She often doesn't even want to talk about the answers to the problems and find out what she's gotten right or wrong. (Interestingly, one of her teachers has figured out that a workaround for this is that if she (the teacher) casts the discussion as "hey, let's figure out how to do this problem that you guys didn't know how to do," she will be all over that. Just not if the discussion is cast as "let me tell you what the answers are so you can see what you got right or wrong." So odd!)
So this sounds extremely like the growth mindset of Carol Dweck's Mindset, another book that I'm recommending to all and sundry, including at work! (If I had been New Guy's aka Incompetent DBA's boss, I would have made this book mandatory reading for him, because he's a walking textbook case of the extreme failure mode of the fixed mindset.)
It may because of E's autism that she can naturally take that stance in the face of social pressure to do the opposite, but I think it's healthy regardless: in fact, I agree with Dweck that the approach E's teacher is using shouldn't be a workaround but should be how we teach in schools by default. I would encourage it and, if you read the book and agree, maybe use that vocabulary when talking to teachers. Spread the word! (I mean, it is how we do things in salon, the terrestrial paradise. ;))
One of my former grad school colleagues, who taught Latin in high school for many years, published a paper recently talking about how he applied the growth mindset in the Latin classroom as best he could, given that the entire school system is structured around a fixed mindset and he had to meet state requirements. I can send you that if you're interested.
[I emailed him immediately to go, "YES! Let's reform the school system together! Start the revolution! Here are my thoughts on pedagogy!" So far crickets, but hope springs eternal.]
A note on Mindset: it's a book that should have been a blog post, so once you get the basic concepts and have read enough illustrations that they've sunk in, there's no need to read the entire book. It's just repetition of the same ideas. Lost at School has a much better content-to-word count ratio.
Another book rec
So this sounds extremely like the growth mindset of Carol Dweck's Mindset, another book that I'm recommending to all and sundry, including at work! (If I had been New Guy's aka Incompetent DBA's boss, I would have made this book mandatory reading for him, because he's a walking textbook case of the extreme failure mode of the fixed mindset.)
It may because of E's autism that she can naturally take that stance in the face of social pressure to do the opposite, but I think it's healthy regardless: in fact, I agree with Dweck that the approach E's teacher is using shouldn't be a workaround but should be how we teach in schools by default. I would encourage it and, if you read the book and agree, maybe use that vocabulary when talking to teachers. Spread the word! (I mean, it is how we do things in salon, the terrestrial paradise. ;))
One of my former grad school colleagues, who taught Latin in high school for many years, published a paper recently talking about how he applied the growth mindset in the Latin classroom as best he could, given that the entire school system is structured around a fixed mindset and he had to meet state requirements. I can send you that if you're interested.
[I emailed him immediately to go, "YES! Let's reform the school system together! Start the revolution! Here are my thoughts on pedagogy!" So far crickets, but hope springs eternal.]
A note on Mindset: it's a book that should have been a blog post, so once you get the basic concepts and have read enough illustrations that they've sunk in, there's no need to read the entire book. It's just repetition of the same ideas. Lost at School has a much better content-to-word count ratio.