every mom wants to be an all-powerful wizard
A recent opinion article in the New York Times got me thinking again about whether or not good students become successful. As stress and anxiety in college students increase, you have to wonder if all the homework and stress of being a straight-A student is worth it. Is there a connection between a student’s GPA and their later success?
…
Finland’s education system ranks at the top of the world by almost every measure, in all sorts of rankings. How do they do it? How is the US education system compared to Finland? To get more information, I watched The Finland Phenomenon:Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System, from the Robert Compton Documentary series on Global Education, directed by Sean T. Faust. In my first post, I looked at the differences between Finland’s school system and our school system and then at how the Finnish educational system structured.
How else do Finnish schools differ?
In Finland, they actively try not to punish students for mistakes and there’s very little testing….
In my last post about How Children Succeed, by Paul Tough, I considered how Advanced Placement (AP, IB, and other courses designed to teach college courses at the high school level) try to challenge high achieving students. Certainly, these rigorous (often defined as requiring lots of hours of study outside of class, that is, homework) can teach self-discipline, which is measured by grades. However, good grades don’t always lead to success. And my research has shown that for the jobs of the future, we really need to be teaching innovators. So what do grades have to do with teaching innovators? Nothing.
“[Self-discipline] may be very useful for predicting who will graduate from high school, but it’s not as relevant when it come to identifying who might invent a new technology or direct an award-winning movie.” – Angela Duckworth, How Children Succeed p 74
This really gets to the heart of what I’m searching for….