Sie sind auf Seite 1von 5

Alexina Laliberte

Mrs. Thomas
UWRT 1101-103
10/10/14 draft 1

How Children Succeed Presented in Four Genres

How do children succeed and what makes them succeed? Merriam-Webster Dictionary
defines success in three ways- 1. a degree or measure of succeeding, 2. a favorable or desired
outcome; the correct or desired result of an attempt, and 3. the attainment of wealth, favor, or
eminence. This definition is true as it is the literal definition of success, but there is no true definition for success because success is different for each person. This book explores the work of
researchers and educators who, for the first time, are using scientific tools to look into the mysteries of character. Through the stories of the children they are trying to help, Paul Tough, the
author, looks into the connection between childhood stresses and future successes. Tough reveals
the ways in which parents both do and do not prepare their children for the future. To me, this
topic couldn't be more fitting for an elementary education major and I am excited to share my
findings.
The Original Book Cover (at top)

The background of the book cover is a solid white color with the title of the book in a solid black color. In the foreground, the secondary title of the book and authors information are
written in black and red inside of a text box. Behind that, there are 5 pencils- one red, one orange, one yellow, one green, and one blue. The colors of the pencils are of that of the simplified
rainbow, which is something that children learn about in elementary school, which is the foundation of their success. All of the pencils, except the blue one, are broken. This blue, fullysharpened pencil resembles the successful child that goes above and beyond all of the others. The
simplicity and cleanliness of the book cover is attractive to many people, especially researchersthat the book includes- who usually like to keep things very symmetrical and organized.

New York Times Book Review


After reading How Children Succeed, I did some further research which led me to a book
review in the New York Times by a woman named Anne Murphy Paul. Anne Murphy Paul is an
author, magazine journalist, consultant, and a speaker who helps people understand how we
learn and how we can do it better. She graduated from Yale University and from the Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism. She is a former senior editor at Psychology Today
magazine, she has been awarded with the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. Her writing has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times
Book Review (this one), Slate, Discover, etc. She is the author of Origins: How the Nine Months
Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives and The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests
Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand
Ourselves. Of all of the book reviews I could have chosen, I figured that this review would be the
most accurate due to the reviewers credibility on multiple levels.

This book review includes multiple direct quotes from the book with Anne Murphys reflections and research findings following them. She also refers back to some of Toughs findings
in his previous book, Whatever It Takes, where he followed educator Geoffrey Canadas efforts
to turn his organization, the Harlem Childrens Zone, into a system that would carry the neighborhoods children from infancy to adulthood. She compares his large scale view of success in
this story to his small stories of success in How Children Succeed. All in all, the conclusion is
made that the children experience the effects of the parents choices, and lack thereof, the
greatest.
She states in her review that although the title How Children Succeed makes the book
sound like an instruction manual for parents, its really a guide to the ironies and perversities of
income inequality in America. She talks about Toughs reflection of dropping out of college and
that he was extremely lucky to be able to experience college and realize that it wasn't meant for
him and still be successful. In relation to the fact that fewer and fewer young people are getting
the character-building combination of support and autonomy that Tough was fortunate enough
to receive, she ends her book review with a very important and insightful question, which is the
question I want to leave the reader with as well. For who will have the conscientiousness, the
persistence, and the grit to change it?

A Tweet from twitter.com


The tweet from Twitter user Paul Tough (@paultough) includes a quote from an article
and the link to the article. The tweet reads, We cant pretend that school preparation begins at
age 4. Four is better than 5, but zero is far better than 4. nyti.ms/1qxwGOm The author of the
tweet just so happens to be Paul Tough the author of How Children Succeed.
This tweet relates to his book due to the fact that his research brought him to the realization that we have to be preparing our children for success even before school so that they can

succeed in and beyond school. The link brings you to a New York Times article with research
done by Clare Huntington, a law professor at Fordham University. She talks about how families
are the ultimate pre-pre-school and how research in neuroscience and other fields has established that parents and caregivers provide a crucial foundation during the first few years of life,
but public policies make it much harder for families, especially families living in poverty, to lay
this foundation. The tweet itself is a tweet that gets me personally intrigued. In my opinion,
tweets that have only a link to an article are annoying. But the fact that Tough included a direct
quote from the article, a catchy one I might add, makes me want to click the link and read the
words surrounding the quote.

Academic piece: Which children succeed and why. by Leon Feinstein


I am going to first preface this by stating that this is an article based on the keys to success for British school-children. Although this article is not based on American children, like
How Children Succeed is, the information provided in this article is applicable and useful. Leon
Feinstein is a researcher at the Centre for Economic Performance and University College London. Feinstein, based on his research, discusses how parental involvement determines the level of
the childs success. It includes a hypothesis, an experiment that confirms the hypothesis, and an
explanation of it all.
In 1997, Feinstein and Symons looks at the determination of educational outcomes.
Teachers were asked to assess parental interest in education of their children at 7, 11, and 16
years old. Early users of this data were concerned that parents may become more interested, or
fake being interested, in the performance of their child, making the data invalid. This data gave
Feinstein and Symons the ability to look at the interest of parents as their children got older. The
study suggested that there is in fact a direct correlation with parental interest and the childs suc-

cess rather than direct effects of social class. The quote, Although parental interest in education
tends to be much greater for parents in professional occupations, it is the interest that explains
educational performance... rather than the social group, is a conclusion of the findings based on
the experiment.

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen