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.
