Graphic designer Paula Scher, on the "second" that it took her to design the Citi logo:
How can it be that you talk to somebody and it's done in a second? But it is done in a second; it's done in a second and 34 years. You know? It's done in a second and every experience and every movie and every thing of my life that's in my head.You can see Paula Scher's original sketch of the logo here:
Paula Scher, a short film by Hillman Curtis
Moving to the Big Citi (Pentagram)[Thanks, Marjorie.]
A few paragraphs from an article by Po Bronson that any parent, student, or teacher might benefit from reading:
For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she's now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work -- a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders -- paints the picture most clearly.That last paragraph helps me understand why so many college students regard their abilities as innate and unchangeable. Self-proclaimed "A students," who have no doubt been told again and again how smart they are, often fail to realize that an A in a college class might require some greater expenditure of effort. More numerous, in my experience, are students who say that they "can't write," that they "suck" at writing, that they're "no good" at English, as if their ability were, again, unchangeable, beyond their control, and not a matter of dedicated practice and increasing mastery.
Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles -- puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, "You must be smart at this." Other students were praised for their effort: "You must have worked really hard."
Why just a single line of praise? "We wanted to see how sensitive children were," Dweck explained. "We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect."
Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they'd learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck's team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The "smart" kids took the cop-out.
Why did this happen? "When we praise children for their intelligence," Dweck wrote in her study summary, "we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes." And that’s what the fifth-graders had done: They'd chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.
In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study's start, responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn't focused hard enough on this test. "They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles," Dweck recalled. "Many of them remarked, unprovoked, 'This is my favorite test.'" Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren't really smart at all. "Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable."
Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck's researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score -- by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning -- by about 20 percent.
Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. "Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control," she explains. "They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child's control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure."
In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids' reasoning goes; I don't need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized -- it's public proof that you can't cut it on your natural gifts.
Oprah Winfrey: "Do people tell you they have to keep going over the words sometimes?"Or as William Carlos Williams says in the poem "January Morning,"
Toni Morrison: "That, my dear, is called reading."
I wanted to write a poemTrying hard, I realize, was what my parents always encouraged me to do. "Do the best you can" was one refrain of my childhood -- a lot more helpful for the work of learning than "You're so smart!" (My own children too know that they should do the best they can.)
that you would understand.
For what good is it to me
if you can't understand it?
But you got to try hard --
How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of Praise (New York)[Thanks to Elaine Fine and Stefan Hagemann for pointing me to Po Bronson's article.]
Related posts
Andrew Sullivan on self-esteem
Good advice from Rob Zseleczky
John Holt on learning and difficulty
Zadie Smith on reading
And from flickr.com: Shakespeare annotated (A photo by murky)
From today's New York Times:
Australia looks ready to become the first country to phase out incandescent light bulbs in favor of more energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs, as part of its drive to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.
The Australian environment minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said Tuesday that he would work with the states to get rid of incandescent bulbs by 2009 or 2010.
"The most effective and immediate way we can reduce greenhouse-gas emissions is by using energy more efficiently," Mr. Turnbull said. "Electric lighting is a vital part of our lives; globally, it generates emissions equal to 70 percent of those from all the world's passenger vehicles."
Australia Is Seeking Nationwide Shift to Energy-Saving Light Bulbs (New York Times)
Related posts
An Inconvenient Truth
Wal-Mart's Bright Idea
Wystan Hugh Auden was born on February 21, 1907, and died on September 23, 1973.
Let your last thinks all be thanks:
praise your parents who gave you
a Super-Ego of strength
that saves you so much bother,
digit friends and dear them all,
then pay fair attribution
to your age, to having been
born when you were. In boyhood
you were permitted to meet
beautiful old contraptions,
soon to be banished from earth,
saddle-tank loks, beam-engines
and over-shot waterwheels.
Yes, love, you have been lucky:
Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay.
From "A Lullaby," April 1972
"As far as I'm concerned, an 'artist' is someone who paints pictures, just as a 'doctor' is someone who fixes your knee."
Previous "Overheard" posts
In a dream:
I was watching the start of the The Mike Douglas Show, the daytime talk show that I watched countless times after school as a kid. The guest host for the day: Fred Astaire. Also appearing: the poet John Ashbery, who was going to read a poem entitled "Dedicated to Fred Astaire." And coming up later in the show: "A special feature on language-poetry and experimental music."
That would have been some Mike Douglas Show.
As I ponder this dream, it occurs to me that Philadelphia, for many years the home of The Mike Douglas Show, is now the home of PENNsound, a spectacular archive of recorded poetry housed at the University of Pennsylvania. And a few years back, I watched an online broadcast of John Ashbery at the U of P's Kelly Writers House.
But how does Fred Astaire fit in? Elaine Fine thinks that a wonderful television clip might be in the background of this dream.
The Mike Douglas Show (Wikipedia)
PENNsound (University of Pennsylvania)
John Ashbery at the Kelly Writers House (University of Pennsylvania)
Fred Astaire sings, Oscar Levant plays (YouTube, via Musical Assumptions)
Michal Levy's 2001 animation of John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" is a thing of beauty, and as vivid a demonstration as possible of the architecture of a jazz solo. (As I learned while browsing her site, Levy is also a saxophonist.)
Giant Steps, a film by Michal Levy (michalevy.com)(Baby steps, giant steps: How many children in 2007 still learn to play "Mother May I?", the game that is the source of Coltrane's title?)
John Coltrane, tenor saxophone
Tommy Flanagan, piano
Paul Chamber, bass
Art Taylor, drums
recorded May 5, 1959
In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall.You can see several of the slides here:
Edward Tufte, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint"
*
Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD's [Office of Secretary of Defense] contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology -- above all information technology -- has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war. To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness.
Retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich
Iraq War Plan Assumed Only 5,000 U.S. Troops Still There by December 2006 (The National Security Archive)
Related reading
Andrew Bacevich (faculty profile, Boston University)
"Delusional" Iraq plans envisaged only 5,000 troops by now, group says (CNN)
A Prewar Slide Show Cast Iraq in Rosy Hues (New York Times)
Edward Tufte, The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint (edwardtufte.com)
