Here's my working hypothesis: E's difficulties are a matter of degree, not kind.
My opinions:
- The things she reacts maladaptively to are also stressors for other people.
- The strategies she uses to deal with stress fall into the same categories as everyone else.
- The reason she reacts maladaptively to stressors that her peers react more adaptively to is that the *amount* of stress she experiences exceeds her emotional regulation abilities. (This is the thesis of Lost at School, that children react maladaptively when the challenges they face exceed their coping abilities.)
- Like all children, she's getting mixed growth and fixed mindset messages from her environment. Thanks to you and D and her teachers, she's getting more growth mindset messages than many kids, so kudos to everyone involved!
- In my opinion (as you know), the educational system is set up with a lot of "It's done this way because it's always been done this way" that doesn't take recent cognitive science findings into account. This is true even of more progressive schools like hers.
- Because things have always been done a certain way, and because most kids have the coping skills to handle the resulting stress more adaptively than E, these things that have always been done become "invisible stressors"--in that people don't realize that these cause stress for everyone. The stress is just more visible in the kids who react maladaptively; it's there in the other kids (and adults) too. I have an essay's worth of opinions on what causes invisible stress, what's cognitively more efficient, and how to identify necessary vs. unnecessary stressors.
- Some of those invisible stressors prime children to think in fixed mindset even if they've been taught growth mindset, and even if they believe and espouse it.
- My opinion is that even the kids who are reacting adaptively to unnecessary stressors are expending unnecessary mental energy on coping, and that all children would be better off with those unnecessary stressors identified and eliminated.
Two days ago, I composed an essay on what my model of the brain looks like, what I think are necessary and unnecessary stressors, and how the unnecessary stressors could be replaced with a more cognitively efficient method of learning. (I say "children" a lot in the above, but that's a feature of the specific environment; the causes and effects and concepts all apply to humans in general.)
Everything E is doing...is consistent with the model in that essay, assuming only that her reactions are more extreme because her emotional regulation isn't up to the demands of her environment. Everything she's reacting to as a stressor...is also something that I reacted to as a stressor. I was able to react more *adaptively*, like most kids, but when I look back on my life, the story of my education is "I wasted all this time I won't get back on cognitively inefficient methods and unnecessary stress, time that I could have spent learning more."
I might edit this essay, omitting all references to E, and post it in my DW, since I post a lot on pedagogy.
I did talk to her about how it's age appropriate to hear it's fine to be wrong when you're a kid, but as an adult there's definitely a premium to be able to do things correctly, and her age group is in a transitional stage right now.
Lol, wow, I would have said the opposite! That the way the school system is set up, you're responsible for a finite set of assigned material, and the authority figure knows exactly what that material is. A wrong answer means you haven't learned something you've been taught, and you need to fix that, because the authorities have decided you need to know this.
Once you become an adult--yeah, some things are like this, like driving. But once you get more autonomy in what you're going to learn, like especially starting in college, you realize that 99.99999999% of human knowledge is something you don't know and are never going to know. Stuff you encounter that you don't know how to do no longer means "You were taught this and have failed to learn it by the time your knowledge was assessed and you must fix that." It means, "Decide whether you want to learn this, and if you do, learn it."
Adults are definitely expected to have mastered material and acquired skills that children haven't yet, but the process of mastering material and acquiring skills as an adult involves just as many wrong answers, and adults are more likely to end up in a healthy environment (which is not to say that all do), where a wrong answer doesn't mean "you should already know this."
When I became an adult was when I stopped being so defensive about not knowing stuff and also so show-offy about knowing stuff that other people didn't. Precisely because there was no longer an assumption that everyone around you has been through the same educational process and is being held to the same expectations, so if someone else knows something, you should know it, and if you know something that they don't, ha! you're better at learning. It just means you've spent your time differently.
One person knows physics, one person knows database administration. Two database administrators who've worked with different databases know different things. One person with an interest in history knows more about dysfunctional families and German literature, one person with an interest in history knows more about military and diplomatic history, one person only started casually studying three years ago!
There are still right answers and wrong answers, and people more proficient and less proficient in a skill, but wrong answers are waaaay more common and way more socially acceptable (in a healthy, supportive environment).
If I had a child in my life, I would tell them, "Yeah, I'm sorry you're stuck in a fossilized school system with pedagogical roots in the Middle Ages, but when you're an adult, life-or-death things like driving aside, knowing the answer is way less important than being able to find out the answer and being willing to accept new information. And that's way less stressful. It gets better."
[And when they inevitably went, "Why can't we do it that way NOW?!" I'd be like, "Well, let's see how much of that we can get away with. *g*"]
This is what I keep trying to teach my junior engineers: "You're not solving simple problems with a known answer, so don't just submit your best effort and wait for the authority figure with the answer key to check your work. There is no answer key. We are solving complex, novel problems as a team. Evaluate your work, identify what part you don't know or aren't sure of, communicate to a more experienced person which part you need help with, and be open to feedback. I'm sorry the school system prepared you to submit your best effort and hope for a good score."
It's gotten to the point where I've had to explicitly spell this out enough that I'm thinking of asking my boss if there's anyway we can communicate to the local software development school that we care less if the graduates they send us can do Python list comprehension, and much more if they can apply the above method to learning anything they need to. Because when they can't, their productivity is way low, their bosses who follow this method instinctively can't necessarily identify what the problem is or teach this method, they just see the low productivity and attribute it to a lack of motivation, and everyone is frustrated, eventually culminating in a firing that I thought was unnecessary.
As I said in email, my boss (my good boss!) thought old JE was a lost cause and new JE is the cat's pajamas who doesn't need any instruction, but I see them both needing the same explicit instruction that they never got. The difference is that now that I'm team lead, I can give new JE that instruction before our boss gets frustrated with his lack of output and decides to fire him.
Given all that, and given that I know you've said the same thing about your old JE, and you said something similar in a physics pedagogy conversation we once had, how do you think E would do with an approach like this?
Step 0: Explain the above to her.
Step 1: She gets a set of math problems. She does as much as she can. She identifies what she's not sure about, and what she doesn't know how to do at all.
Step 2: When she's ready, she asks for the answer key. She uses the answer key to check her own work, and to teach herself what she can from it.
Step 3: When she's taught herself what she can from the answer key, she identifies what she still doesn't understand and asks for help with that part.
Step 4: She gets a new problem set covering the same skill (or the component skill that she identified as needing to practice). Rinse and repeat until she doesn't need the answer key anymore, because she's mastered the skill and is ready to move on to a new one.
Tell her that to prepare for adult life, she needs to learn not just specific math techniques (that she's frankly going to forget anyway if she never uses them) but a problem-solving and communication approach that will work when there's no authority figure and the answer to the problem isn't known, but a team of people needs to solve it together using the various skills they've acquired over their lifetimes.
(Not all jobs are like this, but given her abilities and interests, I think she's more likely to end up in one like yours or mine than in one where she's solely following procedures that she can't deviate from.*)
Given an approach like that, or one based on it and fine-tuned for her, how do you you think she'd react emotionally? How effective do you think it would be in helping her master the math material and the self-assessment and communication technique?
She still needs to learn emotional regulation, and she still needs to learn to accept feedback, but my essay, if I ever post it, explains why I think "submit a best effort and wait for a score" is neither a cognitively efficient method of learning nor an environment conducive to learning the emotional regulation necessary to accept constructive feedback.
* And even if she ends up doing something deterministic for a living--there's still the rest of real life which doesn't come with an answer key, but is a team of people solving a complex, novel problem together, using the different skills they've acquired over a lifetime ...like, say, raising a child. There are some obvious wrong answers, like "Let child play in traffic," but outside of that, there's a lot of "Tried X, worked for child 1 but not child 2, trying something else with child 2." Or writing historical fanfic and getting it betaed. Maybe tell her that in this context. ;)
I do that a lot at work, actually. I model the growth mindset by telling my team that we all make mistakes, and that I'm going to highlight the importance of a chill acceptance of mistakes and receptiveness to feedback by calling attention to my own mistakes and weak areas, and my efforts to grow and successes in growing, so that it feels less threatening when I call attention to their mistakes and weak areas to help them grow. It seems to help!
