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What do you think is the major determinant of whether our children excel in school? IQ? Good teachers? Good schools? Good standards and curricula? No, I say it is the students' motivation, or just plain grit. Other teachers think so too. Education reporter, Libby Nelson, calls attention to the issue of grit in student learning achievement. Teachers and parents sometimes put too much emphasis on intelligence, when the more typical problem in education is that students don't try hard enough and are not sufficiently persistent in trying to achieve excellence. Indeed, excellence is not even a goal for most students. Many students just want to do the minimum required to pass tests. A few students don't care at all. They just drop out. One student told a teacher friend of mine, "I don't need to learn this stuff. Somebody will always take care of me." Nelson points to evidence of grit's importance with these examples: ·          West Point cadets who sco...

All children, if given the chance, will play, preferably with other children. The games they play are often creative, rough and tumble, and of course―fun. Some consequences are obvious: ·          Fun is a positively reinforcing emotion. It makes kids happy. ·          Play encourages exploration with fewer constraining boundaries than the drone of regular life. ·          Play is an effective way to socialize and make friends. ·          Play stimulates initiative and engagement, rather than passively observing what others do. But there is another less obvious reason, one that is biological. In a review in the American Journal of Play (yes, there really is a scholarly journal on play), evidence is provided from controlled studies in rats and some primates. These studies show that when young animals are encouraged to play they de...