Mindset _ The New Psychology of Success - Carol S. Dweck [27]
Here’s how students with the fixed mindset explained their poor grades. Many maligned their abilities: “I am the stupidest” or “I suck in math.” And many covered these feelings by blaming someone else: “[The math teacher] is a fat male slut . . . and [the English teacher] is a slob with a pink ass.” “Because the teacher is on crack.” These interesting analyses of the problem hardly provide a road map to future success.
With the threat of failure looming, students with the growth mindset instead mobilized their resources for learning. They told us that they, too, sometimes felt overwhelmed, but their response was to dig in and do what it takes. They were like George Danzig. Who?
George Danzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homework problems at all. They were two famous math problems that had never been solved.
The Low-Effort Syndrome
Our students with the fixed mindset who were facing the hard transition saw it as a threat. It threatened to unmask their flaws and turn them from winners into losers. In fact, in the fixed mindset, adolescence is one big test. Am I smart or dumb? Am I good-looking or ugly? Am I cool or nerdy? Am I a winner or a loser? And in the fixed mindset, a loser is forever.
It’s no wonder that many adolescents mobilize their resources, not for learning, but to protect their egos. And one of the main ways they do this (aside from providing vivid portraits of their teachers) is by not trying. This is when some of the brightest students, just like Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, simply stop working. In fact, students with the fixed mindset tell us that their main goal in school—aside from looking smart—is to exert as little effort as possible. They heartily agree with statements like this:
“In school my main goal is to do things as easily as possible so I don’t have to work very hard.”
This low-effort syndrome is often seen as a way that adolescents assert their independence from adults, but it is also a way that students with the fixed mindset protect themselves. They view the adults as saying, “Now we will measure you and see what you’ve got.” And they are answering, “No you won’t.”
John Holt, the great educator, says that these are the games all human beings play when others are sitting in judgment of them. “The worst student we had, the worst I have ever encountered, was in his life outside the classroom as mature, intelligent, and interesting a person as anyone at the school. What went wrong? . . . Somewhere along the line, his intelligence became disconnected from his schooling.”
For students with the growth mindset, it doesn’t make sense to stop trying. For them, adolescence is a time of opportunity: a time to learn new subjects, a time to find out what they like and what they want to become in the future.
Later, I’ll describe the project in which we taught junior high students the growth mindset. What I want to tell you now is how teaching them this mindset unleashed their effort. One day, we were introducing the growth mindset to a new group of students. All at once Jimmy—the most hard-core turned-off low-effort kid in the group—looked up with tears in his eyes and said, “You mean I don’t have to be dumb?” From that day on, he worked. He started staying up late to do his homework, which he never used to bother with at all. He started handing in assignments early so he could get feedback and revise them. He now believed that working hard was not something that made you vulnerable, but something that made you smarter.
Finding Your Brain
A close friend of mine recently handed me something he’d written,