In-Class Timed Essay

Prompt: What does Friedman mean by the equation CQ+PQ>IQ? And what does this have to do with what Friedman calls the "Great Sorting Out"?

Friedman’s equation CQ+PQ>IQ signifies that an individual’s curiosity quotient and passion quotient outweigh his or her intelligence quotient. “The Great Sorting Out,” an adjustment period after the Triple Convergence, has rearranged elements of society. Those who benefit and succeed during and after the “Great Sorting Out” are those whose curiosity and passion outweigh their intelligence.

Friedman uses the equation CQ+PQ>IQ to emphasize that curiosity and passion are becoming more and more important than intelligence alone. Friedman notes that “when the world is flat, curiosity and passion…are so much more important” because flat world tools can take your curiosity a long way (303). He gives the example of curious children and students; he argues that these “curious, passionate kids are self-educators and self-motivators” (304). Earlier in the same chapter, Friedman addressed the “ability to ‘learn how to learn’” since it is “how you learn that will set you apart” (302). Since curious kids have a strong sense of motivation, they will learn well since they will grow to “love learning” (303). Therefore, curiosity is a great asset in the flat world.

In addition to curiosity, passion is also necessary for success. A passion for learning and “the innocent passion for a certain job,” a seemingly childlike characteristics, are almost essential for success in the flat world (305). Teachers, for instance, must love kids and be passionate about their professions in order to be truly successful and remain “untouchables.” Friedman defines an “untouchable” as someone “whose job cannot be outsourced, digitized, or automated” (278). One of the characteristics he gives of an untouchable is a “passionate personalizer” who can add a personal touch by being passionate about his or her job (294). Therefore, passion is another essential element for success in this new flat world.

Intelligence is not as important as it once was because of the large number of people with high intelligence and great technical skills. Because of the Triple Convergence, a couple billion people from “closed economies” ran onto the global playing field, many of whom were very smart. Intelligence does not prove to be as much of an asset as it once was, argues Friedman (304).

The “Great Sorting Out” rewards those people with high curiosity and passion quotients, not necessarily those with only high intelligence and technical skills” alone. Since the Triple Convergence has created a “connect and collaborate” society that must be altered and figure out (sorted out, really), passion and curiosity have entered the mix. Since during the “Great Sorting Out,” our “roles, habits, and…practices…have to profoundly adjusted,” our learning and education must be adjusted too. This is where passion and love of learning along with a curiosity for learning come into the mix. Those who are passionate and curious about learning will be rewarded in the flat world. After all, citizens of the flat world “are enabled to do many more things on their own” with new tools and techniques, but they need to be educated well in order to accomplish what they want to do. Passion and curiosity are essential in education.

Since people’s jobs are being automated, particularly those in sales, curiosity and passion are all the more important. According to the protagonist Willy Loman in the play Death of a Salesman, “the man who creates personal interest is the man who gets ahead” (256). Well, not exactly in a flat world. People must work harder to keep their jobs from being automated because it has now become hard “to create human bond[s]” (256). You must be passionate about whatever it is you do in order to succeed in the flat world because you want people to come to you, not a machine. Friedman buys expensive lemonade at sporting events from a man who is passionate and excited about his job (294).

In order to succeed in the flat world and during and after the “Great Sorting Out,” one must also constantly “upgrade their education and…knowledge skills,” argues Friedman (266). The way to do this well is to be curious about what you’re learning. You must be passionate about what you do because it takes passion to do hard work and good work. It takes passion and motivation, not intelligence, to keep learning continuously, a key to success during and after the “Great Sorting Out” in the flat world.


My Thoughts: This turned out to be a lot easier for me than writing about a nonfiction narrative (like Pham's Catfish and Mandala). For one, it was a lot easier to come up with organization because Friedman's book is organized by topic, so essay organization seems to flow rather naturally from that. I enjoyed reading this book, which made it a lot more pleasurable (and easier!) to write about. I feel that I brought in a lot of useful evidence because I made an outline prior to the timed in-class essay detailing the chapters I had read up to that point. In the writing process, these outlines really help me to solidify my point. In addition, careful reading of Friedman was essential to this assignment because he makes a ton of interesting points in a short amount of pages.

