Their Choice

               Failure. What is failure?  Is failure something that can be learned from or is failure something that defines who we are and what we do.  In Carol S. Dweck’s book Mindset, the author evinces that the answer to this question truly lies within ourselves and what we think, i.e. our mindset.  Dweck, unlike Malcolm Gladwell (author of Outliers), believes that people themselves are in complete control of what they think and how they succeed or do not succeed.  According to Dweck, we are all born with a certain amount of talent or a set of skills and what we do throughout our lives can drastically impact what we become: for better or worse.

                There are two mindsets which a person can have: a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.  A person with a fixed mindset tends to take their failures and lets them define them and really bring them down on an emotional level.  However a person with a growth mindset utilizes their failures to better themselves in future endeavors.   In her book, Dweck mentions college students with a fixed mindset who refuse to look at the test scores of those who performed better on a given exam.  Instead they choose to look at the test scores of those who don’t perform as well.  However, college students with the growth mindsets were more concerned with those people who performed extraordinarily on the exam so that they could learn from their failures.   The students with fixed mindsets chose to look at test scores of those who didn’t perform as well because they needed to do what people with fixed mindets tend to do: “repair their self-esteem” (Dweck 36), rather than their failures.

                I do not want to think of myself as a college student with a fixed mindset, but the parallels that I was able to draw between myself and those Dweck mentions with fixed mindsets is astonishing.  I know that I would never want to see another student’s papers on something I performed poorly on.  It just makes me feel like more of a failure.  It leaves me thinking: “If he/she could have done so well, why couldn’t I”.  But perhaps this is something that I can work on.  Maybe I can stop being a college student who always needs self-assurance and become one who learns from failure.

Dweck, Carol S. Mindset. New York, New York: Ballantine Books, 2006.

What was Marita’s bargain?

                In chapter nine of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, the author shares a story about a young girl named Marita who traded her freedom and life as a kid for better education.  Gladwell shares that Marita grew up with her single mother who had very little money and the public schools of New York were lacking in structure and high test scores.  However, a school named KIPP was known for its high standards and better education; and when Marita was given the chance to attend, she seemed to have bargained her time as a kid for what she believed she needed more: a good education. 

This is a concept which is very difficult for me to grasp.  It seems amazing that a girl who is still in elementary school can make such a mature decision.  She could’ve just as easily said no when her mom asked her about it.  Once enrolled, Marita went to KIPP six days a week and her day lasted from 5:45 a.m to 11 p.m., including homework.  At the age of eighteen, it’s hard for me to imagine doing that, let alone when I was in elementary school.   But Marita knew that her key to success would be the better education that KIPP could provide for her. 

Marita essentially made a bargain with her school and in return KIPP gave her the same promise that it provided to its other students: “ to take kids who are stuck in poverty and give them  a chance to get out” (Gladwell 267).  But with all of this in mind, one may ask: what is more important to success, opportunity or hard work?  Gladwell may argue that without the luck of being drawn for attending KIPP, Marita would have no way of being successful.  However, without Marita’s long days at school and working on homework, she wouldn’t be successful either.  It is truly a matter of perception as which is more important, but perhaps that is exactly what Gladwell wants his audience to think about. 

Comparison of Harlan, KY to Proctorville, OH

When reading the beginning chapter six in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, in which he describes the basic environment of the small town of Harlan, an image of Proctorville,OH did cross my mind.  It was specifically the narrow roads and the characteristic of it being a “remote and strange place , unknown by the larger society around it” (Gladwell 162) which painted a picture of Proctorville in my mind.  However, when Gladwell goes on to mention the violence and family feuds in Harlan, KY, the similarities between my hometown and Harlan seemed to diminish.  Like Harlan, Proctorville has its share of families that most everyone knows about, but this is not due to a history of violence among them.  The only reason that certain families are well-known in Proctorville is because it is such a small place and certain families play a larger role in the community. Whether that role is positive or negative is different from family to family.

                That is not to say that occasional disputes don’t occur in a place like Proctorville.  I feel like that “code of honor” which Gladwell speaks of still exists in Proctorville, but definitely not to the same extreme.  I remember in high school that occasional physical altercations occurred between certain people simply from the exchange of a few harsh words.  Now whether these disputes are just the result of teenagers being immature or because of the “code of honor” is debatable.  But then there have been times when I have seen adults around Proctorville get into arguments in public places too.  But they are not teenagers.  Are they simply acting by the “code of honor” which may have been brought to the states by their ancestors or are they just as immature as their children? 

What is a successful student?

Just as it was mentioned with the definition of an outlier, the definition of a student who is successful is open to interpretation and depends mostly on society's view of the subject.  It is absolutely true that a student who works hard and earns A's and B's in school is a successful student.  Or is it? Did the student put in all of his effort?  Is the student happy with the outcome of the classes? Why is it that we think that earning a letter grade closer to an A makes a student more successful?  That's right.  It is simply because that is what we, as a society, have learned while growing up.  Those who earn better grades, earn better jobs, and sometimes even more money. To society, a successful student earns A's and then gets rewarded for those A's in the form of different privilages or more prestigious jobs.  Take the example of honor students at Marshall University.  Because the students earned higher grades in the past, they are rewarded with the opportunity to register for classes first. There's also the idea behind merit-based scholarships.  Because certain students were more "successful" than others in the past, they get to go to school for less money. Why can't a student who puts in all of his effort, all of his time, and manages to make it with straight C's and D's be considered a successful student?  This is because it is far too difficult and inconvenient to measure the amount of effort and hard work that one puts into schoolwork.  It is far easier to put a grade letter next to a student's name and judge their success based on that. 
There is no black and white when it comes to the true definition of a successful student.  The true definition of a successful student lies within that gray area, which we, as a society do not want to step in; for fear of finding something which we don't have the means to or are unable to understand.

What is an outlier?

According to dictionary.com, an outlier is "a person, thing, or part situated away from a main or related body".  The definition of an outlier is largely open to interpretation and can have both positive and negative connotations.  For example, upon hearing the word "outlier", I almost immediately have a flashback to the labs in my AP Biology course in high school.  After the completion of every lab excercise, everyone would record their results on the whiteboard.  From this information, our teacher would construct a graph on microsoft excel and display on the television screen.  And it almost never failed; our lab group would be the outliers.  If everyone recorded results between 1 and 2 cm, we could somehow manage to get a reading of 5 cm.  And then our teacher would go to great lengths to try to find the source of the error with us.  Sometimes, we just wouldn't continue with the course material until the error was found.  In this situation, being the outliers helped us eventually improve our techniques in the lab setting to minimize errors in the future.  As the end of the school year approached, our techniques in the lab improved to a point where were no longer the outliers.  In this situation, the word outlier has a negative connotation, which eventually leads to a positive outcome. 
In Outliers, Malcom Gladwell evinces to his audience the obvious benefits of being an outlier with the examples of people like Bill Joy, who is directly or indirectly responsible for many of the computer programs used today.  Gladwell also mentions the town of Roseta, in which the people are far healthier than the majority of America.  This goes to show that an outlier is simply a person, place, or thing that is unique or set apart from a main group.  The implications of the previous statement depend solely on how society interprets it.

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