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Autism in Heels (O'Toole)
2/5. This is a rare ranking for me, as usually I don't finish books I dislike. And I would absolutely not have finished this book either had I not been reading it for a friend (who thinks her daughter may be on the spectrum). It's one of those irritating half-memoir-half-pop-nonfiction books. (I first wrote "pop science" but I don't think it rises to that level; O'Toole occasionally cites a paper but it's mostly her pontificating.) I think this book could be reasonably useful for a person with ASD who is exactly like O'Toole, or who has a child with ASD who is exactly like her, but wow am I not that person.
I think if it had just been a straight memoir I would have liked it rather more; the thing that bugged the heck out of me was how I got the distinct impression O'Toole was often making the assumption that her story (which was traumatic in a number of ways, including pronounced bullying, lack of support from parents/teachers/psychiatrists, serious self-esteem problems, sexual abuse, and eating disorders) was the ur-story of every Asperger girl ever. I mean, a lot of the book is in first person plural ("we" are like this and "we" feel that). And I suppose that could be read as shorthand for "many girls could be like this, and you should watch for it," which I think is a really good message -- I had no idea that there was such a large correlation between ASD girls and eating disorders before reading this book -- but that's not the message she actually said. She's at best really sloppy about her pronouns, and I don't mean in the he/she/they sense, but in the I/we sense, often giving the sense that she is assigning all her traumas to all ASD girls ever (and honestly I think she actually believes this). I think if I were a parent reading this book who didn't have marked ASD tendencies myself, I'd be super panicked that my kid was doomed to all these horrible traumas.
(I'm not panicked, because even those of us growing up in the 80's like O'Toole and me weren't necessarily doomed. Like basically everyone else, I found middle school to be horrible, but no more than anyone else really, and had a bout with poor self-esteem/caring too much what other people think in my teens-to-20's (again, as far as I can tell, totally typical) but all things considered I honestly have had a pretty great life. I won't deny that quite a lot of that is probably due in large part to luck (including luck in my family, my personality, and what kinds of lessons I learned earlier than her, and early diverting into math/science, which is much more welcoming of certain types).)
To be honest, I kind of feel like the main point of the book is "let me spew my insecurities at you and assume that you share them," which is not at all my favorite kind of book. And I could have done with way fewer inspirationally-angsty sections where she pontificates about how she gets what it's like to be an autistic woman because we've all had those experiences and feelings! (We have not all had those experiences and feelings.)
I also feel like she is irritatingly prone to ascribe every single thing about her and everything that ever happened to her (particularly if it's bad, or if she has negative feelings about it) to ASD. She's also (by her own admission) extremely smart, and a lot of the stories she tells about "see!! how hard it is to grow up ASD??" I feel could just as well have been told about any smart child with a lot of peers (and a mom) who didn't know how to deal with her. For just one example, there's a story she tells about how she knew that menstruation involved an egg (and not much else), and so she asked her mom if she could see the "period egg," and then apparently to this day feels embarrassed about it, which... uhhh... okay, I'm not exactly NT, but that sounds actually like a really smart question given that she didn't know the egg is a single cell?? And one that any reasonably intelligent child growing up thirty-odd years ago who only knew that might ask??
In another example of how Everything Is ASD, she also blithely claims that her inability to do geometry is because she's autistic, in a passage that is just stunning for its wrongheadedness.
NO
I mean... nothing about this makes any sense at all?? I've never heard of NT people learning social rules via deductive reasoning, or really with a formal reasoning process at all?? And NT minds (generally speaking, of course! and of course I know a lot of exceptions) are famously bad at deductive reasoning and good at (often fallacious) inductive reasoning, and if deductive reasoning is not taught or trained it's because it's kind of hard to do so! I will not go as far as to say that Aspergers minds are deductive reasoning minds -- that would be falling into O'Toole's terrible fallacious generalization habits -- but E's mind, at least, is a deductive reasoning mind; she's always been really good at it, but earlier in her life it was really hard for her to reason inductively (it wasn't a rigid rule! she might be wrong!), and this was a big problem for her. (She can do it now, but it's definitely not her most natural mode.) I mean, O'Toole is clearly flamingly bad at deductive reasoning, but I... don't think she can say it's because she's on the spectrum.
