NPR had another piece on the differences between Asian (in this case Taiwanese) children and American children when it comes to learning and struggling to learn.
Based on a Brown University study, it is postulated that in American culture, kids are taught they will be successful if they have the right stuff to begin with. If they are smart, this innate quality, likely genetically endowed, will drive them to be successful, to learn and succeed. Taiwanese parents on the other hand tend to tell their kids that struggle is part of learning, something to be not just endured but celebrated, the stuff of character, of overcoming, of prevailing.
Like most generalizations about cultural values, there are enough individual variations to make one wonder why we even talk about cultural norms, but in the case of anyone's attitude toward learning, this idea of valuing either struggle or talent is important.
The Phantom's brother had two sons. Given a new challenge, say shooting a basketball through a hoop, one son was always able to succeed almost immediately. The other son missed, and missed but he would stay out on the court, hour after hour until, after a week, the "less talented" son became far better then the talented son, who by then had moved on to lacrosse, soccer or baseball. The "talented" son, for whom everything came easily, wound up becoming an architect, but when he saw what architects earn as opposed to the developers, he shifted to becoming a developer. He did what came easily, design, then shifted. The persistent son became a surgeon.
The thing about surgery is, it's ninety percent practice and persistence. We all imagine the heart of the lion and the eye of the eagle, the steady hand, but actually, it's mostly just practice.
Thinking about his own education, the Phantom well recalls the difficulty he had--owing in some measure to an obsessive compulsive gene--with shifting tasks, especially on timed standardized tests, where he would get stuck on one problem, determined to solve it, rather than being able to just move on to the next. In college, this tendency to ram his head against the wall kept him in the library long hours, and finally he made himself walk away form an organic chemistry problem, walk down the hall to the bathroom or the drinking fountain. He often found, when he returned to his study carrel, he could solve the problem.
This memory was sparked by what the Brown study showed: Given a very difficult math problem to solve, American students tended to give up after 30 seconds. Asian students worked for an hour, until the teacher stopped them.
The Asian parents told their children they were good to have struggled, because the important thing in the learning is the struggle. The American parents said, "Well, that's just not your thing."
But you can see American kids struggling to master difficult things at the batting cages, on the basketball court, on the single beam in the gymnastics setting. Learning to swim is the classic struggle. Some kids may get in, "like a fish takes to water," but none of them really swim without being taught systematically and there is usually some struggle there.
Likely, good education requires a lot of both: You have to struggle, practice, fail, get better at most things which are worth doing, but you are likely to be more successful at basketball if you have tall genes and some of us can struggle with calculus forever and never really get it. At some point, you have to know when to give up and move on to something with which you will have a better chance for success.
The kid who struggles must struggle in the right way--not just repeating the same thing over and over but coming back to look at the problem a new way, a fresh approach. Struggle by itself is not enough. Pounding against a wall is nothing to be proud of, unless you are pounding away in new ways, with an aim toward success.
The best coaches I remember spent a lot of time talking about the trouble I could expect in various situations, and how to overcome it. It would be a struggle, but there was always a new approach to get you past the difficulty. You expected trouble, and you called that "challenge." If there was no way around the trouble, struggle was not worth it.
One of the best stories about the redemptive value of struggle comes from a former chief of radiology who tells about the time he chose a resident for his program, giving him a spot for which 170 other applicants had competed, even though this particular medical student did not fit the standard profile of academic success. Unlike most of the radiology residents, he had not had straight A's from kindergarten on, or the highest test scores. He, in fact, had played football in the SEC, linebacker, but somehow he had managed to do well in his organic chemistry courses, and he kept up with his coursework and had good grades, not as good as some of the 170 applicants he beat out, but good.
He was also a very big person, and Black, and when he sat in front of the screens where X rays were projected, in the "reading room," wearing hospital scrubs, occasionally he was mistaken for a janitor by some of the older, white faculty, who could not understand why he was not emptying the trash cans.
At the start of his residency, he was not a star. He missed things. He did not know some things other residents knew. But he was "coach-able." You could correct him, and the next time he got it. "Some of our residents were so unaccustomed to failure, when you pointed out something they missed, they would dissolve--the women into tears, the men into defensiveness." And these super people progressed much more slowly. The football player got better and better, almost exponentially. By the end of three years, he was by far the best resident in the program. "That taught me something about the value of the standard measures by which we judge applicants," the chief said.
Of course, you need persistence in many fields, but you usually need more than that. It helps to be undeterred by failure, but it helps even more to use failure to make you better.
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