
"And since then," she says, "I've had a lot more fun."
today.msnbc.msn.com/id/44123365#.Tkhv878lEtE
Worth Reading
Gareth Cook Self-control in childhood predicts future success By Gareth Cook Globe Columnist / June 12, 2011
FOR DECADES, our national conversation about education has been guided by a single, seemingly irrefutable assumption: It’s all about what kids know. Either children are learning to read, write, and do math, or they are not.
But what about character?
There is a personal virtue that plays a large role in determining whether a child will lead a rewarding, prosperous life, contributing to neighborhood and nation, or stumble into a series of disappointments and even crime. The Greek philosophers lauded it, and it informs the teachings of many world religions. And now a new wave of research suggests that inculcating this basic good, from the earliest ages, could transform our schools and renew our society.
The ancients referred to this virtue as temperance, but, in the argot of modern social science, it is often referred to as self-control — the ability to check one’s impulses, focus on what is important, and better oneself.
The modern investigation of self-control begins with marshmallows. In a famous 1972 experiment at a Stanford University day care, psychologist Walter Mischel gave a group of 4-year-olds a marshmallow test. The children were placed alone in a room with a marshmallow and told that they could either eat the marshmallow, or wait and be given two marshmallows later. Two treats are better than one, but kids varied wildly in their ability to delay the sweet thrill. The successful ones used all sorts of strategies — some hilarious, some heartbreaking — to resist temptation.
The big surprise came almost two decades later, when it was discovered that how well the children handled the preschool marshmallow challenge predicted how well they performed, for example, on the SAT. Self-control matters.
Just how much, though, only became clear a few months ago, with a study that tracked 1,000 people from birth to age 32. Scientist Terrie Moffitt and her colleagues found that self-control has a pervasive and powerful effect on the arc of a life.
Even adjusting for IQ and economic background, children who were more adept at self-control went on to lead better lives. They were healthier, less likely to abuse drugs, more likely to save, less likely to be convicted of a crime, and the list goes on. These “good choices’’ not only benefit the individuals who make them, but their friends, family — even taxpayers.
What makes Moffitt’s discovery of such great public consequence is another surprise. Self-control is like a muscle. It is not just something that one is born with, but something that can be strengthened through regular exercise. Equally important, everyone can benefit. Moffitt found that, no matter the starting point, any improvement in self-control meant brighter prospects, and steps down portended trouble.
A tremendous example of how self-control can be taught is the recently developed “Tools of the Mind’’ curriculum for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classrooms. Based on the teachings of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, Tools is being tested nationwide — including in Massachusetts — and is specifically designed to instill self-control skills in its young charges.
One of the central activities is, surprisingly, play. Not free play, though: The children work in small groups, acting out a particular scenario — an animal hospital, say, or scenes from the “Magic Tree House’’ series. Staying in character requires, and builds, a tremendous reservoir of self-regulation.
A 2007 paper in Science found that children in Tools classrooms had developed substantially more self-control, allowing them to solve more difficult puzzles. Maggie Mack, who directs early childhood education for the Nauset school district, said that she has been amazed at what the children are able to accomplish in her Tools classrooms.
We are building a society filled with ever-more compelling distractions and temptations. We also live in a time when information changes ever faster. What will children need to thrive in this environment? Not catalogs of facts, but the discipline of mind to focus, persevere, and make good choices. A good start would be to make Tools of the Mind — or something similar — a staple of the 21st-century classroom.
Gareth Cook can be reached at [email protected] or Twitter @garethideas .
FOR DECADES, our national conversation about education has been guided by a single, seemingly irrefutable assumption: It’s all about what kids know. Either children are learning to read, write, and do math, or they are not.
But what about character?
There is a personal virtue that plays a large role in determining whether a child will lead a rewarding, prosperous life, contributing to neighborhood and nation, or stumble into a series of disappointments and even crime. The Greek philosophers lauded it, and it informs the teachings of many world religions. And now a new wave of research suggests that inculcating this basic good, from the earliest ages, could transform our schools and renew our society.
