One day, he found himself in the back row of a math class full of ten-year-olds. The teacher was trying to get the children to draw three-dimensional cubes, and one child was really struggling, producing shapes that looked deformed. The teacher called that child up to the front of the room and asked him to draw his design on the board. That surprised Stigler. In American classrooms you wouldn’t single out the child who couldn’t do something. That would be seen as humiliating the poor kid even further. The young Japanese boy started drawing in front of everyone, but he still couldn’t get it right. Every few minutes the teacher would turn to the class and ask what they thought of his efforts, and his classmates would shake their heads, “No, it’s still not correct.” As the exercise continued, Stigler noticed that he himself was getting anxious, and started sweating. “I was really empathizing with this kid,” he says. “I thought, ‘This kid is going to break into tears!’ ”
