How Children Succeed...

I finished reading How Children Succeed with a mixture of affirmation and disappointment.  The affirmation stems from my long-held beliefs that so much of what we deal with stems from the child's home and early childhood and that children need boundaries, structure, and rules.  Paul Tough also writes about the positive impact of failure, when failure is something that people learn from.  Too often, children are not challenged to the point of failing -- while I don't believe that the bar should be raised so high that success is impossible (or seems impossible), sometimes a student may need to fail in order to discover what works for him or her in order to achieve success. 

The disappointment stems from the lack of concrete suggestions for success at the high school level.  Even more so, statistics show that making a difference for the children living at the deepest levels of poverty is so much harder than it is for those living at the higher end of the poverty scale.   One of the major impacts on the likelihood of success is the presence of stress in a child's life.   In addition, a close, nurturing relationship with a parent-figure can offset some of the impact of this stress.  Stresses like loosing a home, witnessing violence, experiencing violence have a incredible negative impact that lasts into adulthood; experiencing these stresses with the absence of a nurturing presence magnifies the impact.  Measures of stress experienced in childhood outweigh the things we normally look at like the results of IQ tests.

This book gave me new insights, but didn't necessarily give me any new tools for the classroom as a whole.  However, it did show me that making a sincere connection to individual students is invaluable.  I will never be happy with my inability to impact every student who crosses my path, but I am encouraged to keep making as much of a difference as I can.