Musings on Grit

[alterin]

About 10 years ago, the big word in education was Grit. Grit was roughly described as the ability to overcome challenges.

I've never had a lot of grit. I've been able to get where I am and to float by and to sometimes succeed by a combination of beginner's luck, intelligence, and just an ability to pick up things and understand basic concepts. It kinda works out for me sometimes.

Where I've failed has been because of a lack of grit. I would start a new skill or hobby, and I would be fairly quickly pretty good for a beginner. When it comes to small roadstops or small challenges, my journey would either end or get sidetracked. Over the years, I've gotten better at this, but I'm a flighty pick up something and move on type of person, and I've shown a big resistance to working on my lack of grit. I don't have enough grit to get more grit?

Anyways, back to education. Ten years ago the word was Grit. Today, education has completely abandoned grit, and I'm trying to build up enough grit to put into words how dangerous and how horrendous this is.


My path to "success" will not necessarily work for anyone else. I'm not tooting my own horn when I say my natural "inclinations" or my natural "intelligence" or whatever you want to call my flighty nature is my biggest, most fatal flaw. Because grit, that thing I lack, is so much more important than any of those things that I possess, and someone with a lot of grit will be able to go so much farther and be so much more successul than I was/am.

So, it's incredibly sad when I see how much education has, not only tried to deemphasize, but has almost made grit a dirty word. We've abandoned basic coping skills. You gain grit by attempting to do something, failing, and getting yourself back up and trying again.

Education has decided that failure is a dirty word, and it's not. We need to embrace failure as the ultimate learning tool. Instead of letting students use the word "anxiety" as this emergency parachute that will let them completely abandon trying, we need to let them sit with their anxiousness and try to overcome it. And maybe, it will be painful. But trying to control the circumstances and the situations surrounding their anxiousness will allow them to grow and get past it.

Grit was a great idea that explains so much about what we're actually trying to do, and instead of embracing it because it's a real skill that will help so much more than the "hard" skills that we try to instill on students and learners, we've abandoned it because we don't have enough grit to see it through. Honestly, I'm not sure the education has enough grit to see anything through. It's just one fad after another and a refusal because we don't see instant results. And I hope the irony is palpable.

Comments

[hudebnik]

Perhaps another reason for not teaching grit is that nobody knows how to teach grit, because the people currently teaching were never taught "how to teach grit", nor were they ever explicitly taught grit themselves. The closest we have is reflecting on our own un-pampered, independent-learning, falling-down-and-getting-back-up childhoods through sepia-colored glasses and sounding like every Old Person in history who's ever complained about "kids these days".

A somewhat similar issue: AI is here, getting better, and not likely to go away unless there's a Butlerian Jihad, so we need to teach kids how to use it for what it does well, while (a) still using their own minds for what humans do well, and (b) not letting their own minds atrophy. And nobody knows how to teach that, indeed almost nobody knows how to do that, partly because the answers are changing by the month.

[alterin]

It's not even that we don't teach it, because yes, it is not something that you actually teach. But, as you're pointing out it falls under the general umbrella of meta-cognition skills, reflecting on the process that we've gone through. These skills are supposed to be integrated throughout all subjects, but then they're paired with the currently very infuriating idea that we need to separate behavior from assessment.

We're being told and forced to do things like accepting all late work, minimum F policies, unlimited retakes, and in general what we're teaching kids is that there is no real accountability, and when there's no accountability, why should you even try?

I have a couple of blog ideas that I haven't gotten to when it comes to AI in education, but in general, I don't think teaching kids how to use it is a real option. I think of it more along the lines of what happened to math education when calculators became more prolific: sure, we can use it after we built a set of foundational skills. The difference being is that the majority of kids in k-12 have not and will not have built those foundational skills. I don't think we're harming them at all by just teaching those foundational skills without AI assistance.

We won't have any studies on it for a while yet, but I'd be shocked if using AI as someone under a certain age is not having similar catastrophic effects that social media is having.

[hudebnik]

I'm currently working at Google, which (like many tech companies) strongly encourages employees to use AI whenever possible, on the off chance that they'll stumble across one of the cases in which it dramatically improves productivity. (Most of the time it doesn't, but there are enough of those cases that the company wants us looking for them.)

My teaching experience was mostly at the college level, not K-12. College kids are thinking about finding jobs in their field, may already be working a job in their field, and they inevitably hear about situations like the above where employers encourage, if not require, AI use. In that context, telling them not to use AI simply proves to them what they were already predisposed to believe: that you, the teacher, have no understanding of the real world and can be safely ignored.

So at least at a college level, we have to accept that students are going to use AI, and incorporate it into the curriculum rather than treating it as a form of cheating. Which means teaching how to use it well: "what kinds of tasks does it do well?", "what kinds of tasks does it do badly?", "what kinds of mistakes does it often make?", and the user's responsibility to watch for and correct those mistakes.

You could say the same things about calculators. Students using calculators need to develop the habit of reality-checking their results, so if the calculator says the area of this shape is -3.2, or the train is traveling at twice the speed of light, something is probably wrong.

For that matter, you could say the same things about searching the Web for answers to questions. Yes, you can find a lot of valuable information very quickly that way, but some of it may be unreliable or even intentional lies; applying common sense and skepticism to Web-search results is an important skill that can be taught.

The same considerations apply to some extent in high school, less so in the lower grades.

As for "catastrophic effects", see this column in Friday's Times, which references this discussion of research on changing attention spans over the past few decades.

[alterin]

So, I'm certainly not suggesting that students shoudn't be trained in the use of AI at some point. They absolutely should, but to me that falls under the category of something that is very domain specific. What I'm doing and what the majority of k-12 teachers are teaching is very non-domain specific. ELA is covering skills that are used by everybody. Basic chemistry, basic physics, algebra, etc are all very much doing the same thing. At that level, there's no use teaching a kid how to use AI because they do not know enough to know that trains can't travel at twice the speed of light, yet.

Sure once they start taking AP courses or they're taking higher level math (and then we're out of my reach of when exactly is appropriate), okay sure - absolutely. And when they're past their core college courses, again - absolutely. I can't imagine a modern coding degree that doesn't have 'vibe coding' baked into its curriculum.

And as an ELA teacher, we do cover the skills that looks for bias and looks for where there are gasps in logic, and hopefully, there's enough there that when they are in a domain specific class they can make the connection, "oh this is like when we did this."

But they need to know reality before they have a chance of being able to check it. And when I'm asking a student to reflect on how they performed on a speech, they shouldn't be looking at AI, who didn't look at their speech anyways, they need to show me the foundational skills that I'm trying to teach.

Not able to read the Times, but I like the discussion - I've seen a few of those, possibly with the same lady.