The main theme of this book is the existence of patterns behind success, which are very weakly acknowledged. A sub-theme is the incidence of culture.
We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either "have it" or you don't. But to Schoenfeld, it's not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That's what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students. Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds...
Every four years, an international group of educators administers a comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior high students around the world. It's the TIMSS, whose point is to compare the educational achievement of one country with another's. When students sit down to take the TIMSS exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It asks them all kinds of things, such as what their parents' level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friends are like. It's not a trivial exercise. It's about 120 questions long. In fact, it is so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank. Now, here's the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMSS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.
The person who discovered this fact is an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania named Erling Boe. So, which places are at the top of both lists? The answer shouldn't surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan)*, Hong Kong, and Japan. What those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work. They are the kinds of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year, said things to one another like «No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.»
* Mainland China isn't on this list because China doesn't yet take part in the TIMSS study. But the fact that Taiwan and Hong Kong rank so highly suggests that the mainland would probably also do really well. Secondly, and perhaps more important, what happens in the north of China, which isn't a wet-rice agriculture society but historically a wheat-growing culture, much like Western Europe? Are they good at math too? The short answer is that we don't know. The psychologist James Flynn points out, though, that the overwhelming majority of Chinese immigrants to the West — the people who have done so well in math here — are from South China. The Chinese students graduating at the top of their class at MIT are the descendants, chiefly, of people from the Pearl River Delta. He also points out that the lowest achieving Chinese Americans are the so-called Sze Yap people, who come from the edges of the Delta, «where soil was less fertile and agriculture less intense.»
Research shows that the difference between people that are good in a field and those who are very good depends on the time spent practicing. The book gives some examples and quotes research of successful people/groups of people who spent about 10,000 before achieving a top level of performance.
Success is not only a matter of merit, but of chance, opportunity (and sometimes selection and self-fulfilling prophecy)
~ the ecology (environment) of an individual explains his success
Notion of accumulative advantage; one advantage leading to another
Research has shown that pupils coming from a rich background and those coming from a poor background have the same learning potential at school. The difference lies in the fact that the pupils living in rich surroundings are performing more intellectual tasks during the summer holidays (they have easier access to books, training notebooks, etc), thus enabling them to maintain a similar level between the end of their previous school year and the beginning of the following year.
People from rich backgrounds do well in society because of the way they are not intimidated by authority and how they have learnt to interact with others
~ notion of entitlement
Each one of us comes from a culture which has its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions.
Who we are cannot be separated from where we are from
~ notion of cultural legacy
A culture of honour can be embedded into people's behaviour if their ancestor had it.
In the 1960's and 1970's, Geert Hofstede, a Dutch psychologist, was working for the human resource department of IBM's European headquarters. His job was to travel the world and interview employees extensively (this resulted in an enormous database), so as to analyse the ways cultures differ from one another, from country to country. Today Hofstede's Dimensions are among the most widely used paradigms in crosscultural psychology.
The five cultural dimensions:
Take a look at countries' scoring on each of these dimensions.
According to Ute Fischer and Judith Orasanu, there are 6 levels of mitigated speech.
Here is an example, based on the phraseology of pilots:
That's the most direct and explicit way of making a point imaginable. It's zero mitigation.
Notice the use of "we" and the fact that the request is now much less specific. That's a little softer.
Implicit in that statement is "we're in this together."
That's even softer than a crew suggestion, because the speaker is conceding that he's not in charge.
This is the most mitigated statement of all.
Planes have crashed because the level of speech of the second-in-command talking to the pilot, or that of the pilot talking to the Air Traffic Control, was too mitigated. This is the reason why in South Korea, English became the only language allowed in the cockpit.
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