彼女のニュースを聞いたとき、だいぶ昔に見たある映画の記憶が蘇りました。「Stand and Deliver」（邦題「落ちこぼれの天使たち」）という映画です。1987年にアメリカで公開されました。日本では注目されずに当時未公開だったようですが、ご存じの読者もいるかもしれません。次のような「あらすじ」です。
米国カリフォルニア州の東ロサンゼルスにあるJames A. Garfield高校。そこで、エスカランテ先生が数学の基礎を担当しています。学生の中には厄介者も多いし、やる気がない生徒も少なくありませんでした。しかし、エスカランテは、彼らのそれぞれに潜在能力があることを信じ、全員が、高校3年までに「AP Calculus」 の試験に合格できるようなプログラムを開発します。エスカランテが生徒達に情熱的に接していくうちに、無気力だった生徒たちとの間に信頼の絆が生まれます。エスカランテを演じたエドワード・ジェームズ・オルモスの演技は素晴らしく、アカデミー賞にもノミネートされました（最終的な受賞は、ダスティン・ホフマンの「レインマン」でしたが）。
Calculusとは解析という意味です。その前のAPがAdvanced Placementという略称です。「飛び級」という意味が示すように、この授業を受けてから、TOEICやTOEFLなどで知られるETS社が所管する試験に合格すれば、多くのアメリカの大学で、単位が与えられます。その結果、まだ高校生でありながら、大学の単位が取得できます。この映画は実話にもとづいています。「You can’t teach logarithms to illiterates (読み書きすらできない学生に、とても対数は教えられない)」という同僚の批判のなかで、エスカランテと学生はともに困難の連続に合いながらも、それらを乗り越え、不可能と思われた目標を見事に達成しました。
以上のように、彼女の発想は、これまでの定説を覆すような革新的な考え方だったため、彼女のアイデアを懐疑的に思った同僚も少なくありませんでした。最終的に小保方博士の研究論文を出版したNature誌でさえ、最初は「Making fool of centuries-old history of cell biology。= 細胞生物学の数百年間の歴史を愚弄している」と激しく批判しました。そうした状況の中で、彼女が研究を進めていくのにはたいへんな困難が伴いました。小保方博士は、「誰も信じてくれなかったので、とても辛かった」と記者にそのときの気持ちを打ち明けています。しかし、彼女は、これらの辛い経験にへこたれずに、ムーミンとおばあちゃんにもらった割烹着と一緒に、5年以上の努力と情熱を傾けた結果、画期的な発見を達成したのです。
小保方さんのような状況になったら、あなたは、どうしますか。僕だったら、断念したかもしれません。そもそも、小保方博士のように画期的な発見をする人間は、他の人とどう違うのでしょうか。もちろん、才能のあるなしは、きっと関係があると思います。しかし、米国ペンシルベニア大学で心理学教授Angela Lee Duckworth博士の最近の研究によれば、成功するためには、才能以上に、努力、諦めない強い気持ちが大事なことが明らかになってきました。彼女は、教授になる前に、ニューヨーク市の中学校で数学を教えた経験をもちます。そのとき、ダックワース博士は、頭がいい生徒が必ずしも成功するとは限らないということに気づきました。それを機に、｢成功｣の秘訣に関する研究に関心を持ち始めました。以来、幅広い分野で目標を達成した「成功者」と諦めた者を比べてきました。そうした人たちが成功するか失敗するかを分けた理由は、例外なく、能力ではなく、努力であることが明らかになりました。ダックワース博士は、その努力をGRIT(意訳：根性)と名付けました。そうです。成功するためには、「あきらめずにやり抜く力」が鍵となるのです。小保方博士は、グリットを持っていたのです。
0:00 When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in _____________ consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools. And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests. I gave out homework assignments. When the work came back, I calculated grades.
0:35 What struck me was that I.Q. was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric I.Q. scores. Some of my _____________ kids weren't doing so well.
0:53 And that got me thinking. The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram. But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly _____________ that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough.
1:15 After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a _____________ perspective, from a psychological perspective. In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is I.Q., but what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?
1:47 So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why? My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy. We tried to _____________ which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out. We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition. We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students? We partnered with private companies, asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs? And who's going to earn the most money? In all those very different contexts, one _____________emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't I.Q. It was grit.
3:00 Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having _____________. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.
3:26 A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools. I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate. Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things like family income, _____________ achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters. It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out. To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask me, "How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?" The honest answer is, I don't know. (Laughter) What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty. Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their _____________. In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.
4:51 So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth mindset." This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to _____________ when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition.
5:27 So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. But we need more. And that's where I'm going to end my _____________, because that's where we are. That's the work that stands before us. We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them. We need to measure whether we've been successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned.
5:54 In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier.
Habitual activity–smoking, eating fatty foods, gambling–changes neural activity patterns in a specific region of the brain when habits are formed. These neural patterns created by habit can be changed or altered. But when a stimulus from the old days returns, the dormant pattern can reassert itself, according to a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, putting an individual in a neural state akin to being on autopilot.
“It is as though, somehow, the brain retains a memory of the habit context, and this pattern can be triggered if the right habit cues come back,” Ann Graybiel, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, said in a prepared statement. “This situation is familiar to anyone who is trying to lose weight or to control a well-engrained habit. Just the sight of a piece of chocolate can reset all those good intentions,” Graybiel said.
The neural patterns get established in the basal ganglia, a brain region critical to habits, addiction and procedural learning. In Graybiel’s experiments, rats learned via specific cues that there was chocolate at one end of a T-shaped maze. While the rats were still learning, their basal ganglia neurons chattered throughout the maze run. That’s because in the early stages, the brain seeks out and soaks in information that could prove important.
As the rats learned to focus in on guiding cues (in the experiment, an audible tone that guided them toward the chocolate), the behavior of the neurons changed. They fired intensely at the beginning and the end, but remained relatively quiet while the rats scurried through the maze.
1. What part of the brain is critical to the development of habits and procedural learning?
2. Why can the mere sight of a piece of chocolate tempt someone who has broken bad eating habits to begin craving sweet foods again?
3. In Graybiel’s experiment, when did neurons fire intensely? When were they relatively quiet? What do these results suggest?
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