Grit & Fame High: A Concrete Lesson in Perseverance

One of the latest educational buzzwords floating about is ‘grit’. Angela Lee Duckworth made this term popular among educators in her widespread TED talk. In her talk, she defines grit in the following way,

Grit is the 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.

Ms. Duckworth goes on to discuss the importance of conveying grit as a practiced skill to our students. I have found that my recent attempts at explaining the value of grit or perseverance are falling flat in my high school classroom. I believe this is because grit is something one has to experience first hand in order to truly understand, and because, well, in students’ eyes, I’m old. How can my experiences or explanations hit home if they perceive an age divide that removes me from their circle of reference?

Last summer, my teen daughter and I escaped an excessively hot day by camping indoors and watching Netflix. She is heavily involved in theater and she came across a documentary called Fame High which was released in 2012 and which traces the artistic pursuits of 4 high school students who attend the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (LACHSA) over the span of a year.

About 15 minutes into our viewing, I noticed how rapt my daughter’s attention was on the students who were attempting to balance their academics, practice schedules for dance, theater, and music, along with the daily pressures of adolescence. Light bulb! What if this was the perfect film to use with high school students in order to make tangible the abstract concept of grit? I had to try, and try I did.

I opted to show the film prior to the end of first semester. I instructed students to take ‘sensorial notes’. Sensorial notes, I explained, are observations you have about the film that make your senses alert. Perhaps it will be a piece of dialog uttered by one of the students, or his or her parents, or teachers. Perhaps it will be a scene that makes your heart beat faster, or causes you to lean in a bit to predict what might happen. Write all of these connections down as they occur for our post-film discussion, I instructed.

It should be noted that when some of my students realized this was a film that followed artistic students as opposed to student athletes, there were some groans. However, my students were engrossed in the journeys of these talented teens before the first 30 minutes went by. The film took two class periods to finish.

Upon its completion, I posed four questions for students to respond to in their writing journals.

• What did these students have in common besides their talent?
• Who was the most interesting character to you and why?
• What is the word that you think best describes the essence or central character trait of each student featured in Fame High? Why?
• Describe how you felt when the film ended. Be sure to explain why.

 The final question was a wonderful gateway into a discussion about grit. So many of my students noted that they felt either inspired or lazy for having given up on something they loved. Students shared that they had ‘quit too soon’, ‘failed to trust themselves’, ‘permitted fear of failure to prevent them from trying’ and so much more.

And after they disclosed their brave and honest reactions, I was able to explain the concept of grit to them using the students from the documentary as concrete reference points. This time the light bulb connections belonged to my students. Fame High is currently available on Netflix.

Written by Jess Burnquist