Top 37 Amanda Ripley Quotes
#1. Paralysis seems to happen on the steepest slope of the survival arc - where almost all hope is lost, when escape seems impossible, and when the situation is unfamiliar to the extreme.
Amanda Ripley
#2. Why do we procrastinate leaving? The denial phase is a humbling one. It takes a while to come to terms with our miserable luck. Rowley puts it this way: 'Fires only happen to other people.' We have a tendency to believe that everything is OK because, well, it almost always has been before.
Amanda Ripley
#3. Dread = Uncontrollability + Unfamiliarity + Imaginability + Suffering + Scale of Destruction + Unfairness
Amanda Ripley
#4. The public totally discounts low-probability high-consequence events. The individual says, it's not going to be this plane, this bus, this time.
Amanda Ripley
#5. If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading, too. That pattern held fast across very different countries and different levels of family income. Kids could see what parents valued, and it mattered more than what parents said.
Amanda Ripley
#6. The Iron Child culture was contagious; it was hard for kids and parents to resist the pressure to study more and more. But all the while, they complained that the fixation on rankings and test scores was crushing their spirit, depriving them not just of sleep but of sanity.
Amanda Ripley
#7. He'd experienced it as a private trauma. Failure in American schools was demoralizing and to be avoided at all costs. American kids could not handle routine failure, or so adults thought.
Amanda Ripley
#8. Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a believe that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life's turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences.
Amanda Ripley
#10. The health of your family or your office or your city directly affects the health of it after. The better you are at handling high-stress situations with little information, those skills lead to resilience and the ability to recover afterward.
Amanda Ripley
#11. Playing with numbers was still considered taboo, a subject best left to the later years, despite America's obvious and enduring math handicap. For too long, what American
Amanda Ripley
#12. Most Americans said teaching was a hard and important job, but many of them, including teachers and teaching professors, didn't seem to believe it required serious intellectual heft.
Amanda Ripley
#13. If life is really as purposeless, unfair, and uncontrollable ... ,then life is simply too terrifying to be managed. So we search for a redemptive narrative ... That search is a survival mechanism.
Amanda Ripley
#14. In many U.S. schools, sports instilled leadership and persistence in one group of kids while draining focus and resources from academics for everyone. The lesson wasn't that sports couldn't coexist with education; it was that sports had nothing to do with education.
Amanda Ripley
#15. Wealth had made rigor optional in America. But everything had changed. In an automated, global economy, kids needed to be driven; then need to know how to adapt, since they would be doing it all their lives. They needed a culture of rigor.
Amanda Ripley
#16. Whether they are at an airline or at a command center, experts will err on the side of excluding the public, as we have seen. If they can avoid enrolling regular people in their emergency plans, they will. Life is easier that way, until something goes wrong.
Amanda Ripley
#17. PISA was developed by a kind of think tank for the developed world, called the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the scientist at the center of the experiment was Andreas Schleicher.
Amanda Ripley
#18. Tom was not good at math. He'd started to lose his way in middle school, as so many American kids did. It had happened gradually; first he hadn't understood one lesson, and then another and another.
Amanda Ripley
#19. Everywhere I went, in every country, people complained about their education system. It was a universal truth and a strangely reassuring one. No one was content, and rightly so. Educating all kids to high levels was hard, and every country - every one - still had work to do.
Amanda Ripley
#20. One thing was clear: To give our kids the kind of education they deserved, we had to first agree that rigor mattered most of all; that school existed to help kids learn to think, to work hard, and yes, to fail. That was the core consensus that made everything else possible.
Amanda Ripley
#21. It was hard to explain, but there just seemed to be something in the air here. Whatever it was, it made everyone more serious about learning, even the kids who had not bought into other adult dictates.
Amanda Ripley
#22. This strange new test called PISA, which stood for the Program for International Student Assessment. Instead of a typical test question, which might ask which combination of coins you needed to buy something, PISA asked you to design your own coins, right there in the test booklet.
Amanda Ripley
#24. My anxiety about disasters is lower. The more you know, the less scary any of this stuff is. And that's my hope for the book. I want to get people's attention and tell them very valuable and ultimately hopeful information, and you find out nothing is as scary as your imagination.
Amanda Ripley
#25. It was interesting to note that higher standards were seen not as an investment in students; they were seen, first and foremost, as a threat to teachers.
Amanda Ripley
#26. I can't tell you how many times I've been with very smart, knowledgeable Homeland Security experts who are essentially tasked with saving your life who do not trust you with information. They just don't. They kind of dismiss the media and the public in one fell swoop.
Amanda Ripley
#27. Without a doubt, American teenagers can perform at the top of the world on a sophisticated test of critical thinking. Students at traditional public high schools that took the test in Fairfax, Virginia, also trounced teenagers around the world.
Amanda Ripley
#28. Was it possible to hammer 3.6 million American teachers into becoming master educators if their SAT scores were below average?
Amanda Ripley
#29. Interestingly, the only class that Eric actually enjoyed in Korea was math. He noticed it on his first day of school. Something was very different about how math was taught in Korea. Something that not even Minnesota had figured out.
Amanda Ripley
#30. Boredom is the specter that haunts children from kindergarten to graduation on every continent.
Amanda Ripley
#31. People will help each other because there is a sense of camaraderie that springs up, which is a survival tactic. You help them because you know you might need their help later. And that is incredibly reassuring.
Amanda Ripley
#32. Wealth had made rigor unnecessary in the United States, historically speaking. Kids didn't need to master complex material to succeed in life - not until recently, anyway. Other
Amanda Ripley
#33. Citizens are not prepared for attacks because there is a bias against the public by nearly every expert and government official. In emergency preparedness, there is this belief that public will panic, that the public is not to be trusted, that there will be looting.
Amanda Ripley
#34. Most Korean parents saw themselves as coaches, while American parents tended to act more like cheerleaders.
Amanda Ripley
#35. Most serious plane crashes are survivable. There's a sense that, 'Oh, if we go down, that's it, it's out of my hands.' And that's just statistically not true. I have more optimism and more faith that my own actions can make a difference.
Amanda Ripley
#36. In Korea, math moved fluidly. When the teacher asked questions, the kids answered as if math were a language that they knew by heart. As in Tom's class in Poland, calculators weren't allowed, so kids had learned mental tricks to manipulate numbers quickly.
Amanda Ripley
#37. Success," as Winston Churchill once said, "is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.
Amanda Ripley
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