Out-of-Class Essay

Assignment Overview: Focus on one way Friedman's "flat world" affects you.

Teachers as “Untouchables”: What Teachers Need to Succeed in the 21^st Century

When parents come in to the educational center in which I work, one of the most common questions is, “So, someone works with the kids right? It’s not all just computer-based?” Since May 2006, I’ve been working as an Academic Coach at Score Educational Center, a computer learning and tutoring center for kids between the ages of four and twelve. When parents come in to check out the center or to enroll their kids in our programs, they are usually impressed by what they see: kids passionate about learning through fun computer games and lessons. But, one question that most parents never forget to ask is: “Does someone work with my child? It’s not just the computer, right? The academic coaches help the kids too, right?” Basically, an Academic Coach teaches new concepts to the students, encourages them, supports them, answers their questions, and celebrates their high scores and improvements with them. Most parents are reassured when they see that one-to-one, coach-to-student interaction. When I interviewed my boss Xavier Nazario, the program director at Score, he informed me that about “50% of the kids quit when the personal interaction isn’t there. It’s when they don’t feel that one-to-one contact – when the computer is teaching them, not the coaches” (Nazario). So what does this have to do with the flat world in which we’re living? Well, it goes to show that technology is not enough on its own; personality matters just as much, if not more than technology alone. In his bestselling work The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, Thomas L. Friedman argues the importance and ubiquity of technology in education, but he also correctly recognizes the significance of personal interaction. I, a young teacher in the 21^st century, teach in two locations in which technology is used extensively, and I agree that a personal touch is necessary. In order for me and other teachers to succeed in the flat world, we will need to become “educated” on the new technological tools used in teaching but will also need to be personal and passionate about what we do so that we too do not become digitized or outsourced to other countries.

Like the parents at Score who recognize the value of personal contact between their children and the academic coaches, I, too, understand its significance. After asking some of my students at Score what would happen if the coaches disappeared, I received such responses as: “But how? Wait, is that possible? I mean, could you really? Then we would get all your Score cards!!!” but I also got a good response from one of my favorite kids who said, “But then…how would we learn anything?” So, this student is implying that she may learn more from us, teenage academic coaches, than she from the computer lessons they work on. Why is this so? Is it because of a flaw in the design of the computer curriculum or is it the fact that students still learn best with someone physical in front of them to teach them? I would argue that they learn more from us for the second reason. I think the students who succeed at Score are the ones constantly asking questions; as Friedman argues, “curious, passionate kids are self-educators and self-motivators” (Friedman 304). These are the students who engage in the programs; they ask questions when they do not understand and apply what they learn to their computer curriculum. These kids exemplify the reason why teachers are needed. I believe that a computer can never be programmed entirely to answer the questions of these curious kids who are thirsty for knowledge. These are the kids for whom real-life teachers are essential. Ultimately, programs like Score work well because they recognize the importance of mixing technology and personal feedback and guidance. Technology alone cannot teach these kids effectively. Therefore, the personal touch that we as coaches provide to them is just as if not more important than the material they are learning on the computer. For this reason, I must learn how to create strong personal bonds with students in order to succeed as a teacher in the twenty-first century. I find that the kids I spend time getting to know at Score are the ones who can learn the most from me. After all, schools may become digital classrooms and playgrounds where much of the work is done on the computer, but students will still need personal interaction in order to learn best.

Not only do teachers need to have strong personal skills in order to create bonds with and understand their students, teachers must also learn about the technology that is being used today. In order to be an “untouchable” teacher, in other words a teacher whose job “cannot be “outsourced, digitized, or automated,” I must learn to use the educational technological tools that my students will be using (Friedman 278). In this flat world in which technology has become such a large and integral part of daily life, I simply cannot choose to ignore what is happening or I run the risk of being automated. If I use “the same old model that worked for the past fifty years,” I will likely be replaced by a computer (Friedman 278). I have to be a teacher who can learn to use and preferably master the technological tools I will be working with; since technology is always changing, I have to keep learning to catch up with it. According to Friedman, an important ability in the emerging flat world is “the ability to ‘learn how to learn’ – to constantly absorb, and teach yourself…new ways of doing new things” (Friedman 302). Teachers have to learn to keep up with the quickly changing technologies by continually learning how to use and manipulate them. Marc Prensky, an educator who supports game-based computer learning, argues that we are living in a time of “exponential change” in which teachers must “get to know their students” and “educate with technology” (Prensky). I have to learn how to use the technology in order to be an “untouchable” teacher who can help her students by understanding the tools they are using.

