Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

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I grew up relatively poor (Appalachia 1980s/90s).

What made the difference for me were two things.

1) Parents that were role models. My mother didn't earn much money, but she had a tremendous work ethic (she grew up on a farm), and was a very disciplined person in terms of morality. She was always present in my life, and was quite firm and consistent in terms of discipline (if you did something wrong, you were punished; and you listened or else). My father was an entrepreneur, very creative, very intelligent, high ingenuity, exposed me to a lot of amazing experiences growing up (traveling, ideas, technology, etc). Neither parent drank, had drug problems, or had ever been arrested. I had a consistent, safe home environment, where being smart was encouraged, independence and success were outcomes to strive for.

2) A tremendous public education system, with high quality teachers across the board. Almost all of which were older women interestingly, most were very firm, attentive, and persistent. The school itself might have had several hundred students, but from K through 5, I had one male teacher out of maybe 15 or 20, and only one younger female teacher.

The kids that did the worst in school, almost universally had very bad home lives. They were not only extra poor, but they had terrible parents (or absentee parents); abusive, alcoholic, non-working, etc types.

I have a pet theory about the older women part: they're a remnant of gender segregation. When teaching was one of the few professions available to women, the lack of competition from other lines of work made such teachers cheaper and more plentiful. I had a similar experience further south. Though, notably, many of my best teachers were older black women. I suspect combined gender and racial segregation led to that.

On the other hand, the best and brightest women used to become teachers. Nowadays, those women will typically go into other professions. Why deal with teaching when you can go into law or medicine or engineering.

My mother, a retired high school science and French teacher, thinks that part of the reason we have a dearth of excellent teachers is because women are now doing other things than teaching.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Thanks for the more succinct statement.

This is a point made by the education historian William Reese. It is also suggested as a partial reason for our lack of 'professional' respect for educators because teaching was considered a 'female', caregiving job (that men wouldn't really begin entering until the 1970's).

The issue is not poverty-it is intelligence (not saying that bad home lives are not a factor).

Well I had a lot of first hand experience with this stuff, growing up in one of the poorest places in the US.

I would say that roughly half the unsuccessful students I knew of were in fact very intelligent, the other half did seem to have lower intelligence. I knew a bunch of them well. Their home lives effectively wrecked them, hampered their learning habits, and their educational stacking progress - in which your knowledge builds year after year, and to succeed each year you must have a consistent rolling forward of that knowledge base from prior years. The unsuccessful but intelligent students had poor habits, poor role models, and often a terrible outlook. Some had been taught very backwards notions about how the world works, or what values should be pursued in life.

I don't think intelligence is a greater a factor than the others. I've known plenty of wildly unsuccessful, broken, smart people, that were crippled by a mediocre foundation at home. I've known successful low intelligence people, with discipline and a strong work ethic; people that can repeat patterns of success, while not having an especially great intellect.

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