Re: Another book rec
Here's my working hypothesis: E's difficulties are a matter of degree, not kind.
My opinions:
- The things she reacts maladaptively to are also stressors for other people.
- The strategies she uses to deal with stress fall into the same categories as everyone else.
- The reason she reacts maladaptively to stressors that her peers react more adaptively to is that the *amount* of stress she experiences exceeds her emotional regulation abilities. (This is the thesis of Lost at School, that children react maladaptively when the challenges they face exceed their coping abilities.)
- Like all children, she's getting mixed growth and fixed mindset messages from her environment. Thanks to you and D and her teachers, she's getting more growth mindset messages than many kids, so kudos to everyone involved!
- In my opinion (as you know), the educational system is set up with a lot of "It's done this way because it's always been done this way" that doesn't take recent cognitive science findings into account. This is true even of more progressive schools like hers.
- Because things have always been done a certain way, and because most kids have the coping skills to handle the resulting stress more adaptively than E, these things that have always been done become "invisible stressors"--in that people don't realize that these cause stress for everyone. The stress is just more visible in the kids who react maladaptively; it's there in the other kids (and adults) too. I have an essay's worth of opinions on what causes invisible stress, what's cognitively more efficient, and how to identify necessary vs. unnecessary stressors.
- Some of those invisible stressors prime children to think in fixed mindset even if they've been taught growth mindset, and even if they believe and espouse it.
- My opinion is that even the kids who are reacting adaptively to unnecessary stressors are expending unnecessary mental energy on coping, and that all children would be better off with those unnecessary stressors identified and eliminated.
Two days ago, I composed an essay on what my model of the brain looks like, what I think are necessary and unnecessary stressors, and how the unnecessary stressors could be replaced with a more cognitively efficient method of learning. (I say "children" a lot in the above, but that's a feature of the specific environment; the causes and effects and concepts all apply to humans in general.)
Everything E is doing...is consistent with the model in that essay, assuming only that her reactions are more extreme because her emotional regulation isn't up to the demands of her environment. Everything she's reacting to as a stressor...is also something that I reacted to as a stressor. I was able to react more *adaptively*, like most kids, but when I look back on my life, the story of my education is "I wasted all this time I won't get back on cognitively inefficient methods and unnecessary stress, time that I could have spent learning more."
I might edit this essay, omitting all references to E, and post it in my DW, since I post a lot on pedagogy.
I did talk to her about how it's age appropriate to hear it's fine to be wrong when you're a kid, but as an adult there's definitely a premium to be able to do things correctly, and her age group is in a transitional stage right now.
Lol, wow, I would have said the opposite! That the way the school system is set up, you're responsible for a finite set of assigned material, and the authority figure knows exactly what that material is. A wrong answer means you haven't learned something you've been taught, and you need to fix that, because the authorities have decided you need to know this.
Once you become an adult--yeah, some things are like this, like driving. But once you get more autonomy in what you're going to learn, like especially starting in college, you realize that 99.99999999% of human knowledge is something you don't know and are never going to know. Stuff you encounter that you don't know how to do no longer means "You were taught this and have failed to learn it by the time your knowledge was assessed and you must fix that." It means, "Decide whether you want to learn this, and if you do, learn it."
Adults are definitely expected to have mastered material and acquired skills that children haven't yet, but the process of mastering material and acquiring skills as an adult involves just as many wrong answers, and adults are more likely to end up in a healthy environment (which is not to say that all do), where a wrong answer doesn't mean "you should already know this."
When I became an adult was when I stopped being so defensive about not knowing stuff and also so show-offy about knowing stuff that other people didn't. Precisely because there was no longer an assumption that everyone around you has been through the same educational process and is being held to the same expectations, so if someone else knows something, you should know it, and if you know something that they don't, ha! you're better at learning. It just means you've spent your time differently.
One person knows physics, one person knows database administration. Two database administrators who've worked with different databases know different things. One person with an interest in history knows more about dysfunctional families and German literature, one person with an interest in history knows more about military and diplomatic history, one person only started casually studying three years ago!
There are still right answers and wrong answers, and people more proficient and less proficient in a skill, but wrong answers are waaaay more common and way more socially acceptable (in a healthy, supportive environment).