Another job I currently have that has taught me the importance of personal interaction is with The Princeton Review, the popular standardized test preparation company. At TPR, I teach high school students how to do well on the SAT; we meet about eight times in person for class and four times for practice tests. That’s one part of my job, but the second half of my job is online. I grade students’ essays from all over the United States – and sometimes outside the United States – on an online grading system called LiveGrader. Basically, students’ handwritten essays are scanned into an online system where graders from all over the country are able to access and grade them. I’ve graded essays that come from as far away as New Hampshire and Maryland as well as South Korea and Taiwan. This LiveGrader system just goes to show how flat the world is getting. In fact, I received an email containing the LiveGrader Gazette, a bulk email sent out to all graders, on February 16, 2007 that stated that “12,000 essays were graded in the past 7 days” (Melbourne). Clearly, LiveGrader has its advantages; however, I’ve noticed that students tend to improve more by coming to see me in person for feedback and advice on how to write good essays for the SAT. I believe it is nearly impossible to help the student in the best way possible by typing three to five sentences of feedback on LiveGrader. Not only is it time consuming, it is extremely difficult to sum up all the comments I want to give in a couple sentences. When I meet in person with a student about his or her essay, I feel that they get a ton more out of these sessions than they do from having their essays graded quickly on the Internet. Essentially, this personal interaction is much more helpful to me and my students, and this is one reason I believe that technology cannot and will not outweigh personal contact.

In addition to building personal bonds with my students, I will need to be passionate about teaching in order to remain an “untouchable” in the future. Friedman claims that passion takes “a routine task and upgrades it,” so I will need to upgrade my teaching in order to stand out from the boring, old teachers who may become digitized (Friedman 294). In order to stand out, I must have passion and a desire to teach differently, to add something to the classroom that can’t be shared with students online. I understand this is a difficult task, but passion will make it less challenging in my opinion. Friedman asserts that if you do something you love to do, “you will bring something intangible to it…which cannot be easily repeated, automated, or outsourced” (Friedman 309). Teachers who love their jobs will be in demand; they won’t be easily digitized. Those who are not passionate about what they do, on the other hand, are at risk for being replaced by computers. From a student perspective, it is easy to tell whether or not a teacher is passionate, and the boring teachers who do not bring much to the classroom are the ones whose demand will unfortunately decrease in the flat world. Teaching can now be truly compared to performing; the teachers who give the best performances, ones filled with excitement, metaphors, comparisons, and humor will still be in demand despite new and emerging technology. Those whose performances are weak with poor reviews will no longer be demanded because online lectures can accomplish the same things in less time.

An additional skill that successful teachers in the flat world must have is the ability to explain concepts clearly and precisely. I don’t believe that computers will ever be as great at explaining as teachers – the truly “great explainers” (Friedman 284). Friedman believes that we need “teachers…who are also good explainers – who can see the complexity but explain it with simplicity” (Friedman 284). In my own personal experience with a “great explainer,” I recognized that the explanations that I received from him in person were far better than those I received online. I took an Organizational Behavior for Business hybrid class at the University of Southern California with Professor Tom Cummings. We listened to weekly online lectures, clips of our teacher lecturing in Windows Media Player format, and we attended discussions with our teaching assistants. When we finally got to meet with the professor halfway through the semester on a biweekly basis, I realized just how much of a “great explainer” and how passionate he really was. He was able to take complex business organization concepts and turn them in to ideas that were much easier to understand. Now that more and more people are attending schools in the United States, great teachers and explainers are needed to educate American students who must compete with students from other countries in the flat world; opportunities in the current world are country-less in a sense because Internet and telephone communication allow jobs to be done from all over the world, so the level of competition has increased. In fact, “approximately 70 percent of high school graduates actually do go to college within two years of graduating” (Kirst). Therefore, society has increased demand for great teachers to educate the increasing population of students. Great teachers are what we need in a time when competition is high because they are best able to explain and personalize.