The ancients referred to this virtue as temperance, but, in the argot of modern social science, it is often referred to as self-control — the ability to check one’s impulses, focus on what is important, and better oneself.
The modern investigation of self-control begins with marshmallows. In a famous 1972 experiment at a Stanford University day care, psychologist Walter Mischel gave a group of 4-year-olds a marshmallow test. The children were placed alone in a room with a marshmallow and told that they could either eat the marshmallow, or wait and be given two marshmallows later. Two treats are better than one, but kids varied wildly in their ability to delay the sweet thrill. The successful ones used all sorts of strategies — some hilarious, some heartbreaking — to resist temptation.
The big surprise came almost two decades later, when it was discovered that how well the children handled the preschool marshmallow challenge predicted how well they performed, for example, on the SAT. Self-control matters.
Just how much, though, only became clear a few months ago, with a study that tracked 1,000 people from birth to age 32. Scientist Terrie Moffitt and her colleagues found that self-control has a pervasive and powerful effect on the arc of a life.
Even adjusting for IQ and economic background, children who were more adept at self-control went on to lead better lives. They were healthier, less likely to abuse drugs, more likely to save, less likely to be convicted of a crime, and the list goes on. These “good choices’’ not only benefit the individuals who make them, but their friends, family — even taxpayers.
What makes Moffitt’s discovery of such great public consequence is another surprise. Self-control is like a muscle. It is not just something that one is born with, but something that can be strengthened through regular exercise. Equally important, everyone can benefit. Moffitt found that, no matter the starting point, any improvement in self-control meant brighter prospects, and steps down portended trouble.
A tremendous example of how self-control can be taught is the recently developed “Tools of the Mind’’ curriculum for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classrooms. Based on the teachings of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, Tools is being tested nationwide — including in Massachusetts — and is specifically designed to instill self-control skills in its young charges.
One of the central activities is, surprisingly, play. Not free play, though: The children work in small groups, acting out a particular scenario — an animal hospital, say, or scenes from the “Magic Tree House’’ series. Staying in character requires, and builds, a tremendous reservoir of self-regulation.
A 2007 paper in Science found that children in Tools classrooms had developed substantially more self-control, allowing them to solve more difficult puzzles. Maggie Mack, who directs early childhood education for the Nauset school district, said that she has been amazed at what the children are able to accomplish in her Tools classrooms.
We are building a society filled with ever-more compelling distractions and temptations. We also live in a time when information changes ever faster. What will children need to thrive in this environment? Not catalogs of facts, but the discipline of mind to focus, persevere, and make good choices. A good start would be to make Tools of the Mind — or something similar — a staple of the 21st-century classroom.
Gareth Cook can be reached at [email protected] or Twitter @garethideas .
Keys To Finnish Educational Success: Intensive Teacher-Training, Union Collaboration
On March 16, I sat down with Finland's Minister of Education, Ms. Henna Virkunnen, for a discussion of the Finnish educational system -- and what lessons it might hold for the U.S. educational system.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The Hechinger Report: It's well-known that Finland's teachers are an elite bunch, with only top students offered the chance to become teachers. It's also no secret that they are well-trained. But take us inside that training for a moment -- what does it look like, specifically? How does teacher training in Finland differ from teacher training in other countries?
Virkkunen:It's a difficult question. Our teachers are really good. One of the main reasons they are so good is because the teaching profession is one of the most famous careers in Finland, so young people want to become teachers. In Finland, we think that teachers are key for the future and it's a very important profession -- and that's why all of the young, talented people want to become teachers. All of the teacher-training is run by universities in Finland and all students do a five-year master's degree. Because they are studying at the university, teacher education is research-based. Students have a lot of supervised teacher-training during their studies. We have something called "training schools" -- normally next to universities -- where the student teaches and gets feedback from a trained supervisor.
Teachers in Finland can choose their own teaching methods and materials. They are experts of their own work and they test their own pupils. I think this is also one of the reasons why teaching is such an attractive profession in Finland because teachers are working like academic experts with their own pupils in schools.
