My worst enemy isn’t just the system, but what the system does to my students’ self-worth and confidence. The daily fight against belief. Don’t talk to me about grit; talk to me about systems of callousness and the incapacity for love and compassion. Talk to me about students knowing their environment is there to help them rather than them having to be skeptical the whole way through their learning.
Talk to me about the withered sparks and dulled stars dug deep into our celestial selves. Fight me when I’m not trying to extract that from 150 or so adolescents.
I prefer if people just said grit meant that yes, we value hard work and passion, and that’s as far as it goes.
Unfortunately, a handful of people are making tons of money on the idea that 10,000 of fixing your attitude about ideas students may or may not be interested in might close the achievement gap. It’s not that folks like Angela Duckworth, Paul Tough, and Malcolm Gladwell aren’t well-meaning folks. But, as we’ve seen with education professors such as Charlotte Danielson, we too easily trust intention without a thorough inspection of effect.
Grit, like so many of these ed reform ideas, may not be bad on its own. However, what’s been pervasive with ideas of grit is the bootstrap theory from which its derived, meaning “If these people just had grit, we could close the achievement gap” rather than “what does ‘grit’ look like for kids who face systemically oppressive odds?” or even “why is it that those who stereotyped for lack of ‘grit’ already have it for survival while those who don’t have to be taught haven’t actually needed it to survive in our society?” What does it mean for some of the folks I graduated with to have no grit at all, but still graduate from Harvard or Columbia because of their intellect or capacity for schooling? Are we quick to measure grit due to outcome?
Is this at least one of the reasons we attest expertise and heroism to multimillionaires who don’t have much expertise in the fields they have undue influence upon?
Perhaps. But the grit I’m dealing with daily is visible through not letting my students fail off a few missed assignments, pushing them to complete it, even if it means I’m spending that extra hour after school grading that work. By some measures, I had plenty of grit to make it to where I am today. I’m just reluctant to embrace such a thing. With the vast amount of grit I might have displayed, I probably can’t measure the bundles of fortune sent my way.
“Unfortunately, a handful of people are making tons of money on the idea that 10,000 of fixing your attitude about ideas students may or may not be interested in might close the achievement gap. It’s not that folks like Angela Duckworth, Paul Tough, and Malcolm Gladwell aren’t well-meaning folks. But, as we’ve seen with education professors such as Charlotte Danielson, we too easily trust intention without a thorough inspection of effect.”
Grifters gonna grift. Meanwhile, teachers do the hard work in our classrooms.
When people started talking about grit, that made sense. I mean, some people have a quality that gives them an edge. Could be any group of people, anywhere, who’s got some grit has an edge.
But then I heard people about measuring grit. That’s tough. Shaking my head. Doesn’t make a lot of sense.
And then I heard people talk about teaching grit. Now I call those people conmen. They have some other agenda or trying to trick readers or activists or someone because anyone who’s known anyone with grit knows they just have it.
Jonathan
When I first started teaching, I adopted the word both in the sense you use in your opening line, and in the sense you express later when you imply that urban students have all kinds of grit–but lack knowledge of the grit needed to navigate the current educational climate: the ability to survive the obstacles of standardization and marginalization but still come out the other end with your soul and creativity intact.
Now, of course, there’s been an Orwellian co-opting of the word (a solid mono-syllabic Proto-Germanic/Saxon word he otherwise would have approved of) so that what it means is less important than who it singles out. It no longer defines a quality anyone should strive to develop, it’s more meant to brand those who don’t have it in order to designate who can’t make it, those who perhaps never will. If you ain’t got grit, there’s nothing we can do for you.
It’s sad when your words get swept like a carpet out from under you.
Like so many other factors that impact a child’s outcome, even if we accept that these qualities help students overcome their circumstances, as public school teachers none of us get credentials in grit development, the same way we aren’t credentialed in poverty abatement or dysfunctional family mitigation. I don’t teach courage, but what I can do is place a child in the environment where they have to be brave, and provide as many tools as possible to make brave decisions and take brave actions. A loose analogy I like is when basketball coached miked-up say things like, “we gotta be tougher on D!” It’s one thing to say basically we need more grit on defense, but another to tell them “stay on the 3-point shooter, switch on the pick and roll, and elevate up and not at the shooter to avoid a foul.”
What these researchers and authors have done is illuminated another variable (math :-) to the equation of student learning anyone engaged with young people must account for. Lord help me if I see a PD on grit, or hear that word roll out of a school board member’s mouth tied to some program or grant.
When I was first hearing about this concept I honestly thought it was for the soft, suburban kids with the helicopter moms. I taught in an inner-ring school where the demographics were changing.The coddled kids needed grit. When I started reading about it being applied to minority/achievement gap kids and I was done.
Author
Exactly right. You hit it right on the nose.