If you are a typical new teacher in Baltimore City, you will most likely have at least heard of the book Mindset and perhaps, like myself, have somehow come into possession of three (or more) pocket sized copies of the book. If you are even more like me (in which case, your procrastination is particularly attuned), after your third copy you read enough to learn its general premise of viewing failure as a means of growth and integral to one’s personal development. Similarly, if your classroom looks anything like mine (“Mr. Bradunas, this is just too much!”), you perhaps realized that this is a message missing in your students’ mindsets.
A few months ago, NYT released an article (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html?pagewanted=all) that spoke to our failure to teach students this lesson that they called grit. It made a small splash when released in the education field and after reading it, I became determined to make grit central to my classroom. Charts were made. Lessons taught. Lessons reinforced. Chants chanted. Fast forward to May. Through an assessment of the highest rigor (watching my students during independent practice) it became apparent that my attempt to create a character development system had eroded in the daily grind of MSA prep. I leave it to you to infer exactly what happened.
I am of the camp that education is two fold. Character and academics. I come from a background of private education and while I can barely remember trigonometry or chemistry (besides what I have relearned watching Breaking Bad), I can still remember my schools motto; Men of Faith, Intellect and Integrity. According to this, academics (intellect) is only 1/3 of the equation. Granted, mottos are not made with proportion in mind and so I’ll settle with saying that character is, I believe, paramount to what education’s true purpose is.
The NYT article referenced research that stated grit is the single strongest predictor of future success. I’ll go on to say that character in general is a better predictor of future success than any MSA score. Out of curiosity, I created a couple wordles of education blogs and found that none of them had character as one of the words in the wordle. The greatest predictor of academic success does not appear in blogs whose singular purpose is to talk about education. (Caution: this was not done with any true consistency and so I would be more than happy if anyone found a blog that mentioned character on a consistent basis).
The reasons for this are quite simple. Character is abstract, hard to measure, and not tested (and therefore not related to funding, evaluations, etc…). Character is a long-term variable that takes more than one year to develop. Character is not possible to standardize. I mean, if we can’t get together to agree on social studies standards, can you just imagine the meeting that would arise if we were to create a character system for the city? Character is also strongly related to morality which is strongly related to religion. And therein lies the problem. Character is complicated. Too complicated to be the silver bullet. Too complicated to be used to justify funding. And so, while we may possess three copies of a book that helps make us effective, we fail to pass on this knowledge to our students. The key to committing something to memory is repetition. Perhaps we should start talking about character a bit more.
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