The Hechinger Report: How are teachers evaluated in Finland? How are they held accountable for student learning?
Virkkunen: Our educational society is based on trust and cooperation, so when we are doing some testing and evaluations, we don't use it for controlling [teachers] but for development. We trust the teachers. It's true that we are all human beings, and of course there are differences in how teachers test pupils, but if we look at the OECD evaluation -- PISA, for example -- the learning differences among Finnish schools and pupils are the smallest in OECD countries, so it seems that we have a very equal system of good quality.
The Hechinger Report: How does Finland incorporate immigrants and minorities into its educational system?
Virkkunen: We haven't had so many immigrants in Finland, but we are going to have more in the future -- and we need more because we have an aging population. In some schools, in the areas around Helsinki, more than 30 percent of the pupils are immigrants. It seems that we have been doing good work, also with the immigrants, if we look at PISA results. Normally, if children come from a very different schooling system or society, they have one year in a smaller setting where they study Finnish and maybe some other subjects. We try to raise their level before they come to regular classrooms. We think also that learning one's mother tongue is very important, and that's why we try to teach the mother tongue for all immigrants as well. It's very challenging. I think in Helsinki, they are teaching 44 different mother tongues. The government pays for two-hour lessons each week for these pupils. We think it is very important to know your own tongue -- that you can write and read and think in it. Then it's easier also to learn other languages like Finnish or English, or other subjects.
The Hechinger Report: What roles do teacher unions play in Finland? In the U.S. right now, unions are seen as a big problem standing in the way of reform. What's it like in Finland?
Virkkunen: It's a totally different situation in Finland. For me, as Minister of Education, our teachers' union has been one of the main partners because we have the same goal: we all want to ensure that the quality of education is good and we are working very much together with the union. Nearly every week we are in discussions with them. They are very powerful in Finland. Nearly all of the teachers are members. I think we don't have big differences in our thinking. They are very good partners for us.
The Hechinger Report: What do you think the U.S. can and should learn from Finland when it comes to public education?
Virkkunen: It's a very difficult question. An educational system has to serve the local community, and it's very much tied to a country's own history and society, so we can't take one system from another country and put it somewhere else. But I think that teachers are really the key for a better educational system. It's really important to pay attention to teacher training, in-service training and working conditions. Of course, the teachers always say we also have to pay attention to their salaries. But in Finland, it seems that the salaries are not the main reason it's an attractive profession. Teachers aren't very badly paid. They earn the average if you look at other academic professions.
The Hechinger Report: In the U.S., it's estimated that 50 percent of new teachers quit within five years. I suspect it's different in Finland. Is teaching seen as a lifelong career in Finland?
Virkkunen: Teaching is a lifelong career in Finland, but right now we are doing an evaluation of why some teachers leave their jobs. The rate isn't very high. It's often men who leave, as they find jobs with higher salaries. We have to develop some kind of mentoring system because the new, young teachers need support. Often the feedback I hear from young teachers is that it is not easy to cooperate with parents, for example, so that is one of the areas where young teachers need support from their colleagues.
The Hechinger Report: What's something important but not widely known or well understood about public education in Finland?
Virkkunen: We teach all pupils in the same classrooms. We don't have really good, top schools and very poor, bad schools. We are quite good at giving special support to students with learning difficulties. About 25 percent of our pupils receive some kind of special support, but in regular classrooms -- often the teacher has an assistant in the classroom. We also think it is very important that there aren't too many pupils per teacher. We don't have legislation limiting class size, but the average class size for all grades is 21. In first and second grade, it's 19.
We think we can have equality and good quality at the same time -- that they are not opposites.
Our students spend less time in class than students in other OECD countries. We don't think it helps students learn if they spend seven hours per day at school because they also need time for hobbies and of course they also have homework.
Photo courtesy of the Finnish government.
Boston Globe 9.28.10
Are we raising a generation of nincompoops?
NEW YORK--Second-graders who can't tie shoes or zip jackets. Four-year-olds in Pull-Ups diapers. Five-year-olds in strollers. Teens and preteens befuddled by can openers and ice-cube trays. College kids who've never done laundry, taken a bus alone or addressed an envelope.