In somewhat more shallow news, there's a lot about O'Toole's style that just grates on me, it's very breathless and all over the place and she uses italics like they're going out of style, and she will be making one point and then just start talking about something else, and just keeps going even when she's only talking tangentially about the point that she was making earlier -- well, okay. As you can see, this is the way I naturally write (and speak) myself! (D had to repeatedly ask me, when we dated/married, to add some context/transition words when I completely changed the subject during a conversation, because I was totally not used to doing that.) So I didn't have too much trouble reading it, but I do think that this is what editors (betas, lol) are for, and an editor should have edited the heck out of this and structured it a lot more and taken out a lot of italics. (Okay, I'll... mostly... stop with the italics now. But that is kind of what it felt like.)
As you might have expected from that last paragraph, the book is extremely disorganized, with her flitting from random story to other subject, often without clearly saying what she's talking about. I think she thinks she's being ~genuine~ and ~individualistic~, but really she's mostly being disorganized (which again! I write like this! This review is kind of like that! I get it! But this is why I always go through a bunch of drafts, because being able to communicate with other people is a Thing that is Useful), and an editor should really have gone through this. There's one chapter that's entitled "Predators and Fandom Families," and if you're scratching your head wondering what the connection is and if she's going to talk about, oh, idk, fandom scandals of the past, you would be wrong! She just... decided... she wanted to talk about predatory behavior that happened to her and also about how fandom is nice for ASD kids to meet other people who share interests. In the same chapter. I think the common thread is that... ASD kids want to fit in too?? (E only vaguely wants to fit in, but I certainly did when I was a kid and didn't know how) and that can lead to vulnerability to predators, which happened to her, but also a better solution to this is for them to find fandom "families." I think. Mind you, she never draws these connections very clearly, so you have to kind of infer it from the stream of consciousness.
I'm not sure what her main thesis is given the disorganization, but I think it's that we should ~celebrate~ every individual person as being individual people and each having differences, but also that ASD explains everything about Asperger girls, who are all Exactly Like Her. Yeah. It's kinda inconsistent.
With all that, as I've mentioned in places above, there were bits and pieces here and there where I did find out things I didn't know, or that made me think about things a little differently. ASD kids not being good at context -- I've seen that before, but not phrased quite that way, and, yeah, that's me.
This bit was interesting to me:
Because, huh. I wouldn't say I had social anxiety exactly, but I have always been much better at performance skills than in social interaction, and I've discovered this late-breaking talent of actually being... quite good at giving talks at church and teaching adults at church. (Not kids; kids are too unpredictable, lol. But adults are reasonably predictable! Also, sadly this doesn't magically make me better at giving talks in general, it's just that I've had more experience in figuring out the specific rules for church talks. And also, this was only once I figured out the rules; I was an extremely terrible teacher the first time they called me to do it, in grad school, to the point where my poor home teachers had to stage an intervention.) E is probably better at performance skills than social interaction, but she doesn't particularly like it.
Also, this passage. She's talking about doing research to figure out what was wrong with her daughter's GI problems (which is a harrowing story of how doctors wouldn't listen to her and thought she was just complaining about "too much laundry," omg -- and again, when she talks about her own experiences, they're often quite compelling!):
Okay, uh, aside from the irritating part where, again, the wording implies that she ascribes her ability to absorb information as something that one can do if and only if one is autistic (both sides of which I take issue with),![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mildred_of_midgard, you know whom I thought of :P
(Also, this is justone two small but super annoying bits: she brings up drapetomania (an 1851 hypothesized mental illness causing enslaved Africans from fleeing plantations, because why else would anyone ever do that??) to (I think, because her writing is super unclear) make the point that doctors don't look at the whole person... and then later talks about and appropriates Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a woman?" speech (she even uses the word "hijacking"!) to ask why other women drag on her for being (she quotes a critic) "smart, pretty, popular." I don't disagree that she should still be able to talk about her trauma without getting slammed for it even if she is attractive and intelligent! But argh, in a 2018 book about a white upper-middle-class profoundly-gifted ASD woman, I think these particular analogies could 100% have been left out. And yes, I can see that this is not being able to do context/not reading the room/mind-blindness at its peak, but like. Again: Don't you have a NT editor?)
