It is Thursday, December 26, 2024, Boxing Day, the second day of Chanukah, and, most important, the second Day of Coynezaa.
The Hili dialogue will be very short today because I prepare most of them the day before, and yesterday was Christmas, when I took a well-deserved break. We will have a science post and a readers’ wildlife post, but the full Monty won’t be on tap until tomorrow. So first, here’s Hili (and Szaron). Hili is chewing out the sub-editors
Hili: What do our readers like best?A: I don’t know, I never thought about it.Hili: That’s what I suspected.
In Polish:
Hili: Co nasi czytelnicy lubią najbardziej?Ja: Nie wiem, nigdy się nad tym nie zastanawiałem.Hili: Tak podejrzewałam.
And Szaron on his blanket and the poinsettia. No worries: none of the cats gnaw on the plant, whose sap is poisonous.
*One NYT article that readers can quarrel about. It’s by Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Penn’s Wharton School, and is called “No, you don’t get an A for effort.” (See it archived here.) It’s an argument that today’s students, who beef about their grades not reflecting their effort, are misguided. While effort may count some, achievement, or merit, is more important—at least for course grades. Excerpts:
After 20 years of teaching, I thought I’d heard every argument in the book from students who wanted a better grade. But recently, at the end of a weeklong course with a light workload, multiple students had a new complaint: “My grade doesn’t reflect the effort I put into this course.”
High marks are for excellence, not grit. In the past, students understood that hard work was not sufficient — an A required great work. Yet today, many students expect to be rewarded for the quantity of their effort rather than the quality of their knowledge. In surveys, two-thirds of college students say that “trying hard” should be a factor in their grades, and a third think they should get at least a B just for showing up at (most) classes.
This isn’t Gen Z’s fault. It’s the result of a misunderstanding about one of the most popular educational theories.
More than a generation ago, the psychologist Carol Dweck published groundbreaking experiments that changed how many parents and teachers talk to kids. Praising kids for their abilities undermined their resilience, making them more likely to get discouraged or give up when they encountered setbacks. They developed what came to be known as a fixed mind-set — they thought success depended on innate talent, and they didn’t have the right stuff. To persist and learn in the face of challenges, kids needed to believe that skills are malleable. And the best way to nurture this growth mind-set was to shift from praising intelligence to praising effort.
The idea of lauding persistence quickly made its way into viral articles, best-selling books and popular TED talks. It resonated with the Protestant work ethic and reinforced the American dream that with hard work, anyone could achieve success.
Psychologists have long found that rewarding effort cultivates a strong work ethic and reinforces learning. That’s especially important in a world that often favors naturals over strivers — and for students who weren’t born into comfort or don’t have a record of achievement. (And it’s far preferable to the other corrective: participation trophy culture, which celebrates kids for just showing up.)
The problem is that we’ve taken the practice of celebrating industriousness too far. We’ve gone from commending effort to treating it as an end in itself. We’ve taught a generation of kids that their worth is defined primarily by their work ethic. We’ve failed to remind them that working hard doesn’t guarantee doing a good job (let alone being a good person). And that does students a disservice.
. . . . This is what worries me most about valuing perseverance above all else: It can motivate people to stick with bad strategies instead of developing better ones. With students, a textbook example is pulling all-nighters rather than spacing out their studying over a few days. If they don’t get an A, they often protest.
. . . Teachers and parents owe kids a more balanced message. There’s a reason we award Olympic medals to the athletes who swim the fastest, not the ones who train the hardest. What counts is not sheer effort but the progress and performance that result. Motivation is only one of multiple variables in the achievement equation. Ability, opportunity and luck count, too. Yes, you can get better at anything, but you can’t be great at everything.
. . . Teachers and parents owe kids a more balanced message. There’s a reason we award Olympic medals to the athletes who swim the fastest, not the ones who train the hardest. What counts is not sheer effort but the progress and performance that result. Motivation is only one of multiple variables in the achievement equation. Ability, opportunity and luck count, too. Yes, you can get better at anything, but you can’t be great at everything.
Is Grant a hardass, too tough on his students? Should effort (which can be gauged to some extent) count for anything when assessing grades? After all, when someone like me used to look at grades on a transcript, say for potential graduate students, I assumed they reflected mastery of the material.
