I'm the kind of reader who has to re-read things several thousand times

What kind of a reader are you?

1.  Note each time the text seems to move into a new claim or phase of Lehrer’s argument.   At each significant change, subdivide the text.  Label each subdivision by the claim or sub-claim presented.

2.  Go through the text deliberately and highlight every instance of dialogue.  What do you theorize its role in Lehrer’s argument?

“It went against the way we’d been thinking about personality since the four humors and the ancient Greeks,” he says.

“I’ve always believed there are consistencies in a person that can be looked at,” he says. “We just have to look in the right way.

“Young kids are pure id,” Mischel says. “They start off unable to wait for anything—whatever they want they need. But then, as I watched my own kids, I marvelled at how they gradually learned how to delay and how that made so many other things possible.”

“We recently tried to do a version of it, and the kids were very excited about having food in the game room,” she says. “There are so many allergies and peculiar diets today that we don’t do many things with food.”

“When you’re investigating will power in a four-year-old, little things make a big difference,” he says. “How big should the marshmallows be? What kind of cookies work best?”

“I knew we’d designed it well when a few kids wanted to quit as soon as we explained the conditions to them,” he says. “They knew this was going to be very difficult.”

“If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.

“What’s interesting about four-year-olds is that they’re just figuring out the rules of thinking,” Mischel says. “The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that’s a terrible idea. If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room.”

“If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”

“In general, trying to separate nature and nurture makes about as much sense as trying to separate personality and situation,” he says. “The two influences are completely interrelated.”

“When you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much,” he says. “And if you don’t practice then you’ll never figure out how to distract yourself. You won’t develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won’t become second nature.”

“All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”

“We can’t give these people marshmallows,” Berman says. “They know they’re part of a long-term study that looks at delay of gratification, so if you give them an obvious delay task they’ll do their best to resist. You’ll get a bunch of people who refuse to touch their marshmallow.

“These tasks have been studied so many times that we pretty much know where to look and what we’re going to find,” Jonides says

“These are powerful instincts telling us to reach for the marshmallow or press the space bar,” Jonides says. “The only way to defeat them is to avoid them, and that means paying attention to something else. We call that will power, but it’s got nothing to do with the will.” 

“We’re incredibly complicated creatures,” Shoda says. “Even the simplest aspects of personality are driven by dozens and dozens of different genes.”

“They turned my kitchen into a lab,” Carolyn told me. “They set up a little tent where they tested my oldest daughter on the delay task with some cookies. I remember thinking, I really hope she can wait.”

“I’m not interested in looking at the brain just so we can use a fancy machine,” he says. “The real question is what can we do with this fMRI data that we couldn’t do before?” 


Mischel “This is the group I’m most interested in,” he says. “They have substantially improved their lives.”


Mischel “For the most part, it was an incredibly frustrating experience,” she says. “I gradually became convinced that trying to teach a teen-ager algebra when they don’t have self-control is a pretty futile exercise.” 


Duckworth “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control.”

“The core feature of the KIPP approach is that character matters for success,” Levin says. “Educators like to talk about character skills when kids are in kindergarten—we send young kids home with a report card about ‘working well with others’ or ‘not talking out of turn.’ But then, just when these skills start to matter, we stop trying to improve them. We just throw up our hands and complain.”


“When you do these large-scale educational studies, there are ninety-nine uninteresting reasons the study could fail,” Duckworth says. “Maybe a teacher doesn’t show the video, or maybe there’s a field trip on the day of the testing. This is what keeps me up at night.” 

“This is where your parents are important,” Mischel says. “Have they established rituals that force you to delay on a daily basis? Do they encourage you to wait? And do they make waiting worthwhile?” 

“We should give marshmallows to every kindergartner,” he says. “We should say, ‘You see this marshmallow? You don’t have to eat it. You can wait. Here’s how.’ ” 

These quotes help the writing more interesting and also help see the point of view from others.

3.  Note every introduction and/or biographical background for the “characters” in Lehrer’s text.  How do these function in the text? 

Marc Berman, a lanky graduate student with an easy grin, speaks about his research with the infectious enthusiasm of a freshman taking his first philosophy class. Berman works in the lab of John Jonides, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, who is in charge of the brain-scanning experiments on the original Bing subjects

-This helps us understand who the people he uses in his argument are, and how they can fit in with his argument. The introductions also help the story become more readable, instead of just facts people are introduced to help support his thesis.

4.  Mark each time Lehrer offers a definition.   How elaborate is each definition?  What does the sequence of these mean in aggregate?

5.  Have you found any metaphors in this text?  Did you expect to find metaphors or metaphoric language in a scientific text?