Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity." "It's a sign of low ability - people who are smart don't struggle, they just naturally get it, that's our folk theory. "I think that from very early ages we see struggle as an indicator that you're just not very smart," Stigler says. Stigler is now a professor of psychology at UCLA who studies teaching and learning around the world, and he says it was this small experience that first got him thinking about how differently East and West approach the experience of intellectual struggle. "And at the end of the class, he did make his cube look right! And the teacher said to the class, 'How does that look, class?' And they all looked up and said, 'He did it!' And they broke into applause." The kid smiled a huge smile and sat down, clearly proud of himself. Stigler says the child continued to draw his cube with equanimity. I thought, 'This kid is going to break into tears!' "īut the kid didn't break into tears. "I realized that I was sitting there starting to perspire," he says, "because I was really empathizing with this kid. And as the period progressed, Stigler noticed that he - Stigler - was getting more and more anxious. Every few minutes, the teacher would ask the rest of the class whether the kid had gotten it right, and the class would look up from their work, and shake their heads no. And so he watched with interest as the Japanese student dutifully came to the board and started drawing, but still couldn't complete the cube. Stigler knew that in American classrooms, it was usually the best kid in the class who was invited to the board. His cube looked all cockeyed, so the teacher said to him, 'Why don't you go put yours on the board?' So right there I thought, 'That's interesting! He took the one who can't do it and told him to go and put it on the board.' " "The teacher was trying to teach the class how to draw three-dimensional cubes on paper," Stigler explains, "and one kid was just totally having trouble with it. In 1979, when Jim Stigler was still a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he went to Japan to research teaching methods and found himself sitting in the back row of a crowded fourth-grade math class. Chinese schoolchildren during lessons at a classroom in Hefei, east China's Anhui province, in 2010.
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