And on meme from Cat Memes:
. . . and my daily post from the Auschwitz Memorial:
Killed with cyanide gas upon arrival at Auschwitz, this French Jewish girl was only eight.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2024-12-26T11:37:01.149Z
After thirteen years of school during which students get high marks for good work, mediocre work, poor work, improved work, not doing the work but turning up, and for not turning up if the teacher can’t control them, it is hardly surprising when they whine at getting grades that reflect the quality of their work more accurately.
It’s rather sad that kids turned out of a one-room schoolhouse at fourteen were better equipped for the world than those attending modern schools.
I’d rather my doctor/surgeon/dentist/lawyer/engineer was somebody who is highly skilled and knowledgable but got that way with very little effort than somebody who put massive effort in in college but is still a bit rubbish.
I think the litmus text is that any criterion you wouldn’t use to select the surgeon who is about to operate on you is bullshit (for professionals, at least).
Not everyone gets to be an astronaut.
All good ideas, once implemented, will eventually be taken too far. It’s our fallible nature.
I suspect, however, that one reason the A-For-Effort crowd is able to assume that effort’s not just an important component but the whole point of their endeavors is cultural. Much of modern life, including childhood and adolescence, is pretty much divorced from doing manual labor which matters.
Not true for most of human history. If that cow isn’t found it dies; if that well isn’t dug there’s no water; if that wood isn’t chopped you freeze this winter. There are undeniable physical consequences in a reality which doesn’t give a damn about your precious self and the journey you’re making towards Being the Best You You Can Be. You can’t argue with Nature and change the past.
I think games and even academics have what might be called artificial consequences. Failing a course because your study habits weren’t optimal isn’t quite like dropping a load of bricks on the heads of your work buddies because your attempt to tie down the load earned only an A for effort. The first one may matter — but the second one really, really matters in a way that’s apparent without having to self-reflect.
“Much of modern life, including childhood and adolescence, is pretty much divorced from doing manual labor which matters.”
Hear, hear.
It would seem that the persistence, perseverance, toil, sweat and grit of manual labor ought to count for something. I’d like to think that an employer (with some familiarity with manual labor) would like to see at least a bit of manual labor on a prospective employee’s resume. It seems that it would be a reasonable indication that the employee is not likely to complain and wilt like a salted snail when confronted with the least bit of inconvenience.
Results, not effort.
It’s so sad about Hélène Pokoïk, a completely innocent child, and a burgeoning scholar—just look at those books! She would have been 91, and a great-grandmother.
Those pictures are always so sad, but they’re very effective.
As far as A for effort: no. Unless you’re a cat. Then all you have to do is look cute. 🐈🐈🐈
Certainly “theory” is in play, but I do wonder how many educators who are praising effort rather than achievement harbor childhood—and perhaps adult—insecurities. I’ve thought the same about those who advocate for students being able to retake tests and rewrite papers as often as they like before getting a final grade. But, hey, they are the appropriately-credentialed education “experts,” so the rest of us should all genuflect and let the experts proceed as they please.
As a non-educator, other than being a TA in grad school, I’m not sure that effort is worth a grade as such, though I think it is worth a comment – and here I’m thinking about school rather than university, where grades don’t come with comments.
But as I have observed in my career, and as a late colleague of mine put it: “You can train for skills, but you can’t train for effort.” In other words, sometimes it’s worth hiring a person who appears to lack a job-related skill if it seems that they are willing to learn it. Not quite the same thing, I know.
One model of education I’ve found useful is that competence has 3 interrelated aspects: understanding (“know that”), skill (“know-how”), and attitude. Persistent effort in the face of frustration is mainly an attitude, which by itself can not compensate for deficits in skill or understanding; academic work is mainly based on understanding, which by itself can not compensate for deficits in skill or attitude (e.g. entitlement).
I attended junior high in the early 70s (in California) and our report cards had letter grades and comments. I studied hard at home and always got A’s, but the comments consistently said things like, “Debi seems disinterested, off in her own world, doesn’t apply herself well…”. I was grounded repeatedly as a result. The comments were accurate. I was miserable in junior high and constantly planning my next escape. If effort were what I was being graded on, I suppose I would have flunked.