Anyway -- if you can sort of disassociate the interesting and compelling stories she tells from either needing them to have structure or from the extreme tendency to group all ASD girls together, or from the bits which are either offensive or flat-out wrong -- there are some good things here! It's just that, oof.
I think if it had just been a straight memoir I would have liked it rather more; the thing that bugged the heck out of me was how I got the distinct impression O'Toole was often making the assumption that her story (which was traumatic in a number of ways, including pronounced bullying, lack of support from parents/teachers/psychiatrists, serious self-esteem problems, sexual abuse, and eating disorders) was the ur-story of every Asperger girl ever. I mean, a lot of the book is in first person plural ("we" are like this and "we" feel that). And I suppose that could be read as shorthand for "many girls could be like this, and you should watch for it," which I think is a really good message -- I had no idea that there was such a large correlation between ASD girls and eating disorders before reading this book -- but that's not the message she actually said. She's at best really sloppy about her pronouns, and I don't mean in the he/she/they sense, but in the I/we sense, often giving the sense that she is assigning all her traumas to all ASD girls ever (and honestly I think she actually believes this). I think if I were a parent reading this book who didn't have marked ASD tendencies myself, I'd be super panicked that my kid was doomed to all these horrible traumas.
(I'm not panicked, because even those of us growing up in the 80's like O'Toole and me weren't necessarily doomed. Like basically everyone else, I found middle school to be horrible, but no more than anyone else really, and had a bout with poor self-esteem/caring too much what other people think in my teens-to-20's (again, as far as I can tell, totally typical) but all things considered I honestly have had a pretty great life. I won't deny that quite a lot of that is probably due in large part to luck (including luck in my family, my personality, and what kinds of lessons I learned earlier than her, and early diverting into math/science, which is much more welcoming of certain types).)
To be honest, I kind of feel like the main point of the book is "let me spew my insecurities at you and assume that you share them," which is not at all my favorite kind of book. And I could have done with way fewer inspirationally-angsty sections where she pontificates about how she gets what it's like to be an autistic woman because we've all had those experiences and feelings! (We have not all had those experiences and feelings.)
I also feel like she is irritatingly prone to ascribe every single thing about her and everything that ever happened to her (particularly if it's bad, or if she has negative feelings about it) to ASD. She's also (by her own admission) extremely smart, and a lot of the stories she tells about "see!! how hard it is to grow up ASD??" I feel could just as well have been told about any smart child with a lot of peers (and a mom) who didn't know how to deal with her. For just one example, there's a story she tells about how she knew that menstruation involved an egg (and not much else), and so she asked her mom if she could see the "period egg," and then apparently to this day feels embarrassed about it, which... uhhh... okay, I'm not exactly NT, but that sounds actually like a really smart question given that she didn't know the egg is a single cell?? And one that any reasonably intelligent child growing up thirty-odd years ago who only knew that might ask??
In another example of how Everything Is ASD, she also blithely claims that her inability to do geometry is because she's autistic, in a passage that is just stunning for its wrongheadedness.
WHAT
Neurotypical minds (and geometric proofs) work... top-down, based on deductive reasoning, which is usually thought of as a skill that develops without any teaching or training. And for nonspectrum thinkers, that's mostly true. They see a fact -- maybe a facial expression, maybe a social situation -- and easily link it to a clear, logical conclusion. Our spectrum minds operate differently... Generally, we [spectrum minds] understand things, people, ideas -- life -- using inductive reasoning. We go from the bottom-up, starting with specific, concrete experiences, facts, and examples. Then we spot trends, notice patterns, and discover bigger concepts that link it all together.
NO
I mean... nothing about this makes any sense at all?? I've never heard of NT people learning social rules via deductive reasoning, or really with a formal reasoning process at all?? And NT minds (generally speaking, of course! and of course I know a lot of exceptions) are famously bad at deductive reasoning and good at (often fallacious) inductive reasoning, and if deductive reasoning is not taught or trained it's because it's kind of hard to do so! I will not go as far as to say that Aspergers minds are deductive reasoning minds -- that would be falling into O'Toole's terrible fallacious generalization habits -- but E's mind, at least, is a deductive reasoning mind; she's always been really good at it, but earlier in her life it was really hard for her to reason inductively (it wasn't a rigid rule! she might be wrong!), and this was a big problem for her. (She can do it now, but it's definitely not her most natural mode.) I mean, O'Toole is clearly flamingly bad at deductive reasoning, but I... don't think she can say it's because she's on the spectrum.
