True Grit

by Education Blog

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Posted on November 6, 2017

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In the book “The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way,” author Amanda Ripley followed the lives of 3 American students as they traveled as foreign exchange students in different countries.  The book profiles the educational systems in Finland, Poland, South Korea and compares them with the United states.

The book was insightful in many areas, but one of the comments that was made throughout the book is that the profiled countries all wanted the best possible education for their children.  As noted in the book, Finland has what is considered to be the best educational system in the world. Now without writing a book review, one particular area I found interesting was in the mindset, or culture if you will of the country of Finland.  A Finnish word sisu (SEE-su) means strength in the face of great odds.  I didn’t realize until reading the book that Finland invented the game Angry Birds, Nokia and the Linux operating system.  The closest synonym to the word sisu in English is grit.

It made me think, how do we teach our students to work hard in the face of a tough problem, when the odds don’t appear to be in their favor, when they need to show grit in the face of adversity?  When do we consider failure as an opportunity to learn?

A few weeks ago my daughter asked me to help her with some math homework.  I sat down with her and was going to amaze her with my brilliance (Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally) as I worked through the steps of the math problem.  The challenge was that I couldn’t solve the problem.  I worked, erased, rewrote the problem, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out. I never knew adding parenthesis to a problem could be so difficult for me.  At one point I looked at her as she was sitting next to me staring at the TV as I feverishly worked on the equation and it hit me.  It was at that point I realized there is no sisu being developed, except on my part.  I shut the book and told her you know what, I’m not in this class, I’m going to need to study to understand this, and I really don’t want to study, I’d ask your teacher tomorrow.  Now I don’t know if I handled that correctly, if I taught her grit, because parenting is by far the most challenging responsibility I’ve ever encountered, but the next time she works on order of operations she’ll know that her teacher is the expert.

Congratulations to our football team on their win Friday, they finished the regular season with a 9-1 record.  They will be hosting Christian Heritage in a first round playoff game this Friday at Ranger field.  Kickoff is set for 7:00.

Sincerely,

Tim Argo

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