What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell

Some readers were no doubt disappointed in this collection of articles first published in the New Yorker. I feel something close to astonishment by how interesting and entertaining I find some of these pieces, even though I’ve read many of them before.

I love Gladwell for all the reasons that he's been so celebrated: he’s a wonderful storyteller, with a nose for interesting stories that can appeal to a wide variety of people. Most of all, I love his work because, so often, he turns received wisdom on its head (e.g., gut instinct is actually reading facial expressions) or points out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes (job interviews are really about finding that spark of chemistry, a “de-sexualized date,” and are poor predictors of employee performance).

My favorite pieces are:

"True Colors: Hair Dye and The Hidden History of Postwar America?” which takes us into a past in which immigrant women used hair color as part of their assimilation into American culture and the successful selling of that and other products to women as their ticket to success;

“Cesar Milan: The Movements of Mastery,” for its insightful portrait of Milan and most importantly, for what the article contains about the messages we send through our physical movements and how adept dogs are at reading them;

and

“Most Likely to Succeed:

How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job?” in which Gladwell shows us a little bit of the difference between a good teacher and a bad one, explains why the stakes are so high and then goes on to explain that it’s very hard to predict who will be a good teacher and suggests that young teachers be hired as apprentice/trainees, heavily mentored, and that tenure not be granted automatically. When I first read this article, I was stunned by its audacity but I see now that teacher training is moving in this direction.

Some additional thoughts:

I'm now on a non-fiction reading jag (or, perhaps, a non-fiction listening jag, as I've been listening to Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, Jane's Fame, Drive by Daniel Pink, and Superfreakonomics by Stephen Leavitt and Steven Dubner on compact disc); also a few months ago, I watched the documentary Waiting for Superman.

Some time later, I was asked by someone about the merit of Waiting for Superman, and I said I liked it, and tried to tell this guy something about it -- as I attempted to summarize the movie, I saw that while the movie is a really affecting story, what it was really saying was that the quality of many of our urban schools is just appallingly, unacceptably bad. It occurred to me for the first time that perhaps the filmmaker was saying that the quality of teaching was unacceptably low, and I wondered if I agreed with that.

I have felt in the past that teachers were incorrectly blamed for the poor performance of their students; that the single most important predictor of academic performance is the socioeconomic status of students' parents. After thinking about what Gladwell says about the many factors that contribute to the success of individuals (success isn't all that individual), what Leavitt and Dubner say about changes to the teaching professional since 1960 (as more professional fields have opened to women, teaching has become a less attractive choice at the same time that the wages of teachers, relative to those of other professionals with similar amounts of education, have dropped markedly) have made me realize that while it may be entirely true that the socioeconomic status of parents being the single most accurate predictor of student success is entirely true, that doesn't mean that other factors can't affect the outcome or that they haven't affected outcomes.

Perhaps it is true that the quality of teaching has dropped over the past few decades and that, in those same few decades, middle-class parents have stepped forward to provide enrichment activities on weekends and over the summer.

I do accept Gladwell's premise that some teachers are better than others; I think I wasn't fully convinced that differences in the quality of teaching could make such a difference until I was told that in Depression, a job teaching school was a good job, stable and secure in a horrible economy and as a result, some very bright and very well educated people entered public education and stayed there, not to mention the bright and capable women who remained there in part because there were not many other professional choices. Ultimately, as Gladwell points out in his piece on the difficulties of predicting performance, it's not intelligence, or education, or kindness, or "loving people," as young people used to say in job interviews, that makes a good teacher but some combination of qualities and perhaps good training and supervision. I would love to see a longitudinal study of new teachers. What's the difference between a teacher who lasts only one year, who lasts three years, and another who lasts ten years? What causes a teacher who lasts for ten years to leave the profession? I'd love to know.