In somewhat more shallow news, there's a lot about O'Toole's style that just grates on me, it's very breathless and all over the place and she uses italics like they're going out of style, and she will be making one point and then just start talking about something else, and just keeps going even when she's only talking tangentially about the point that she was making earlier -- well, okay. As you can see, this is the way I naturally write (and speak) myself! (D had to repeatedly ask me, when we dated/married, to add some context/transition words when I completely changed the subject during a conversation, because I was totally not used to doing that.) So I didn't have too much trouble reading it, but I do think that this is what editors (betas, lol) are for, and an editor should have edited the heck out of this and structured it a lot more and taken out a lot of italics. (Okay, I'll... mostly... stop with the italics now. But that is kind of what it felt like.)
As you might have expected from that last paragraph, the book is extremely disorganized, with her flitting from random story to other subject, often without clearly saying what she's talking about. I think she thinks she's being ~genuine~ and ~individualistic~, but really she's mostly being disorganized (which again! I write like this! This review is kind of like that! I get it! But this is why I always go through a bunch of drafts, because being able to communicate with other people is a Thing that is Useful), and an editor should really have gone through this. There's one chapter that's entitled "Predators and Fandom Families," and if you're scratching your head wondering what the connection is and if she's going to talk about, oh, idk, fandom scandals of the past, you would be wrong! She just... decided... she wanted to talk about predatory behavior that happened to her and also about how fandom is nice for ASD kids to meet other people who share interests. In the same chapter. I think the common thread is that... ASD kids want to fit in too?? (E only vaguely wants to fit in, but I certainly did when I was a kid and didn't know how) and that can lead to vulnerability to predators, which happened to her, but also a better solution to this is for them to find fandom "families." I think. Mind you, she never draws these connections very clearly, so you have to kind of infer it from the stream of consciousness.
I'm not sure what her main thesis is given the disorganization, but I think it's that we should ~celebrate~ every individual person as being individual people and each having differences, but also that ASD explains everything about Asperger girls, who are all Exactly Like Her. Yeah. It's kinda inconsistent.
With all that, as I've mentioned in places above, there were bits and pieces here and there where I did find out things I didn't know, or that made me think about things a little differently. ASD kids not being good at context -- I've seen that before, but not phrased quite that way, and, yeah, that's me.
This bit was interesting to me:
For many girls, "showwomanship" [sic] skills far exceed comfort with spontaneous or one-on-one social interaction. Intuitive use of this sidestep around social anxiety can lead to excellence in teaching, narrative presentation, litigation, and performance.
Because, huh. I wouldn't say I had social anxiety exactly, but I have always been much better at performance skills than in social interaction, and I've discovered this late-breaking talent of actually being... quite good at giving talks at church and teaching adults at church. (Not kids; kids are too unpredictable, lol. But adults are reasonably predictable! Also, sadly this doesn't magically make me better at giving talks in general, it's just that I've had more experience in figuring out the specific rules for church talks. And also, this was only once I figured out the rules; I was an extremely terrible teacher the first time they called me to do it, in grad school, to the point where my poor home teachers had to stage an intervention.) E is probably better at performance skills than social interaction, but she doesn't particularly like it.
Also, this passage. She's talking about doing research to figure out what was wrong with her daughter's GI problems (which is a harrowing story of how doctors wouldn't listen to her and thought she was just complaining about "too much laundry," omg -- and again, when she talks about her own experiences, they're often quite compelling!):
Back then, much as later on, I did serious, responsible research and spoke with enough authority that every single physician we met asked if I'd gone to med school. Not rudely. They just figured I must have. Oh, how I wish I'd known to have said, 'No, I'm not an MD. I'm autistic, so I can absorb, retain, and access vast amounts of information. In a way that I've only ever encountered among others on the spectrum, my mind grabs onto something, like a little ankle-biting dog, and until the pieces make sense simply will not let go.'
