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The hostility that some people -- not me -- feel towards the arguments made in "Outliers" suggest both a misunderstanding of the premise, and a distrust of the conclusions.

As I understood the premise, it was not that the cultural backgrounds, language considerations, and lucky breaks are the sole factors in producing success or failure; if that were the case, there would have been no good Korean airlines pilots, ever. Instead, those factors helped produce outliers, and tended to correlate strongly with greater success. That is, speaking a language which helps one remember numbers better will, all things being equal, tend to make one better at math, but does not guarantee that everyone who speaks that language will be a mathematical genius. It's possible to fly an airplane well while still being from Korea, and it's possible to become a successful lawyer even if your father was not a Jewish man working in the garment industry.

The force that those cultural factors impart on our lives is distrusted, though, by those who want to believe that they have achieved something on their own, or that their heroes have achieved something on their own, I think because they feel it denigrates their experience to say that they achieved those great heights with the help of others. That kind of thinking is why almost everyone knows Sir Edmund Hillary and almost nobody knows who helped him: we tend to value the individual's achievement and view talking about support as watering that down. How often do commentators note that the MVP of a Superbowl was the beneficiary of a host of other factors? Peyton Manning cannot complete 29 of 34 passes unless his receivers make the catch, after all.

So I agree with the thought that we would have more successful people -- more in number, and greater in success, if successful people believed three things:

1. "that the future can be better than the present," and
2. that "I have the power to make it so" and
3. that I have that power in part because of my circumstances and background.

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Actually the reason that Asian country students perform better at math is that the curriculum for 4th grade students in these countries include being taught in some fashion the math concept that the Identity Rule is the CORE MATH CONCEPT. This understanding is why they perform so well as a group in math. The argument that the asian languages create some intellectual advantage does not explain why other non-asian speaking countries also perform at high levels. Those countries that understand the importance of the Identity Rule refer to it as The Golden Rule of Math.

Any person with good math skills knows the Identity Rule. What appears to be less obvious to educators in the U.S. (based on U.S. student math performance) is that the IDENTITY RULE is the CORE MATH CONCEPT, and that it can be easily taught. My contention is that these concepts can be understood by a student within an hour to an hour and a half, and that once understood (the Gestalt) by the student, the student can then easily understand all subsequent math instruction, without any further tutoring. An understanding of how to use the Identity Rule to manipulate fractions gives the student the ability to perform in math in the 98th percentiles, throughout elementary and high school just like students in asian countries.

I can provide a two page tutorial that only takes an hour to an hour and a half to walk a fourth grade student through. f.barcena35@comcast.net

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When I first began teaching English in a high school in upstate NY, I asked for the results of annual tests for reading and math. Everyone thought my request were strange.
"What do you want these for? No one else ever looks at them." But the secretary in the Guidance Department dragged out the results, and showed them to me.
"What year do you teach?" I taught 9 and 12 at the time, but the school did not test the seniors. She started to tear off the 9th grade report at the perforations when I stopped her. I asked to see all the results, including math, so I would be able to compare mine to others. she looked at me like I had two heads and I could tell she was irritated. You never ever want to irritate a secretary, and I knew that, but I really needed to know is my students were improving. I was surprised there wasnt a line of people eager for the results. This was in the 1980's. I could see the assigned reading and math levels on these IOWA tests were wildly inflated, evidently to reassure parents that all the students were above average, as they were in Lake Woebegone, but I found them useful nonetheless because I could measure the improvement of each of my students from their level achieved the previous year. A 9th grader might improve from 10.6 to 12.6, and since I have always found arithmetic relaxing, I dutifully recorded the incremental improvement +2.0, or in a few cases,-0.7.
I did the same for other grade levels, other teachers of the same grade level, and for my same students in their math assessments. I did this every year to assess my own performance and the methods I used which were different from those used by other English teachers. Obviously I wanted to know if the students were improving as well.

