Summary

On the first two pages of the chapter, Duckworth speaks about how she quit her well-paying job in management consulting to become a seventh-grade math teacher at a public school in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a poor neighborhood. She noticed that some of her students were "quick studies" who immediately saw patterns in math problems. However, she noted that these were not the students who succeeded at the highest levels in her class. Instead, some of the students who were not as quick to understand problems turned themselves into "overachievers" by working at a problem again and again and coming to class prepared. She was surprised that aptitude did not translate into success and writes, "I'd been distracted by talent" (17). She began to ask herself hard questions about her teaching and believed that all her students...