Teaching Tip #138

Teacherscribe’s Teaching Tip #138

The Immigrant Edge – This one should get Trump’s blood boiling

Brian Buffini, an incredible successful Irish immigrant, was featured on the Entreleadership podcast.  In the interview, he shared the seven traits that make immigrants – often – so much more successful than Americans residents.

How can we teach these in our classes?

Trait #6 – Willingness to delay gratification.

Results don’t happen immediately.  It takes time.  Think of Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule.  It takes time to master a concept or idea.  Unfortunately, we live in a society where students read things shared by adults - yes, adults - that totally runs counter to this.  Just the other day a former student, now an adult with a family, shared a video that claimed to purportedly: “Watch this congressman disprove global warming in five minutes.”

Really?  Who is stupid enough to think you can disprove a large concept like global warming and climate change in a five minute video that never even cited any real scientific data?

Students (and adults) are losing the ability to delay gratification because our world is all about instant gratification.

Don’t believe me?  Look at the tizzy everyone (teachers and students alike) were thrown into yesterday when the wifi was knocked out by the power outage.  We lost our ability to instantly connect and get information.

Brene Brown has a great point about delayed gratification in her TED Talk on vulnerability: when she looks back on her life, she realizes all the times that really made her who she really is were times of difficult struggle and pain.  Yet, as educators and parents and adults, how often do we experience struggle and pain?  How often do we allow our students (and our own children) to struggle and experience pain?  What rewarding experiences are we robbing them of?