My point here is that not one single administrator ever gave a damn. Although my results were better than those of any other teacher in English or Math at any level, 7-11, my methods were often criticized. No principal, guidance counselor or superintendent ever listened when I tried to show them the results. They changed the subject. I got the impression they didnt know what I was talking about. I could tell each year that all the copies of the test results were filed in the Guidance Department and no one else ever looked at them, so I was probably right.

The IOWA tests assigned inflated grade levels, but they were very useful at measuring student progress. The district tested all students at the same time each year, but when they switched over to NCLB, they tested just two grades at first, and they tested in June, then March, then January, so it was not possible to measure progress. In addition, under NCLB, the goal was to get every student to pass. The assessments were not designed to measure individual student progress from year-to-year, and in fact, across
NY and across America, students are sliding down every year after 4th grade.

Re: NYorker article. Ed courses need to train teachers in best practices. They dont. They need to videotape student teachers while they are teaching, not just for those contrived 10-minute demos, but they need to have a camera running for several days. The student teacher needs to have all the footage evaluated for best practices. This actually compares very well to how they choose athletes, and it is also the way athletes learn to improve. Even in Middle School athletes are examining tapes to see how they can improve. I suggest Education Departments start doing the same thing.
It happened to me, by accident. I taught at a private school in Rhinebeck for Emotionally Handicapped teenagers, and I decided to direct MACBETH during the summer session. The school's photography teacher decided to videotape rehearsals. Ron was always taking photos of the kids for their individual yearbooks, and we all got used to having him there every afternoon. Later on, when I saw the video of myself when I was working with the kids during rehearsals, I knew that this was the right career for me. I just felt like a complete human being, operating on a mental and physical and emotional level, enjoying the moment. It was a tough job, and I was earning almost nothing, but those tapes showed me I was in the right place.

It is essential for student teachers to be able to see themselves and other teachers on tape, because once we start teaching we never get this chance. Teachers are rarely given even time to sit in other classes to watch how other teachers teach.

More later unless I am cut off.

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It really shouldn't be surprising that Matt Cassell has been an adequate performer in New England. He comes from a family of athletes, was a highly-regarded high school quarterback, and unfortunately landed at USC, on the depth chart behind two Heisman trophy winners. Cassell chose to stay at USC because he liked it there.

There are plenty of examples of quarterbacks who learned at the knee of Belichick and didn't become great quarterbacks. (Rohan Davey springs to mind.) Also, Belichick has no special expertise in working with quarterbacks ... he's a defensive coach. Cassell has learned to play quarterback from Josh McDaniels, a 31-year old student with a short resume.

This is a long way of saying that the reasons you give for the success of certain quarterbacks is entirely circumstantial. It could just as easily be due to the player's inherent ability, and it's just as likely that the player actually improved over a span of years due to his own effort and hard work rather than the teaching efforts of a professional football team, or his college, or etc.

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I was ready to write you a long letter arguing that more important than a teacher's innate talent is the environment into which she is drafted and the support she receives, when you conceded the point in this post. Rather than weeding out bad teachers or trying to recruit good teachers, school systems would be much better served if they focused on creating environments where teachers can get really good at teaching. I think there is much to be learned from the military (to make a rather clumsy comparison) which during a draft takes anyone -- regardless of bravery, training, experience, or talent -- and turns them into soldiers who, for the most part, develop weapons expertise and the bravery to charge into life-threatening situations and carry out their mission. In the same way, I believe that almost any teacher can become a master teacher with the right kind of support and practice and that most of that has to take place once they become teachers.

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I find it very odd that having gone to some length to show how the teaching success is not tied to the academic prowess of the person teaching you then make the unsupported statement that to be a teacher you need to have a degree.

Cheers, Liam

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I'd be pretty curious to hear your thoughts on Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate."

Are your views necessarily mutually exclusive? Obviously there is some middle ground, but is it merely lip-service to discuss it? Perhaps most importantly, to what degree do you believe that you disagree with Pinker, if at all?

What are your views on identical twin studies?

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I think sometimes people get too hung up on either the balck or the white. Many of the modern theories of the way things interacts, like those in outliers, are so much about the grey areas in between. David Brooks' focus on people suceeding through shear force of will seems to miss the point that there are so many other factors that are needed for sucess. Yes force of will helps a lot but so many people with much force of will acheive very little because of the environment or direction that they are driving in. We need more than just personality for something to succeed otherwise the only people that can succeed are those with a driven, forceful personality. A world where that was the only reason for success would not be the more balanced world that we live in today.

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The comment: "It's only nature that is unchangable and deterministic. Nuture [sic], by definition, isn't" is more than just a little naive. There is no reason to think, in general, that a genetic cause is in any sense more ineluctable than a social one. You should read Human Nature After Darwin by Janet Radcliffe Richards...

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who can quailify to application

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yes i agree very good behavior

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Hello,

I think what Brooks seems to be getting at is what the individual, by sheer will power or some such thing, can accomplish. Nurture can be changeable but it isn't within the individual's control: we don't get to choose how our parents raise us, how our high school teachers treat us and etc.

If you look at it this way, your book explains success in terms of ,what psychologists call, situational factors and not dispositions. (Even when you resort to dispositional explanations, those dispositions are almost always the result of the culture, parenting etc.)

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Grandchildren of functional/educational/successful (FES) grandparents have a second layer of probability for success later in life. People compute this as a "cultural" infulence when it is more appropriatly applied to the excellence of individuals that mentor young children around them in ways that result in good citizens. Folks mess up on the first batch all the time, so factor in FES for grandparents.
Excellent people is the primary concern on both the micro (home) and macro (policy) level and the classroom is no exception. When the indicators for classroom success are inconsistent, it seems to me that the more reasonable approach is to look to generational (and not cultural, a subtle step, I know) factors to find the answer.

Say a FES grandparent produces one child with a 50/50 chance of FES. If the child achieves FES, sobeit. If that child does not, the grandparent still has a 50/50 shot at getting the grandchild to FES. So the result is a %50 success rate over two generations. Take out the FES grandparent, and the two generational FES rate become %25.
So why does the persormance rates in children from different continents shock us so? Enter a good mentor/parent/grandparent and the math trends upward. One generational step demonstrates the drastic statistical disparity that concerns Mr. Gladwell so much.

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How closely does this idea correlate with Rawls' Second Principle of Justice?

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http://searchingfor93.com

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Two points --

1. Chuck Klosterman makes a good argument that apples and oranges are actually quite similar.

2. I can sense that you want to write a sports book. (Please write a sports book.)

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On page 54 of Outliers you ask=="How many high schools in the world had access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968?"

I know you are familiar with the Dartmouth BASIC language project that started in 1962 when John Kemeny (later Dartmouth President) and Tom Kurtz wrote this "beginners" computer language required ! for all Dartmouth freshmen--A friend and I were fortunate to commercialize the BASIC language and distribute terminals and support to hundreds of schools starting in 1966. I suspect there are hundreds of "1955" ers who had highly successful careers in the computer field.

By the way Kemeny was a Hungarian revolution immigrant along with Andy Grove and others--they may represent another group of interest.

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I am from Hong Kong, hailed as one of the "East Asian economic miracles" in the last few decades. There is a commonly accepted "refugee theory" about Hong Kong's success.

In the 1950s and 1960s, lots of refugees left Communist China and arrived in Hong Kong. They were broke and had no choice but to work very hard. But more importantly, they were self-selected risk-takers (most had to risk being caught, or drowned in the high seas, when escaping from China). Many of these risk-takers ended up being successful entrepreneurs.

In other words, the theory is about how adverse condition created successes, which on the surface at least seems contradictory to Outliers' premise. Of course one can argue that these talents would have done much better if they had better education, access to capital, etc. But I wonder how, and if, I should try to reconcile the two different theories.

Would appreciate thoughts from others. Thanks.

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Shaun Hill would agree with you.

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success is relative. in any group,
some will be called successful. even
a group of losers has the "best" loser.
a group of billionaires has the "poorest" one.
so, success is a matter of
survival and randomness. randomness
grouping; (I am your father) and survival (mother did not abort). it's just like the old
saying: "save one person and you save the world."
....'cause you never know.
of course, one could
argue the opposing corollary.

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"They were successful because their very fortunate cultural circumstances gave them that belief in meaningful work. Nurture here is driving nature, not the other way around."

But where did their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. get those "fortunate cultural circumstances"? HINT: see Charles Murray et. al. on Jewish genes.

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"It's only nature that is unchangable and deterministic. Nuture, by definition, isn't. "

Except that nature and nurture have a tendency to interact. All the genetic advantages in the world aren't going to help a child with fetal alcohol syndrome or who comes from an abusive environment. There are even cases of child prodigies with supposedly brilliant futures who end up "burning out" despite careful nurturing. William James Sidis, for example.

http://drvitelli.typepad.com/providentia/2007/09/reining-in-the-.html

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Malcolm,
would love to hear your thoughts about the President Elect's recent appointment of Arne Duncan as Education Secretary? after having read your book, i was intrigued by mr. duncan's resume which suggests an affinity for charter schools. if you were to look into your crystal ball, do you think you would find that his appointment to obama's cabinet to be a step in the right direction? what sort of cultural indicators would you look for during the early stages as obama's administration works to improve our nation's education system in order to gauge the success of any new programs/systems that are implemented?

along the lines of this thread, any thoughts about if/how the 10,000 hr rule applies to the success of QBs and teachers? aside from the qualitative aspects of mentoring programs - is there a quantitative measure of the time that teachers would need to spend practicing teaching in order to become great teachers? if 10,000 hrs were a benchmark i would be interested to see how great vs. poor teachers stack up on average?

@Don - great point!

btw, i live in Los Angeles and had been looking for ways to get involved by volunteering as a tutor for underprivileged kids in my neighborhood. Your book served as an impetus for achieving that goal. I recently got in touch with a local charter school and am working with them to develop an after school program to develop computer skills. Your previous books helped me develop my business, and Outliers has helped me to start giving back. Thanks you for doing what you do, and for being an inspiration.

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Interesting follow up thoughts.

I'm interested in your brother's thinking on this. So would time as an intern/resident (as is required in the medical field) be useful or simply bring about uneven results?

It seems that professional development (notice: different than "merit") seems to be the most logical approach in creating successful teachers. Many argue that the first few years of childhood is when the greatest impact can be made on skill development...perhaps the same notion can be applied to teachers?

Somewhat broad thoughts I know, but you see what I'm getting at.

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This may be helpful only for me, but let’s ask this question: Is Jeff Garcia a good quarterback? The short answer: It depends.

Jeff Garcia’s career stats are pretty good, better than average. He’s thrown almost twice as many touchdowns as interceptions (151-79) over his NFL career and has led three different teams into the playoffs. However, his stints with the Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions were failures and both teams quickly moved to replace him. While a lot of time could be spent discussing the Lions and the Browns as dysfunctional organizations where no one has been successful, I think it’s safe to say that Jeff Garcia is a good quarterback on a team that passes the ball often, that has a mobile offensive line that allows hims to move outside the pocket and make plays, and receivers who can adjust to his movement and gain yards after the catch. He can be above average on a team that plays to his strengths, and terrible on a team that doesn’t.

Is it possible that could be true with teachers as well? If the superstar math teacher was asked to wear a shirt and tie, was at a school where students found his energy bouncy and abrasive, would they still be watching video of him? So, in addition to providing strong professional mentoring, can we also help teachers learn the environments in which they will help students to thrive?

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