Are we raising a generation of nincompoops? And do we have only ourselves to blame? Or are some of these things simply the result of kids growing up with push-button technology in an era when mechanical devices are gradually being replaced by electronics?
Susan Maushart, a mother of three, says her teenage daughter "literally does not know how to use a can opener. Most cans come with pull-tops these days. I see her reaching for a can that requires a can opener, and her shoulders slump and she goes for something else."
Teenagers are so accustomed to either throwing their clothes on the floor or hanging them on hooks that Maushart says her "kids actually struggle with the mechanics of a clothes hanger."
Many kids never learn to do ordinary household tasks. They have no chores. Take-out and drive-through meals have replaced home cooking. And busy families who can afford it often outsource house-cleaning and lawn care.
"It's so all laid out for them," said Maushart, author of the forthcoming book "The Winter of Our Disconnect," about her efforts to wean her family from its dependence on technology. "Having so much comfort and ease is what has led to this situation -- the Velcro sneakers, the Pull-Ups generation. You can pee in your pants and we'll take care of it for you!"
The issue hit home for me when a visiting 12-year-old took an ice-cube tray out of my freezer, then stared at it helplessly. Raised in a world where refrigerators have push-button ice-makers, he'd never had to get cubes out of a tray -- in the same way that kids growing up with pull-tab cans don't understand can openers.
But his passivity was what bothered me most. Come on, kid! If your life depended on it, couldn't you wrestle that ice-cube tray to the ground? It's not that complicated!
Mark Bauerlein, author of the best-selling book "The Dumbest Generation," which contends that cyberculture is turning young people into know-nothings, says "the absence of technology" confuses kids faced with simple mechanical tasks.
But Bauerlein says there's a second factor: "a loss of independence and a loss of initiative." He says that growing up with cell phones and Google means kids don't have to figure things out or solve problems any more. They can look up what they need online or call mom or dad for step-by-step instructions. And today's helicopter parents are more than happy to oblige, whether their kids are 12 or 22.
"It's the dependence factor, the unimaginability of life without the new technology, that is making kids less entrepreneurial, less initiative-oriented, less independent," Bauerlein said.
Teachers in kindergarten have always had to show patience with children learning to tie shoes and zip jackets, but thanks to Velcro closures, today's kids often don't develop those skills until they are older. Sure, harried parents are grateful for Velcro when they're trying to get a kid dressed and out the door, and children learn to tie shoes eventually unless they have a real disability. But if they're capable of learning to tie their shoes before they learn to read, shouldn't we encourage them?
Some skills, of course, are no longer useful. Kids don't need to know how to add Roman numerals, write cursive or look things up in a paper-bound thesaurus. But is snail-mail already so outmoded that teenagers don't need to know how to address an envelope or put the stamp in the right spot? Ask a 15-year-old to prepare an envelope some time; you might be shocked at the result.
Lenore Skenazy, who writes a popular blog called Free-Range Kids, based on her book by the same name, has a different take. Skenazy, whose approach to parenting is decidedly anti-helicopter, agrees that we are partly to blame for our children's apparent incompetence, starting when they are infants.
"There is an onslaught of stuff being sold to us from the second they come out of the womb trying to convince us that they are nincompoops," she said. "They need to go to Gymboree or they will never hum and clap! To teach them how to walk, you're supposed to turn your child into a marionette by strapping this thing on them that holds them up because it helps them balance more naturally than 30,000 years of evolution!"
Despite all this, Skenazy thinks today's kids are way smarter than we give them credit for: "They know how to change a photo caption on a digital photo and send it to a friend. They can add the smiley face without the colon and parentheses! They never took typing but they can type faster than I can!"
Had I not been there to help that 12-year-old with the ice-cube tray, she added, the kid surely would have "whipped out his iPhone and clicked on his ice cube app to get a little video animated by a 6-year-old that explained how you get ice cubes out of a tray."
