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

behaved and attentive, eager and ready
to learn. They don’t seem like bad
apples at all. They only start to
misbehave well into the lesson, and only
in response to the way Stella is
behaving. Stella causes the crisis. How
so? By doing an appalling job of
teaching the lesson.
Stella had the girl from the class
reading alongside her as a way of
engaging the rest of the students. But the
pacing of the back-and-forth between the
two of them was excruciatingly slow and
wooden. “Look at her body language,”
one of the Virginia researchers, Bridget
Hamre, said as we watched Stella.
“Right now she is just talking to this one