ABILITY & EFFORT

Ability & Effort

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review [tcr.org]
29 November 2006

    Students who do good academic work in high school and who are also good athletes are often puzzled that they get so much more recognition for their sports achievements than they do for the academic work on which they may have put forward the same high level of effort.

    Of course, success in academics and success in athletics may both be attributed to both genes and effort, but for some reason we in the United States have decided to celebrate athletic achievement as though it were purely the result of effort and to be much more circumspect about celebrating academic achievement in the schools, as though it were the result purely of genes (ability). Naturally, it isn’t fair to praise someone for their genes!

    Most Asian countries, according to Stevenson & Stigler (The Learning Gap) believe that effort rather than ability is most responsible for success in school, but we tend to lean the other way.

    Over the last 19 [29] years, I have published 748 [1,198] history research papers by high school students from 44 states and 33 [40] other countries. In that time, I have had some interesting comments from our authors. I went to visit a high school senior in Connecticut some years ago, whose essay on the Great Awakening won an Emerson Prize. She was all-state soccer in Connecticut and everyone in school knew that, but no one knew she had been published in The Concord Review. She went on to play on her college soccer team, at Dartmouth, but she also graduated summa cum laude in science and has since completed Harvard Medical School.

    Another of our authors, Sophia Parker Snyder, who is a Senior at Harvard College now, wrote me:

    “It is absolutely wonderful to know that there is someone in this world who appreciates the academic achievements of high school students. As a scholar-athlete, I am often shocked at the greater rewards I reap for my athletic achievements, regardless of the fact that these accomplishments are far less important than my intellectual ones. This approach to scholarship and athleticism seems to me completely backwards, and I am glad that you and your publication are doing something to right this wrong.”

Strong words, perhaps, but what are the consequences of the attitudes she describes? It is interesting that high school coaches often know and talk with college coaches, and that college coaches take a real interest in high school athletes, yet history teachers, for example, hear nothing from college history professors, who also take no interest in high school history students, however outstanding they may be. The irony is that the high school coach is often a history teacher and the outstanding high school athlete may be a first-rate history student as well, but they get the message from our society that what they do in athletics matters and what they do in academics does not.

    This tendency to downplay good academic work naturally influences other students who might be capable of better work if they decided to put in some more effort, or even a lot more effort, but if academic work is not that important, then why should they?

    The purpose of The Concord Review over the years has been to find exemplary academic work by high school students of history (and we have) and to distribute it as widely as possible to show teachers and other students what some of their peers are doing. The fine essays have come in, but the numbers of schools and teachers who have been willing to put good examples of history research papers before their students as an incentive have been quite small so far.

    Some Teaching American History programs even decided that showing teachers fine academic work might just discourage them or their students. We would have to stop showing National Basketball Association games on television if we thought that showing them to students would make them all give up at basketball. Of course we don’t have to do that, because outstanding athletic performances just make high school athletes want to try harder to excel.

    We need to cultivate that same confidence in our students when it comes to academics. We need to have faith that celebrating outstanding academic work and showing it to our young people will not scare them off, but will give them an incentive to put forth their very best efforts on their most important work—their school work.


“Teach with Examples”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
  
  

  

  
   

THE WHOLE CHILD

School Information System
Education: Investing in Our Future
www.schoolinfosystem.org

5 March 2008

THE WHOLE CHILD

EdNews.org; Houston, Texas; 1 March 2008

Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
Columnist EducationNews.org


    Here in Massachusetts these days, we are hearing more and more from the Governor and educators about “The Whole Child.” They say we should be sure, in our schools, not to get distracted from a focus, in a holistic way, on the whole child.

    I have heard about this “whole child,” but I have yet to have anyone explain what that could mean. I know that it has been said, of boys, for instance, that they are made of “snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails,” and of girls, that they are mostly “sugar and spice and everything nice,” but I can’t believe that completes the inventory.

    Each student may be considered from a neuro-psychological, socio-economic, philosophical, dental, muscular-skeletal, ethnic, spiritual, academic, motivational, personality configuration, family, allergic, drug-resistant, blood-type, intellectual, gastrointestinal and athletic point of view, among a large group of other perspectives.

    This raises the question of what parts of the whole child the school might be best qualified and equipped to work with? Surely no imaginable set of teachers, nurses, hall monitors, principals, bus drivers, coaches, and so on can deal with all the various characteristics of each human being who comes as a student to their school.

    It would appear that a school and its staff might have to choose which aspects of the whole child should be their focus. In recent decades, self-esteem, tolerance, social consciousness, respect for differences, and environmental awareness have taken up a good deal of time in the schools. Perhaps as a consequence, our students tend to be in-numerate and a-literate. The Boston Globe reports today that: “37 percent of public high school graduates who enter public higher education may not be ready.”

    In addition, our students, when compared with students taught abroad, often perform below average on international examinations of their academic fitness.

    Some educators, who may not have been all that academically inclined themselves in school, and who have experienced a focus in their graduate education programs on social justice, self-esteem, diversity training, environmental awareness and so on, find that they really do not know enough history, mathematics, science, literature, foreign languages and so on to teach them very well, and they may want to fall back on the sort of thing they studied at their schools of education and offer that to their students instead.

    When confronted with those, such as parents, who would like them to teach students history, mathematics, science, literature, foreign languages, academic expository writing and the like, many educators defend themselves by claiming that they cannot focus so much on academics because they have a holistic interest in the whole child.

    As it turns out, our society has people who can help them with this unwieldy burden. There are priests, rabbis, ministers, rishis and others who can help with young people's spiritual needs. There are medical professionals who can help students with their physical and mental health problems. There are activist organizations of many kinds to help them with social justice and environmental concerns. And there are many other social organizations, not excluding families, who can relieve our educators of the need they feel to “address” the whole child.

    Happily this allows educators to return to their original and traditional mission of teaching our students knowledge and academic skills, such as reading, writing and calculating. With the extra time available to them, now that they no longer have to worry about improving every aspect of their students’ lives, they can do much more to see that their students may enter college with the academic readiness they will need to survive there, and to enter the workforce with the literacy and numeracy skills so many employers have been begging for.

    It may be a wrench to give up the ambitious project of holistically taking on the whole child, with their multiple intelligences and so many other characteristics, but a new focus on academic work may, by itself, help to reduce the contempt in which so many of our schools and educators are now held by the nation whose young people they could be serving so much better.


===============

“Teach with Examples”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Academic Coaches [2014]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®