Friends playing devil's advocate say I'm wrong to indict a whole generation for the decline of skills they don't need. After all, we no longer have to grow crops, shoot deer, prime a pump or milk a cow to make dinner, but it was just a couple of generations ago that you couldn't survive in many places without that knowledge.
Others say this is simply the last gasp of the analog era as we move once and for all to the digital age. In 10 years, there won't be any ice cube trays; every fridge will have push-button ice.
But Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University who has studied culture and American life, defends my right to rail against the ignorance of youth.
"That's our job as we get old," he said. "A healthy society is healthy only if it has some degree of tension between older and younger generations. It's up to us old folks to remind teenagers: 'The world didn't begin on your 13th birthday!' And it's good for kids to resent that and to argue back. We want to criticize and provoke them. It's not healthy for the older generation to say, 'Kids are kids, they'll grow up.'
"They won't grow up," he added, "unless you do your job by knocking down their hubris."
NEW YORK--Second-graders who can't tie shoes or zip jackets. Four-year-olds in Pull-Ups diapers. Five-year-olds in strollers. Teens and preteens befuddled by can openers and ice-cube trays. College kids who've never done laundry, taken a bus alone or addressed an envelope.
Are we raising a generation of nincompoops? And do we have only ourselves to blame? Or are some of these things simply the result of kids growing up with push-button technology in an era when mechanical devices are gradually being replaced by electronics?
Susan Maushart, a mother of three, says her teenage daughter "literally does not know how to use a can opener. Most cans come with pull-tops these days. I see her reaching for a can that requires a can opener, and her shoulders slump and she goes for something else."
Teenagers are so accustomed to either throwing their clothes on the floor or hanging them on hooks that Maushart says her "kids actually struggle with the mechanics of a clothes hanger."
Many kids never learn to do ordinary household tasks. They have no chores. Take-out and drive-through meals have replaced home cooking. And busy families who can afford it often outsource house-cleaning and lawn care.
"It's so all laid out for them," said Maushart, author of the forthcoming book "The Winter of Our Disconnect," about her efforts to wean her family from its dependence on technology. "Having so much comfort and ease is what has led to this situation -- the Velcro sneakers, the Pull-Ups generation. You can pee in your pants and we'll take care of it for you!"
The issue hit home for me when a visiting 12-year-old took an ice-cube tray out of my freezer, then stared at it helplessly. Raised in a world where refrigerators have push-button ice-makers, he'd never had to get cubes out of a tray -- in the same way that kids growing up with pull-tab cans don't understand can openers.
But his passivity was what bothered me most. Come on, kid! If your life depended on it, couldn't you wrestle that ice-cube tray to the ground? It's not that complicated!
Mark Bauerlein, author of the best-selling book "The Dumbest Generation," which contends that cyberculture is turning young people into know-nothings, says "the absence of technology" confuses kids faced with simple mechanical tasks.
But Bauerlein says there's a second factor: "a loss of independence and a loss of initiative." He says that growing up with cell phones and Google means kids don't have to figure things out or solve problems any more. They can look up what they need online or call mom or dad for step-by-step instructions. And today's helicopter parents are more than happy to oblige, whether their kids are 12 or 22.
"It's the dependence factor, the unimaginability of life without the new technology, that is making kids less entrepreneurial, less initiative-oriented, less independent," Bauerlein said.
Teachers in kindergarten have always had to show patience with children learning to tie shoes and zip jackets, but thanks to Velcro closures, today's kids often don't develop those skills until they are older. Sure, harried parents are grateful for Velcro when they're trying to get a kid dressed and out the door, and children learn to tie shoes eventually unless they have a real disability. But if they're capable of learning to tie their shoes before they learn to read, shouldn't we encourage them?
Some skills, of course, are no longer useful. Kids don't need to know how to add Roman numerals, write cursive or look things up in a paper-bound thesaurus. But is snail-mail already so outmoded that teenagers don't need to know how to address an envelope or put the stamp in the right spot? Ask a 15-year-old to prepare an envelope some time; you might be shocked at the result.
