BÀI HỌC 24B: SHADOWING TECHNIQUES - TASK 21 -TO 30

 TASK 21: Emma Watson "Gender equality is your issue too!"

I was appointed /əˈpɔɪn.tɪd/ as Goodwill Ambassador /æmˈbæs.ə.dər/ for UN women 6 months ago. And the more I have spoken about feminism /ˈfem.ə.nɪ.zəm/, the more I have realized that fighting for women's rights has to often become synonymous  /sɪˈnɑː.nə.məs/ with Man-hating.

If there's one thing I know for certain, it is that this has to stop. 

For the record, feminism by definition is: The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities  /ˌɒp.əˈtʃuː.nə.ti/ . This is the theory  /ˈθɪə.ri/ of the political  /pəˈlɪt.ɪ.kəl/, economic and social equality of the sexes. I started questioning gender- based assumptions a long time ago when I was eight. I was confused at being called “bossy” because I wanted to direct the plays that we would put on for our parents - but the boys were not. When at 14, I started to be sexualized by certain elements of the media. When at 15, my girlfriends started dropping out of their beloved sports teams because they didn't want to appear “muscly” /ˈmʌs.li/. When at 18, my male friends were unable to express their feelings.I decided that I was the feminist  /ˈfem.ɪ.nɪst/ and this seemed uncomplicated to me. But my recent research has shown me that Feminism has become an unpopular word. Women are choosing not to identify as feminists. 

Apparently I am among the ranks of women whose expressions are seen as too strong,  too aggressive, isolating, and anti-men, unattractive even. Why has the word become such an uncomfortable one?

I am from Britain and I think it is right that I am paid the same as my male counterparts. I think it is right that I should be able to make decisions about my own body.

I think it is right that women be involved on my behalf in the policies, ad the decisions that's will affect my life.I think it is right that socially I am afforded the same respect as men.But sadly I just say that there is no one country in the world where all women can expect to receive these rights. No country in the world can yet say that they have achieved gender equality. These rights I consider to be human rights but I am one of the lucky ones. My life isa  sheer privilege because my parents didn't love me less because I was born a daughter. My school did not limit me because I was a girl. My mentors didn't assume that I would go less far because I might give birth to a child one day. These influencers were the gender equality ambassadors that made me who I am today. They may not know it, but they are the inadvertent feminist who are changing the world today. We need more of those. 

And if you still hate the word- it is not the word that is important but the idea and the ambition behind it. Because not all women have received the same rights that I have. In fact, statistically, very few have been. 

In 1997, Hillary Clinton made a famous speech in Beijing about women's rights. Sadly, many of the things that she wanted to change are still true today. But what stood out for me the most was that less than 30% of the audience were male. How can we affect change the world when only half of it is invited or l feel welcome to participate in the conversation? Men- I would like to take this opportunity to extend your formal invitation.

Gender equality is your issue too. Because today, I've seen my father's role as a parent being valued less by the society despite my needing his presence at a child as much as my mother's. I’ve seen young men suffering from mental illness, unable to ask for help, for fear it would make them look less of a men - or less of a man. In fact in the UK suicide is the biggest killer of men between 20 to 49,eclipsing road accidents, cancer and coronary heart disease. I have seen men made fragile and insecure by a distorted sense of what constitutes male success. Men don't have the benefit of equality either. We don't often want to talk about men being imprisoned by gender-stereotypes but I can see that they are and that when they are free,things will change for women as natural consequence. If men don't have to be aggressive in order to be accepted, women don't feel compelled to be submissive. If men don’t have to control, women don't have to be controlled. Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong. It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideas.

If we stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by who we are, we can all be freer and this is what HeForShe is about. It's about freedom. I want men to take up this mantle, so that their daughters, sisters and mothers can be free from prejudice, but also so that their sons have permission to be vulnerable and human too. Reclaim those parts of themselves they abandoned and in doing so be a more true and complete version of themselves. 

You might think who is this Harry Potter girl? And what is she doing speaking at the UN. It's a really good question. I have been asking myself the same thing. All I know is that I care about this problem. And I want to make it better. And having seen what I have seen and given a chance- I feel it is my responsibility to say something. Statesman Edmund Burke said “All that is needed for the forces of evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing.”

In my nervousness for this speech and in my moments of doubt, I've told myself firmly “If not me, who? If not now, when?” if you have similar doubts when opportunities are presented to you I hope that those words will be helpful. Because the reality is that if we do nothing, it will take 75 years or for me to be nearly a hundred before women can expect to be paid the same as men for the same work. 15.5 million girls will be married in the next 16 years as children. At the current rates, it won’t be until 2086 before all the rural African girls can have a secondary education. If you believe in equality, you may be one of those inadvertent feminists that I spoke of earlier. And for this I applaud you. We are struggling for a uniting word but the good news is that we have a uniting movement. It is called HeForShe. I am inviting you to step forward, to be seen, and ask yourself “if not me, who? If not now, when?” Thank you very very much. 

TASK 22: The key to success? - Grit - Angela Lee Duckworth

When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management 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.

What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores. Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well. 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 convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough.

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 motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ. But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?

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 predict 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 characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit.

Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. 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.

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, standardized 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.

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 commitments. In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.

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 persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition.

So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. But we need more. And that's where I'm going to end my remarks, 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.

In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier.

Task 23: