The Matthew Effect
"Success in hockey is based on _______________ ___________ and both of those words are important. Players are judged on their own performance, not on anyone else's, and on the basis of their ability, not on some other arbitrary fact" (17).
What is "individual merit"?
Among ___________ Valley insiders, Joy is spoken of with as much awe as someone like Bill Gates of Microsoft" (37).
What is "Silicon"?
"He got a perfect score on the ______, even though he fell asleep at one point during the test" (71).
What is "SAT"?
"What did Joe Flom's father do? He sewed shoulder pads for women's dresses. What did Robert Oppenheimer's father do? He was a _______________ manufacturer, like Louis Borgenicht" (154).
What is "garment"?
"Consider, for example, the famous (in aviation circles, anyway) crash of the ____________ airliner Avianca flight 052 in January of 1990. The Avianca accident so perfectly illustrates the characteristics of the 'modern' plane crash that it is studied in flight schools" (181).
What is "Colombia"?
"None of those things, though, will improve her math and reading skills, and every carefree ____________ day she spends puts her further and further behind Alex. Alex isn't necessarily smarter than Katie." (259).
What is "summer"?
"Canadian hockey is a _________________ (16).
What is a "meritocracy?"
"_________________, for example, famously started writing music at six" (40).
Who is "Mozart"?
"In 1921, Terman decided to make the study of the ______________ his life work. Armed with a large grant from the Commonwealth Foundation, he put together a team of fieldworkers and sent them out into California's elementary schools" (74).
What is the "gifted"?
"His work was ____________: it engaged his mind and imagination. And in his work, there was a relationship between effort and reward: the longer he and Regina stayed up at night sewing aprons, the more money they made the next day on the streets" (149).
What is "complex"?
"Klotz sees himself as a _________________. It's not his job to solve the crisis. It's the captain's and the captain is exhausted and isn't saying anything. Then there's the domineering Kennedy Airport air traffic controllers ordering the planes around" (207).
What is "subordinate"?
"Levin was standing in the school's main hallway. It was lunchtime and the students were trooping by quietly in orderly lines, all of them in their _______ Academy shirts. Levin stopped a girl whose shirttail was out" (261).
What is "KIPP"?
"We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play and by 'we' I mean ____________ in determining who makes it and who doesn't" (33).
What is "society"?
"'In Liverpool, we'd only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for _________ hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing'" (49).
"The relationship between __________ and IQ works only up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn't seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage" (79).
What is "success"?
"The first critical fact about Harlan is that at the same time that the Howards and the Turners were killing one another, there were almost ________________ clashes in other small towns up and down the Appalachians" (165).
What is "identical"?
"Throughout history, not surprisingly, the people who grow ________ have always worked harder than almost any other kind of farmer" (233).
What is "rice"?
"The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think ______________ spring naturally from the earth" (268).
What are "outliers"?
"There was a period where Paul Allen and I got in trouble for stealing a bunch of _______________ and crashing the system. We got kicked out. I didn't get to use the computer the whole summer" (52-53).
What are "passwords"?
"The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls “_______________ intelligence'" (101).
What is "practical"?
"When one family fights with another, it's a feud. When lots of families fight with one another in identical little towns up and down the same mountain range, it's a _________" (166).
What is "pattern"?
"So, which places are at the top of both lists? The answer shouldn't surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan. What those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and __________________ work" (248).
What is "meaningful"?
"That is the story of my mother's path to success and it isn't true. It's not a lie in the sense that the facts were made up. But it is false in the way that telling the story of ____________ without mentioning the computer at Lakeside is false, or accounting for Asian math prowess without going back to the rice paddies is false" (272).
Who is "Bill Gates"?
"We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there's nothing in any of the histories we've looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to _________ ____ _________ at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society" (67).
What is "come of age"?
"Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style '_________________ ________________.' It's an attempt to actively “foster and assess a child's talents, opinions and skills.” Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of “accomplishment of natural growth (104).
What is "concerted cultivation"?