The surprising advantage of larger class size, dyslexia and losing your parents

In Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, David and Goliath, he tells the always appealing story of the underdog – the little guy who wins despite the odds - from a seductive standpoint: our disadvantages are often the advantage that allow us to win. For example, he tells of dyslexics whose very struggle with reading allows them to win in the world by conferring some advantage – the capacity to listen carefully in one story, in another, the capacity to take risks, because frequent failure numbs fear. He shares stories of people who have gained an advantage – again, a kind of fearlessness – from losing a parent before the age of 20.  A researcher reviewed the lives of people whose lives merited more than one column in the Encyclopedia Britannica or Encyclopedia Americana. By the age of 10, 25% of these high-achieving people had lost a parent; by the age of 15, 34.5% had had a parent die; by age 20, 45%. On the other hand, Gladwell also points out that prisoners are two to three times more likely to have had a parent die in childhood and the number of dyslexics in prisons far exceeds the average.  When I was telling my very practical youngest son about the people whose disadvantage gave them an advantage, he said that he had no doubt that the number of dyslexics and people with early childhood loss in prison far exceeded the number that excelled. And quite likely, he added, the high-achievers had other advantages that factored more importantly in their success.

Yes, but we are always so easily seduced by the story of the underdog, especially the story of an underdog whose very disadvantages are the weapon against the established top dog. The vast majority of us, after all, are underdogs with a full gamut of disadvantages. (Gladwell lists some of them in Outliers; simply being born after March, for example, is a disadvantage.) Surprisingly, one of the disadvantages that turns out to be an advantage in Gladwell’s book is class size, a topic of great interest in British Columbia right now, where schools are shut down for a teacher’s strike that includes a demand for a more thoughtful approach to class size and composition. According to the research that Gladwell shared, class size falls into a category of things that follow “inverted-U” logic. For example, too little food is detrimental to health, but at some point, adding more food to our diet becomes as harmful. So, too, he writes, too many children in a class is a disadvantage, but at a certain point, too few children is equally disadvantageous.

Any teacher would agree. As Gladwell writes, “It is a strange thing, isn't it, to have an educational philosophy that thinks of other students in the classroom with your child as competitors for the attention of the teacher and not allies in the adventure of learning?” Indeed. That’s why BC teachers never speak of class size without composition; diversity in a classroom also falls on the inverted-U:  too little does not spark creativity and divergent thinking; too much causes chaos. (How do you know when you've reached the tipping point from advantage to disadvantage? Ask the teacher. But of course that would mean we respected teachers’ understanding of the complex dynamics in their classrooms. We prefer to find a mythical mathematical formula.) Gladwell argues that wealthy people who send their children to expensive private schools with small classes may be conferring an unwitting disadvantage. I find it hard to believe. I’d argue that a larger class size is like the “advantage” of dyslexia and losing a parent, helping a few (perhaps) and harming countless others.

The most disturbing part of the book for me was how many of the stories showed that disadvantages in early life allowed the person to be ruthless or deceptive enough to win – and these qualities, serving a “win,” were renamed an advantage. Of course, that’s how the Davids win. And really, when you think about it, that’s how the Goliaths stay on top (or the Davids, once they've beaten Goliath).

I keep wondering, lately, if there are different stories to grip our imagination, that don’t focus on who wins or who loses or how to gain an advantage over our enemies. Today, thousands of years after David took out his sling shot, in what seems an endlessly perfect summer of blue skies and gentle breezes, the tragic battle continues in the land of David and Goliath and the bitterness deepens in the decades-long dispute between the BCTF and the government. No new ending seems possible in either story. The rhetoric of peace and negotiations, fair deals and settlements are merely maneuvers to gain advantage. It seems to me that as long as we continue to focus on how to be or remain the winner, we lose the story of good.  That’s a story I’d love to hear.

Counting the Blessing of Wrinkles

My home is filled with family this week.  My youngest is getting married on Saturday, so we’re all gathering to laugh and play and be merry together.  Today, though, I’m taking some time to remember my brother, who is missing.  He died ten years ago today. How he would have loved all the family festivities and the wedding, his youngest son the Master of Ceremonies, his “other son,” as he often referred to Will, the groom.  We are taking advantage of the gathering of so many family members to also celebrate my daughter’s becoming a dermatologist last month, a profession that her uncle had recommended to her when she first told him she was going to be a doctor.  We are all getting older, he told her; you go to school, I’ll set up your office and we’ll make a killing off all the people who want to look young again.

Getting older is a blessing we don’t count often enough these days.  Today I’m grateful for the wrinkles and grey hairs, for the grown children and for Jack, our grandchild, filling the house with squeals of delight as uncles toss him in the air – and for the memories of my brother who will never grow old.  

Anna Karenina: Too Long; Read it Anyway

I've just finished rereading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.  It’s a revelation to me on a number of fronts. I read it first when I was 19, a lifetime or two or three ago. I remembered it only vaguely, except that I loved it. On rereading I wonder why. What did I think of the great swaths of the book dedicated to Russian politics, the long passages describing hunting trips, the chapters about farming? Did I admire the, to me now, overblown emotions of Anna and Levin?

Yet although I finished reading the novel over a week ago, I can’t stop thinking about it. Perhaps it is the slow painting of a life and time sketched out in such close details that, even now, I feel like I've been there, that the people of the story are part of my life. Perhaps it is the awful way that Tolstoy strips his characters for us to view the vulnerability that we skitter away from, even from our own selves, particularly from ourselves. Perhaps it is the unhurried unfurling of ideas, revealed through lives and moments.

Too often, now, I skip from idea to idea; if a book doesn't interest me quickly, I read a different one; if an article drags, I click to another. When I first read Anna Karenina, however, there were no bookstores nearby; the Internet did not provide an endless supply of reading material. I wonder if it is new for me to become frustrated with passages that don’t meet with my tastes. Perhaps with no unlimited supply of reading to turn to when I became uncomfortable, I was more patient in my youth, savouring the story as it unfolded. We so routinely set aside anything too long now, that we use an acronym – tl;dnr – too long; did not read.

I wonder what in my life, in our lives as a community, is being lost in abundance. I am grateful that, despite its being too long, I read Anna Karenina anyway.