In order to simulate these one-on-one interactions between students and teachers, many online companies have created tutoring programs in which a student meets on a regular basis with a physical tutor somewhere else in the world online – on another continent usually – via webcams or Skype, the internet phone service. These programs have their benefits; cost efficiency, distance learning, time zone differences among others. But, why are these programs still not enough? I think there’s something about the meeting with someone physically face-to-face and talking with them that just can’t be simulated technologically. Yes, people will use these online programs, but teachers will still be necessary because they are more valuable in person than they are on the computer. Friedman touches on the idea of “e-tutoring…another example of how modern communications…are broadening the boundaries of outsourcing” (Friedman 42) in discussing an e-tutoring company called Growing Stars that brings tutors to students on their home computer screens. Although e-tutoring can be effective in some situations, like supplementing school work, it can never take the place of the best teachers in the flat world. I’ve witnessed the importance of having personal interactions with teachers like Dr. Tom Cummings. Not only was he a “great explainer,” he was humorous, outgoing, and interesting, but these traits did not come through in his online lectures because technology could not capture his personality. We could only see how much of a great professor he was when we met with him in person. My friend and classmate Lisa Ault enthusiastically shared with me: “Dr. Cummings is the best teacher I’ve ever had. But I didn’t know until I met him and started going to his office hours. He was so boring and flat in those online lectures…now I can tell how excited he is about business psychology” (Ault). In my opinion, Dr. Cummings is one of those teachers who will never be outsourced because he has the passion and teaching skills that computers lack but that are necessary for student learning. In fact, he is a great model to follow for those who want to be “untouchable” teachers in the flat world.

Is the teaching profession in danger? Partly yes, I believe; however, the teachers who are in danger are those who are not engaging with students and who are not passionate about what they do. Teaching is like performing; no one wants to listen to a boring teacher just like no one wants to see a boring show. But those teachers who bring something to the classroom that can’t be digitized – passion, explaining skills, and personal interactions with students – are not in danger of being outsourced. In some aspects, the teaching profession is safe because students seem to succeed more with personal interaction. The parents at Score can rest easy – at least for now – because Academic Coaches are not being fired just because great technology is being created. Likewise, great teachers will not become obsolete in the flat world.

My Thoughts: This was by far my favorite essay in this class! I really enjoyed it because I got a chance to write about myself and a side of me I usually do not think about. Previously, in high school, I wrote many analytical essays but never any personal ones. Therefore, this was my first real stab at tackling both an analytical and personal essay. I think my research was really essential to making this paper a success. I learned a lot of stuff from the interviews I took, and this made me realize that online research isn't the only type of research that can be done. Now, I will learn from this and explore this type of research in future assignments I have. In addition, I have good organization in this paper (organization is often a problem for me), and I believe it transitions nicely from one paragraph to the next using bridge transitions. I learned about the efficacy of these types of transitions and plan to use these great transitions in future papers. I also believe my writing itself has improved a lot from high school. I always had problems with sentence structure and awkward wording, but I found a way to solve this problem: reading the essay out loud after completion to figure out how to phrase things best. I'm very proud of this work!

Works Cited

Ault, Lisa. Telephone interview. 27 Feb. 2007.

Friedman, Thomas L. The World is Flat: a Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. 2nd ed. New York City: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Kirst, Michael, comp. The Bridge Project. Stanford University. 28 Feb. 2007 .

Melbourne, Drew. "Live Grader Gazette - 2/16/07." E-mail to Irine Tyutereva. 16 Feb. 2007.

Nazario, Xavier. Personal interview. 19 Feb. 2007.

Prensky, Marc. "EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative." San Diego, CA. 30 Jan. 2006. 24 Feb. 2007 .