If I had a child in my life, I would tell them, "Yeah, I'm sorry you're stuck in a fossilized school system with pedagogical roots in the Middle Ages, but when you're an adult, life-or-death things like driving aside, knowing the answer is way less important than being able to find out the answer and being willing to accept new information. And that's way less stressful. It gets better."
[And when they inevitably went, "Why can't we do it that way NOW?!" I'd be like, "Well, let's see how much of that we can get away with. *g*"]
This is what I keep trying to teach my junior engineers: "You're not solving simple problems with a known answer, so don't just submit your best effort and wait for the authority figure with the answer key to check your work. There is no answer key. We are solving complex, novel problems as a team. Evaluate your work, identify what part you don't know or aren't sure of, communicate to a more experienced person which part you need help with, and be open to feedback. I'm sorry the school system prepared you to submit your best effort and hope for a good score."
It's gotten to the point where I've had to explicitly spell this out enough that I'm thinking of asking my boss if there's anyway we can communicate to the local software development school that we care less if the graduates they send us can do Python list comprehension, and much more if they can apply the above method to learning anything they need to. Because when they can't, their productivity is way low, their bosses who follow this method instinctively can't necessarily identify what the problem is or teach this method, they just see the low productivity and attribute it to a lack of motivation, and everyone is frustrated, eventually culminating in a firing that I thought was unnecessary.
As I said in email, my boss (my good boss!) thought old JE was a lost cause and new JE is the cat's pajamas who doesn't need any instruction, but I see them both needing the same explicit instruction that they never got. The difference is that now that I'm team lead, I can give new JE that instruction before our boss gets frustrated with his lack of output and decides to fire him.
Given all that, and given that I know you've said the same thing about your old JE, and you said something similar in a physics pedagogy conversation we once had, how do you think E would do with an approach like this?
Step 0: Explain the above to her.
Step 1: She gets a set of math problems. She does as much as she can. She identifies what she's not sure about, and what she doesn't know how to do at all.
Step 2: When she's ready, she asks for the answer key. She uses the answer key to check her own work, and to teach herself what she can from it.
Step 3: When she's taught herself what she can from the answer key, she identifies what she still doesn't understand and asks for help with that part.
Step 4: She gets a new problem set covering the same skill (or the component skill that she identified as needing to practice). Rinse and repeat until she doesn't need the answer key anymore, because she's mastered the skill and is ready to move on to a new one.
Tell her that to prepare for adult life, she needs to learn not just specific math techniques (that she's frankly going to forget anyway if she never uses them) but a problem-solving and communication approach that will work when there's no authority figure and the answer to the problem isn't known, but a team of people needs to solve it together using the various skills they've acquired over their lifetimes.
(Not all jobs are like this, but given her abilities and interests, I think she's more likely to end up in one like yours or mine than in one where she's solely following procedures that she can't deviate from.*)
Given an approach like that, or one based on it and fine-tuned for her, how do you you think she'd react emotionally? How effective do you think it would be in helping her master the math material and the self-assessment and communication technique?
She still needs to learn emotional regulation, and she still needs to learn to accept feedback, but my essay, if I ever post it, explains why I think "submit a best effort and wait for a score" is neither a cognitively efficient method of learning nor an environment conducive to learning the emotional regulation necessary to accept constructive feedback.
* And even if she ends up doing something deterministic for a living--there's still the rest of real life which doesn't come with an answer key, but is a team of people solving a complex, novel problem together, using the different skills they've acquired over a lifetime ...like, say, raising a child. There are some obvious wrong answers, like "Let child play in traffic," but outside of that, there's a lot of "Tried X, worked for child 1 but not child 2, trying something else with child 2." Or writing historical fanfic and getting it betaed. Maybe tell her that in this context. ;)
I do that a lot at work, actually. I model the growth mindset by telling my team that we all make mistakes, and that I'm going to highlight the importance of a chill acceptance of mistakes and receptiveness to feedback by calling attention to my own mistakes and weak areas, and my efforts to grow and successes in growing, so that it feels less threatening when I call attention to their mistakes and weak areas to help them grow. It seems to help!