outliers reflection

The book outliers talks about how it is easier for the chinese people to do math because of the Chinese characters. I am not Chinese, but I am good at math.  I don't think the characters have anything to do with it. If we work harder for it, we could be just as good as any other culture. Plus, as some of my classmates that know chinese Americans said, they still count in the American language. It might also have alot to do with the circumstances in our life. how hard our parents push us and what life style we were born in.

In the book it also talks about kipp school. The school isn't in a good neighborhood and there are alot of students in every classroom. Apperently, the best learning situation is a class with less kids. So, really kipp school was kind of a test. The kids were choosen by a lotery pick. They are in school by 7:30 and school ends at 5. they have alot of after school activities. they are all required to be in the orchestra, which is said to make you think better. So inspite of the situation, the kids are getting a good education. this is where I go against what I said earlier about situations influencing your abitlitiy. Even though the students weren't in the best environment, they all worked hard and got good grades. As a public school student, I feel like my school time is to short. We only get fifty minutes to learn a certain topic everyday, and only get 45 minutes of homework. I like the amount of homework, but I don't feel like I have enough time to get our questions out. There has been so many classes where my teachers were in the middle of explaining something, but then the bell rings. Then we have to waste more time the next day to finish explaining something we were supposed to finish the day before.

The ethnic theory of plane crashes is a chapter in the book that is explained greatly. The chapter starts off talking about a captian of a korean air fight. He died in a huge plane crash. There are only .27 per million departures that fail in american airlines. For korean air in 1988 to 1998 4.74 per million departures failed which is more then 17 times higher. The reason for this is because of cultural differences. the koreans where tought that telling the authorities that they did something wrong was disrespectful, so they didn't report problems. Americans weren't tought that way. When there is a problem they went to whoever was in charge and told them exactly what the problem was and that they wanted it fixed. This is interesting to me because i like knowing how different cultures do things differently.