David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

between a class of twenty-five students and a class of eighteen students? There’s no question that the latter is easier for the ...

each patient? Or would you simply leave at six-thirty instead of seven-thirty and have dinner with your kids? Now for the crucia ...

three or six—all varying degrees of intimacy in and of themselves. With eighteen students, I can always get to each one of them ...

And what about the other direction? Drop down six from the perfect eighteen bodies and we have the Last Supper. And that’s the p ...

manage as the very large class. In one case, the problem is the number of potential interactions to manage. In the other case, i ...

But he didn’t want to teach a class of fewer than twenty either: The life source of any class is discussion, and that tends to n ...

And if the class is too small, among the speakers, you don’t have enough breadth of opinion perhaps to get things really going. ...

kind of conversation or discussion going in the target language. It’s difficult to play games to reinforce vocabulary, grammar s ...

what you need is to have people around you asking the same questions, wrestling with the same issues, and worrying about the sam ...

teaching children at precisely the age when they begin to make the difficult transition to adolescence. They are awkward and sel ...

this age, it’s like they have a muzzle on.” She didn’t say it, but you could imagine her thinking that if someone went and built ...

You have to really be on top of your game when you have that many kids in a classroom so that over there in a corner, they’re no ...

And that’s the real issue—what can be done to enliven, enrich, and engage the child, so they aren’t just being passive.” Did she ...

adventure of learning? When she thought back to that year in Meriden, DeBrito got a faraway look in her eyes. “I like the noise. ...

6. A half-hour drive up the road from Shepaug Valley, in the town of Lakeville, Connecticut, is a school called Hotchkiss. It is ...

average class size? Twelve students. The same condition that Teresa DeBrito dreads, Hotchkiss—just up the road— advertises as it ...

institutions and wealthy countries—all Goliaths—too often fall into: the school assumes that the kinds of things that wealth can ...

stronger and richer is always in our best interest. Vivek Ranadivé, a shepherd boy named David, and the principal of Shepaug Val ...

and Adam Grant argue, in a brilliant paper, that, in fact, nearly everything of consequence follows the inverted U: “Across many ...

Stage three, where extra resources have no effect on the outcome. And stage four, in which more resources are counterproductive. ...