Lenore Skenazy, who writes a popular blog called Free-Range Kids, based on her book by the same name, has a different take. Skenazy, whose approach to parenting is decidedly anti-helicopter, agrees that we are partly to blame for our children's apparent incompetence, starting when they are infants.
"There is an onslaught of stuff being sold to us from the second they come out of the womb trying to convince us that they are nincompoops," she said. "They need to go to Gymboree or they will never hum and clap! To teach them how to walk, you're supposed to turn your child into a marionette by strapping this thing on them that holds them up because it helps them balance more naturally than 30,000 years of evolution!"
Despite all this, Skenazy thinks today's kids are way smarter than we give them credit for: "They know how to change a photo caption on a digital photo and send it to a friend. They can add the smiley face without the colon and parentheses! They never took typing but they can type faster than I can!"
Had I not been there to help that 12-year-old with the ice-cube tray, she added, the kid surely would have "whipped out his iPhone and clicked on his ice cube app to get a little video animated by a 6-year-old that explained how you get ice cubes out of a tray."
Friends playing devil's advocate say I'm wrong to indict a whole generation for the decline of skills they don't need. After all, we no longer have to grow crops, shoot deer, prime a pump or milk a cow to make dinner, but it was just a couple of generations ago that you couldn't survive in many places without that knowledge.
Others say this is simply the last gasp of the analog era as we move once and for all to the digital age. In 10 years, there won't be any ice cube trays; every fridge will have push-button ice.
But Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University who has studied culture and American life, defends my right to rail against the ignorance of youth.
"That's our job as we get old," he said. "A healthy society is healthy only if it has some degree of tension between older and younger generations. It's up to us old folks to remind teenagers: 'The world didn't begin on your 13th birthday!' And it's good for kids to resent that and to argue back. We want to criticize and provoke them. It's not healthy for the older generation to say, 'Kids are kids, they'll grow up.'
"They won't grow up," he added, "unless you do your job by knocking down their hubris."
Homework v Nurture
By Joanna Weiss Globe Columnist / April 3, 2010
Flash forward 30 years or so to my daughter’s full-day kindergarten experience, which includes substantial amounts of homework. Real homework: Scrambled sentences and flashcard drills. Addition and subtraction. Word problems.
It’s a way to reinforce what she’s learning in school, her teacher once explained. And on that level, I’m not complaining: My daughter usually loves school and learning, and applies her newfound skills in creative and practical ways. Once, she came to my office and, without prompting, drew an x- and y-axis on a white board. Her class had been charting the weather every day. I welled with maternal pride.
On the other hand, she’s 5. She’s supposed to do her homework at the end of a long day, when she’s tuckered out, her baby brother is fussing, and her parents are desperately trying to get dinner on the table. Homework can be a family project — some coaching with an abacus helps the math problems go down — and it can be stressful. Even more so, I gather, in later grades, when kids are often saddled with hours of nightly work from teachers who don’t coordinate, at times when they’re supposed to be busy with sports and music lessons and, theoretically, the act of being children.
And there’s no real proof that all of that homework helps, says Nancy Kalish, co-author of the 2006 book “The Case Against Homework.’’ Research shows no correlation, she wrote, between volume of homework and test scores or success in life. Other developed countries give far less homework than we do. Yet while parents and educators across the country have thanked her for the book, Kalish says, very little in our national school culture has changed since its publication. That’s partly due to our new emphasis on standardized testing, which prompts more drilling of academic skills. But it’s partly because of our pervasive and pressure-filled culture of kid achievement.
To many well-meaning parents, “achievement’’ is a term that’s so vague it can be a trap — a message that we don’t just need to give our kids the skills to live productive lives, but also to make sure those skills come early, in ways that can be measured. There’s a reason why so many baby toys have “Einstein’’ or “leap’’ in their names, and why companies peddle high chairs that purport to be educational. And there’s a link between an early focus on academic gains and the fact that so many high school seniors, trained early to link test scores to success, believe their futures hang on which colleges they happen to attend. (That’s an especially noxious idea at a time when private college tuition can top $50,000 per year.)
