The focus on just thinking about standardized test scores as being synonymous with achievement for teenagers is ridiculous, right?
ANGELA DUCKWORTHThe focus on just thinking about standardized test scores as being synonymous with achievement for teenagers is ridiculous, right?
ANGELA DUCKWORTHThere’s this really awesome theory of human motivation – that human beings all want three things. One is to be competent, one is to belong, and one is be free, as in to have choice: to not be told what to do but to choose what to do.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHI believe kids should choose what they want to do, because it’s their life, but they have to choose something, and they can’t quit in the middle unless there’s a really good reason.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHWhen I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHYou know, the things that I want my own daughters to develop – the idea that we’re going to get there through rewards and punishments seems completely at odds with the idea of character itself.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHI don’t think that every child in America is going to necessarily aspire to, you know, a four-year degree from a liberal arts college or a certain kind of life. I think that people should learn to be excellent in the thing that they choose to do.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHI define talent as the rate at which you get better at something when you try. To be very talented means you get better faster and more easily than other people or other things that you try.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHVery few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it’s merely personally fascinating.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHIt is important to realize that the process of ‘fostering’ a passion takes trial and error. It takes experience; you cannot do it all in your head. And it takes a long time.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHThe parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHTo me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHI would be surprised if my girls ended up as women without grit. I really would.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHAnd I’ve discovered a strikingly consistent pattern: grit and age go hand in hand. Sixty-somethings tend to be grittier, on average, than fifty-somethings, who are in turn grittier than forty-somethings, and so on.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHI know that instructional time is a zero-sum game, but if we want kids to do well academically, it’s hard to imagine that happening if they don’t have some control over their attention.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHOne of the challenges of commencement speeches is that you have this older, wiser person who is accomplished talking to young, not-yet-so-wise, not-yet-accomplished adults or, in high school or middle school, even younger.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHGrittier students are more likely to earn their diplomas; grittier teachers are more effective in the classroom.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH