In the ever-ending boundaries of educational science, there is a new frontier: measuring grit.
Peter Greene discovers a striking phenomenon: apparently Connecticut has unlocked the secret of Grittology.
“I am sure that all of us, all around the country, want to know how this is done. I am sure that phones are ringing off the hook in CT DOE offices as other educational thought leaders call to ask for the secret of grittological measurements.
“Was it a physical test? Did they make teachers do the worm for a thousand yards? Did they make teachers peel onions and sing “memories” while watching pictures of sad puppies, all without crying? Did they have to compete in three-armed wheelchair races? Were they required to complete a season of the Amazing Race as participants? Did they have to stand stock still while being pelted with medium-sized canteloupes?
“Or perhaps it was a study of their personal history. We know that grittologists have determined that people who have tended not to quit things in the past probably won’t quit things in the future (who knew?) So maybe the state looked for people who didn’t quit things, like lifelong members of the Columbia Record Club or folks who actually finished an unfinishable sundae or who stayed in a bad marriage. Maybe the state only accepted cancer survivors or acid reflux sufferers or folks with chronic halitosis.
“Or maybe Connecticut has a special computerized grit test. Take a PARCC exam on a computer with a bad internet connection or using a keyboard on which some eighth grader has previously moved around all the keys. Create a word document on a computer running Windows 3.0– no swearing at the blue screen of death. Play HALO with a six-year-old on your team. Is there a grit praxis?”
Keep your eyes on Connecticut. They measure grit there. But be sure to read the comments where you will learn most teachers who applied to the program were accepted. Guess that all teachers in Connecticut have grit.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It sounds like “Grit” is the new “Self-esteem”, and anyone who worked with kids or parents who valued self esteem more than literacy, math or science will know what I mean.
Newer teachers may not understand this but if you taught long enough, then you lived it. I started teaching in 1975 when self-esteem wasn’t even on the radar but by the early 1980s it was a terminal cancer eating away at competent teachers pressuring them to cave in and join the hot air balloon of self esteem—meaning the kids had to feel good about themselves and nothing else was important.
I think that the Self-esteem movement that started outside of the schools in the home and even encouraged from church pulpits (I’ve researched this in depth so I know what I’m talkign about) is what’s responsible for grade inflation and dumbing down the curriculum. That was my experience when I was still teaching and as the self-esteem movement reached epic proportions the pressure on teachers to not fail kids was intense until teachers caved in and passed everyone to get the rabid parents and administrators off their backs.
It was a never ending battle where parents would even demand that their child be transferred to a teacher who would not fail them even though the kid never read, never did classwork and homework was a forgotten word. And this is where teachers who today would be accused of being incompetent became popular—the teacher of last resort to shut up parents who were more concerned with a child’s false sense of self esteem than if the kid was learning.
The parenting self esteem movement was the first inquisition aimed at teachers, and that led to where we are today.
I am working on a doctoral research project inspired by Diane’s book, Death and Life of the Great American School System (2011). If the public school system–as many of us knew it, at least–is dead or near death, it would stand to reason that public school teachers who remember the system as it was prior to No Child Left Behind (2002) have experienced loss and grief. If you remember what it was like to teach prior to No Child Left Behind, if you feel as if teaching completely changed when No Child Left Behind was implemented, or if you ever felt saddened by some of the changes that resulted from educational reform, then you may be interested in taking my survey.
Professional Loss and Grief in Teachers (a survey)
https://ndstate.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_5nCLnPAFadWZX93
Wonderful, Jackie. I will definitely do this.
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
It is no accident that our oligarchs have discovered gritfulness as a primary virtue.
They are in the process of remaking U.S. education as a workforce training program for the children of the proles. The whole theme of the current deform movement is workforce training. We need to be more competitive. Otherwise, those Singaporeans are going to throw us to the mat, stomp on our rib cages, buy up all our MacDonalds franchises, and replace all our Walmarts with Singaemporiums.
In the the world being created, there will be lots and lots of low-paying service jobs, and in those jobs, workers will be alienated from other workers, from the fruits of their own labors, from the tasks they are doing, and from their own dreams for the future. And it will take an enormous amount of grit to put up with that, day in and day out. They will have to be extraordinarily griftful, to grin and bear it obediently and slavishly.
And so the interest in “grit.”
“Will you be taking that latte on the veranda, Mr. Gates? Yes sir, immediately, sir. Anything you wish, sir. And for the young master?
I do not consider myself, by any means, a Marxist. However, the part of Marx’s body of thought that does hold up best, that is most profound, I think, most accurate and insightful, was his theory of alienation. He laid out this theory of alienation in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, here:
http://mailer.fsu.edu/~njumonvi/marx_e&p-mss.htm
It’s well worth reading, today. It speaks to much that is happening right now.
I guess that what you would call me is a neo-Georgian and an anarcho-syndicalist. I believe that teachers should run schools, but with the checks and balances provided by elected school boards and the courts operating to ensure that civil liberties are respected.
“alienation” is probably the result of the fact that for about 100,000 years Homo sapiens lived exclusively in small nomadic bands. More complex societies are less than 10-20,000 years old. We are still evolving to become better adjusted to the more complex heirarchial societies in which most of us now live.
So alienation is like Type II diabetes. With the change from a hunter gathering diet to an agricultrural diet glucose control became an important issue. We have made a lot of progress but maybe need another 10,000 years of evolution or so to solve the problem of insulin resistence.
I suspect that it is indeed true that humans have evolved to operate optimally in small bands. That’s how hominids and their ancestors lived for millions of years and how Homo lived until very, very recent times. The isolation of a couple and their kids in a house in the suburbs is a very weird phenomenon. But, of course, as with all things, there are multiple factors contributing to multiple kinds of alienation, and many of these are economic and social factors, including factors related to types of industrial work and roles and to class dynamics.
Your final sentence is the future of the U.S. “Will you…Mr. Gates …and young master?”
America’s shining moments and hopes for a people, lifted out of subjugation, is no longer feasible. The nation was simply overcome by the greed of a few and the complacency of many. ….Until,
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” JFK.
Grit(s):
bring to a slow boil; add a pinch of salt.
Put into bowl. Add a pat of butter and grind on some fresh pepper.
Enjoy.
fancy folk and Italians call them polenta
Bring water to a rapid boil. Stir the grits in slowly, stirring all the while, so that they don’t clump. Lower heat to a little less than medium. Add salt and butter (or vegan margarine, in my case) to taste. Stir until the grits/ begin to pull away from the sides of the pan.
This will take a while.
Pour into flat dish and allow to cool. Slice and use the polenta for other preparations.
follow the proportions of water to grits given on the package or box of raw grits/corn meal. You can do this with white or yellow grits. You can add various ingredients, if you wish, while cooking–salsa or chopped parsley, cilantro, rosemary or thyme, basal, spinach, onions, or garlic–these and many others are common.
Without trying to sound erudite, I discovered the best way to measure grit off the back of a box of Quaker Grits. It is measured in dry form, by the ounce..
Maybe it’s because I have teen boys – but the 6 year old on the Halo team… absolutely hilarious!
I remember watching Michelle Rhee on TED TV talk about grit. It was the must have – the be all end all attribute that all children simply HAD to possess in order to succeed. She went on to say something to this effect: “We don’t know what it is… but we want to find out!” Seriously.
Grit (I prefer the term “doggedness”) is the only thing the SBAC ELA tests measure, as far as I can tell. Because of these dreadful tests, I fear we’re creating a national doggedness curriculum: give kids an endless stream of confusing, boring, difficult and pointless tasks to build up their doggedness skills. This is rigor all right; it’s also scandalous malpractice.
Four and one-halfhours of ELA testing and we still dont know if an 8th grader can distinguish between a noun and a verb. Knowledge of only two items on this list were necessary to complete what was essentially a test of abstract, subjective skills that are nearly impossible to teach. Can you find the two?
•Allegory
•Alliteration
•Allusion
•Amplification
•Anagram
•Analogy
•Anastrophe
•Anecdote
•Anthropomorphism
•Antithesis
•Aphorism
•Archetype
•Assonance
•Asyndeton
•Authorial Intrusion
•Bibliomancy
•Bildungsroman
•Cacophony
•Caesura
•Characterization
•Chiasmus
•Circumlocution
•Conflict
•Connotation
•Consonance
•Denotation
•Deus ex Machina
•Diction
•Doppelganger
•Ekphrastic
•Epilogue
•Epithet
•Euphemism
•Euphony
•Faulty Parallelism
•Flashback
•Foil
•Foreshadowing
•Hubris
•Hyperbaton
•Hyperbole
•Imagery
•Internal Rhyme
•Inversion
•Irony
•Juxtaposition
•Kennings
•Litote
•Malapropism
•Metaphor
•Metonymy
•Mood
•Motif
•Negative Capability
•Nemesis
•Onomatopoeia
•Oxymoron
•Paradox
•Pathetic Fallacy
•Periodic Structure
•Periphrasis
•Personification
•Plot
•Point of View
•Polysyndeton
•Portmanteau
•Prologue
•Puns
•Rhyme Scheme
•Rhythm & Rhyme
•Satire
•Setting
•Simile
•Spoonerism
•Stanza
•Stream of consciousness
•Suspense
•Syllepsis
•Symbol
•Synecdoche
•Synesthesia
•Syntax
•Theme
•Tone
•Tragedy
•Understatement
•Verisimilitude
•Verse
Indeed, NY. The creators of the standards and of the test designs seem, to me, close to illiterate. I suspect that those two are, BTW, mood and tone. The know-nothings who wrote the egregiously amateurish Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] in ELA return to those again and again and again and again and again and again and, of course, leave out almost everything else on your list or any reasonable list of literary terms.
Well, well said, Ponderosa!!!
Perhaps grit is a genetic mutation?
“Perhaps grit is a genetic mutation?”
Yeah, I think it has something to do with a (bird’s) crop.
It’s not how many times you fall down, it’s how many times you get up that counts. Ask any coach. This lesson is taught in may ways in many situations. Learn, adapt and move on.