Okay, uh, aside from the irritating part where, again, the wording implies that she ascribes her ability to absorb information as something that one can do if and only if one is autistic (both sides of which I take issue with),
mildred_of_midgard, you know whom I thought of :P(Also, this is just
Anyway -- if you can sort of disassociate the interesting and compelling stories she tells from either needing them to have structure or from the extreme tendency to group all ASD girls together, or from the bits which are either offensive or flat-out wrong -- there are some good things here! It's just that, oof.
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!
Re: Another book rec
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.
I wonder if this is a classics vs. tech learning divide? Because I would say, if you don't know how to do the problem, that's not a wrong answer! (*) Often, a wrong answer means either that you have been careless or (if you're making the mistakes a lot) that you haven't got the sufficient automaticity to be able to do the problem without making careless mistakes, PLUS which you might not understand the material well enough to realize that your answer is off and that you should recheck it. (I think I've told you this? or maybe it was someone else? that my physics teacher would give partial points if your answer was orders of magnitude off and you said, "hey, this answer looks weird and I'm pretty sure it's not right.")
The thing is, if you are a nurse who is calculating drug dosages, or an engineer who is calculating how to build a bridge, I absolutely DO NOT WANT you to get a wrong answer! But okay, everyone gets wrong answers sometimes, so at least I want you to know your subject well enough to realize that prescribing 1 mg instead of 1 ug is WAY TOO MUCH!
In my job, while people's lives don't generally depend on my calculations, yeah, the customer relies on me checking my work and not producing something that's wrong. Of course I've made mistakes before, and I try to be transparent about that to the customer, but -- yeah, it's actually reasonably important to be able to check one's work and not make careless mistakes to the extent possible, or catch your mistakes when you do. (That's obviously only part of being a good engineer, but it is a part! I have worked with junior engineers before who could write superfast code... but you always had to check their work because it would be sloppy and often give totally the wrong answer (e.g., when you do a coordinate transform from one coordinate system to another there ACTUALLY IS a right answer, not that I'm bitter about this or anything!)... and this is NOT a good thing.)
Now, I'm not saying that this is something E needs to worry about! She doesn't at all -- she's the most thorough person I've ever met. (Let's put it this way: when she got 49/50 on the local math competition and said she'd answered all 50, both her teacher and I figured it was the test that was wrong, not her -- and we were right.) I do however think that in general for math education (I can see how it would be different for other subjects) at the level she's at, there's actually a reason why it's set up that way and there's a reason why, after being told for many years that it's okay to be wrong, at some point students start getting told that they need to start getting the right answer, at least on the second try.
(*) Which she also hates, but I also think it's also very important for her to be able to tackle problems that she can't immediately solve. But that's another issue. I would like to say more about it, but let me just say right now that I never got much practice in sitting with problems I didn't know how to do and struggling with them for a while and figuring them out, and I think my life would have been a lot better if I'd gotten more practice with that. And also that she does get a lot of practice along the lines of the steps you outline, for various reasons. Maybe more later on this if I have more time.
Re: Another book rec
let me just say right now that I never got much practice in sitting with problems I didn't know how to do and struggling with them for a while and figuring them out
Hahaha, I feel like waaay too much of my experience was with sitting with problems I didn't know how to do and struggling with them and then not figuring them out because I hadn't been given the necessary tools, and all this did was create a feeling of helplessness and resentment.
Long ago, I read a TA online saying, "They always tell us to make the students who come to us for help work through the problem themselves because that's how they'll learn, but actually what I find in practice is that the student is almost always missing some key piece of information. Once you give them that information, they can apply it to solving the problem just fine. If you don't teach them that bit of information, they're not going to independently discover that piece of mathematics for a homework assignment."
Re: Another book rec
Haha, right?! I am spending way too much time thinking about this too. Some of which is time I was supposed to be sleeping.