We’re far more malleable than that, both in our capacity to achieve and in our rates of learning. Kalish notes that, no matter when they start reading, most kids reach the same level by third grade. If they’re given too much homework before they’re developmentally ready, she says, kids can internalize the notion that they aren’t natural students. But as David Shenk argues in his new book “The Genius in All of Us,’’ natural talent or intelligence aren’t what determine achievement; discipline and hard work matter more, whether a kid’s passion is physics or piano.
Book title notwithstanding, Shenk isn’t advocating that we all create child prodigies. But he does believe in nurturing kids’ interests, and he thinks that homework can get in the way. That’s why — like many parents, I suspect — he thinks homework should be flexible and, to some degree, optional. He’ll send a note to his daughter’s teacher, saying she wanted to modify her assignment, or that it was more important for her to get a good night’s sleep than to finish every question. And when his first-grade son would rather make a home movie than fill out a worksheet, he indulges. Good teachers, he says, are more than willing to be flexible with him.
Joanna Weiss can be reached at [email protected].
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
Flash forward 30 years or so to my daughter’s full-day kindergarten experience, which includes substantial amounts of homework. Real homework: Scrambled sentences and flashcard drills. Addition and subtraction. Word problems.
It’s a way to reinforce what she’s learning in school, her teacher once explained. And on that level, I’m not complaining: My daughter usually loves school and learning, and applies her newfound skills in creative and practical ways. Once, she came to my office and, without prompting, drew an x- and y-axis on a white board. Her class had been charting the weather every day. I welled with maternal pride.
On the other hand, she’s 5. She’s supposed to do her homework at the end of a long day, when she’s tuckered out, her baby brother is fussing, and her parents are desperately trying to get dinner on the table. Homework can be a family project — some coaching with an abacus helps the math problems go down — and it can be stressful. Even more so, I gather, in later grades, when kids are often saddled with hours of nightly work from teachers who don’t coordinate, at times when they’re supposed to be busy with sports and music lessons and, theoretically, the act of being children.
And there’s no real proof that all of that homework helps, says Nancy Kalish, co-author of the 2006 book “The Case Against Homework.’’ Research shows no correlation, she wrote, between volume of homework and test scores or success in life. Other developed countries give far less homework than we do. Yet while parents and educators across the country have thanked her for the book, Kalish says, very little in our national school culture has changed since its publication. That’s partly due to our new emphasis on standardized testing, which prompts more drilling of academic skills. But it’s partly because of our pervasive and pressure-filled culture of kid achievement.
To many well-meaning parents, “achievement’’ is a term that’s so vague it can be a trap — a message that we don’t just need to give our kids the skills to live productive lives, but also to make sure those skills come early, in ways that can be measured. There’s a reason why so many baby toys have “Einstein’’ or “leap’’ in their names, and why companies peddle high chairs that purport to be educational. And there’s a link between an early focus on academic gains and the fact that so many high school seniors, trained early to link test scores to success, believe their futures hang on which colleges they happen to attend. (That’s an especially noxious idea at a time when private college tuition can top $50,000 per year.)
We’re far more malleable than that, both in our capacity to achieve and in our rates of learning. Kalish notes that, no matter when they start reading, most kids reach the same level by third grade. If they’re given too much homework before they’re developmentally ready, she says, kids can internalize the notion that they aren’t natural students. But as David Shenk argues in his new book “The Genius in All of Us,’’ natural talent or intelligence aren’t what determine achievement; discipline and hard work matter more, whether a kid’s passion is physics or piano.
Book title notwithstanding, Shenk isn’t advocating that we all create child prodigies. But he does believe in nurturing kids’ interests, and he thinks that homework can get in the way. That’s why — like many parents, I suspect — he thinks homework should be flexible and, to some degree, optional. He’ll send a note to his daughter’s teacher, saying she wanted to modify her assignment, or that it was more important for her to get a good night’s sleep than to finish every question. And when his first-grade son would rather make a home movie than fill out a worksheet, he indulges. Good teachers, he says, are more than willing to be flexible with him.
Joanna Weiss can be reached at [email protected].
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.