Most Likely To Succeed Summary

Reading is something we do every single day not just in school but when we are driving, or when we are ordering food at a restaurant. Every single day we read but this week one paper that stood out to me was a article about football and teachers. I can see how they may not seem as if they relate or if they will ever relate. However the article really shows how we may never know who’s right for the job even if it’s choosing a quarterback for the nfl or picking a teacher. In Most Likely to Succeed by Malcolm Gladwell they talk about a scout named Dan Shonka, and how he can’t determine if Chase Daniel the star quarterback at the University of Missouri will actually be able to play in the NFL. In the NFL you have one moment to throw the ball just
catch, throw and watch the ball spin through the air. In college you can take moments to think about the play you can catch, look, determine, and throw. There is such a difference in the way football is played in the NFL versus college. Not knowing if a player will be successful in the game makes it difficult to just pick someone even if they are the star of their team.
Finding good teachers is also difficult because you can’t know if someone will be a good or bad teacher. You will get interviewed but that will be based on how you did in school and what gpa you had compared to you actually in a classroom. Both quarterbacks and teachers can never really be determined by how they play a game in college and a teacher can’t be judged based on their gpa. A quote from the article that I found so true with both teachers and quarterbacks is “no one knows what a person with the potential to be great teacher looks like. The school system has quarterback problem.” An example of this would be back in 1999, Shonka was on the staff of the Philadelphia Eagles. They took five quarterbacks and only came out successful in the end. However, teachers don’t get this luck we can’t have taxpayers pay more just to have four tested and only have one come out successful. We will never see a potential teacher or quarterback because we will never know what they will be like. No matter how many experiments or IQ tests we try to provide to determine these qualities we can never actually predict whether that person will succeed or
not. Between the two you see that no one person can predict a good teacher or quarterback. This reading really showed me that you may never know if someone will be a good teacher. It also gives me inspiration as a future teacher. As we teach the next generation, we may never know if someone will be a great teacher or an amazing quarterback but we can learn from these readings and take them with us. As the future teachers we can all try to be great teachers for the next generation and to inspire them.