This is a very good article. The reference to the newly published book Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of Superathlete

This is a very good article. The reference to the newly published book Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of Superathletes--and What We Can Learn from Them by Mark McClusky prompted me to request that book from my friendly public library. I like how the article looks at the absolute skill levels among professional competitors in chess and professional performers in orchestral music and shows that the skill level in those and many other domains has been steadily rising in my lifetime. There is still a lot of untapped potential in most individuals alive today that can be developed even at adult ages. As the article reports, "What we’re seeing is, in part, the mainstreaming of excellent habits. In the late nineteen-fifties, Raymond Berry, the great wide receiver for the Baltimore Colts, was famous for his attention to detail and his obsessive approach to the game: he took copious notes, he ate well, he studied film of his opponents, he simulated entire games by himself, and so on. But, as the journalist Mark Bowden observed, Berry was considered an oddball. The golfer Ben Hogan, who was said to have 'invented practice,' stood out at a time when most pro golfers practiced occasionally, if at all. Today, practicing six to eight hours a day is just the price of admission on the P.G.A. Tour. Everyone works hard. Everyone is really good." This kind of cultural change can still go a lot further in a lot of fields on human performance. A culture of continual efforts at self-improvement has hardly even begun in many occupations. The article's conclusion about improving the performance of elementary and secondary school teachers in the United States is thoughtful, and also refers to good new books, Building a Better Teacher by Elizabeth Green and The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein. Studies of educational effectiveness in the United States consistently show that the variance in teacher quality in any one school swamps the variance in school quality between one school and another, so any child in any school district is at risk of getting an ineffective teacher. (Although schools in poor neighborhoods of the United States, on the whole, have the greatest difficulty in hiring and retaining good teachers.) Anything that can help teachers learn to teach better before or after they began working in the classroom will have massive social benefits. An economist who has studied teacher effectiveness for years shows that the best teachers are almost literally worth their weight in gold, while the worst teachers have negative added value for their pupils.[1] Bringing a culture of continual self-improvement in America's schools is a project of crucial national importance. [1] http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-how-much-good-teacher-worth http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-h...