Yeeeeah, I have a longer comment on problem-solving failure modes I'm not subjecting you to in the interest of both of us sleeping, but on the subject of the tangent, I feel that not being given the appropriate tools is a curriculum/professor problem. I have also had a bunch of experiences in college where I hadn't been taught the appropriate material in class and then basically either had to hope the TAs took pity on us or learn it on my own (thank goodness I had a partner in
crimeproblem sets where together we managed this for multiple classes -- way easier to do with another person, rather like salon). (*) But that had to do with my professors for the most part sucking at teaching (there were a couple of exceptions, and then a few more were excellent lecturers, but that's different), I suspect in large part because they were generally there to do research and teaching was not the priority. It is possible though to have a technical curriculum that incorporates good challenging problems and a class that teaches you the material you need to know to be able to do them! Notably, AoPS actually started with the problems (hence its name), built the curriculum/textbooks around them, and then moved on to actually providing infrastructure for classes.(*) omg, this reminded me: and then there was our topology class, which was taught by a young, energetic, likeable professor who was generally regarded as a good teacher (to the standards of usual college pedagogy). It turned out his lectures were awful (even by college pedagogy standards) and he would often fall into weird digressions that had nothing to do with math, and we learned nothing in class. Then, a good way through the class, he told us that he had a massive brain tumor, which hadn't been caught by university health services until it got really bad. (!!) Wow, this explained SO MUCH and we felt super sorry for him. (You know, I never knew what happened to him, but I just looked him up and he recovered and now seems to be doing well, I'm relieved to find out!) But it also meant that the class basically had to teach ourselves the entire course (I can't remember if we got a sub in the end; I think we did, but by that time it was kind of too late anyway). Even with partner-in-problem-sets and a few of our friends suffering together, for years afterwards I would have a nightmare about signing up for a class and then realizing the class was almost over and I didn't know any of the material -- which is of course a common nightmare -- but what wasn't common was that in my nightmares it would always be specifically a topology class.
Re: Another book rec
Oh no! I feel for him too! I'm glad you found he recovered. I had a philosophy professor with a brain tumor, but it didn't affect his teaching, thankfully! (He was a very good teacher and was my first introduction to cognitive science, including some stuff he taught me that makes E's behavior not seem weird to me. ;) Staying well off that topic, though!)
what wasn't common was that in my nightmares it would always be specifically a topology class.
I can imagine, omg!
Also, it occurred to me recently that--okay, there are a few reasons junior high was the most stressful period of my life and my single least favorite to date, but a major one was that there was a running theme among the teachers of "teach X; test Y." Like, stuff totally unrelated to the class, that they didn't teach us the skills for, and that we didn't have the tools to even acquire the skills for. Almost all of these examples are from seventh and eighth grade. And those are just a subset!
I remember one particularly bad one was: my eighth grade American history teacher got it into his head that we were all dropout risks, and decided to make it his Holy Mission to scare us into staying in school.
Note: I was in the honors class. My best friend in that class went on to get a masters in engineering and work at Boeing. One of the other kids is now at Google. I'm me. When he first announced this, I thought he was overreacting and maybe he should stick to making his non-honors classes doing it.
Then he described the project, which was to find a source of income and come up with a budget that would cover things like car payments and car insurance payments. He told us this would be impossible. That was the point of the assignment.
We had to make phone calls (this was before internet!) to, like, car insurance companies to see what kind of a deal we could get. Not very good ones, given that we were like 13-14!
I handed in my best attempt and got, I believe, a B, with angry notes that things I'd proposed would never work in the real world. I knew that, this was my best floundering effort to do something he said was impossible!
He was giving off angry vibes the entire time he announced, discussed, and gave us feedback on this assignment. It was like, *personal*, like we'd all personally threatened to drop out of his class and become bums.
Me, in eighth grade: "I'm going to get a PhD in physics! Why are you punishing me for not knowing how car insurance works at age 13?? What does this have to do with American history? Why are you bringing my grade average in this class down?"
Of course, my two worst classes were:
7th grade biology: home of dissections, at the precise age when my gross animal squick peaked. Added to the random igloo and magazine assignments described in the post linked above, I was one stressed child in that class. That was the class I dreaded the most in my entire life.
8th grade math: teacher who didn't want to be there and was phoning it in. You never saw your graded homework until the day before the exam, at which point you got a whole pile back. Learning from wrong answers? What even was that? The homework was graded and sat piling up in her outbox, visible, for weeks until the exam. It wasn't taking her that long to grade it. We just weren't to touch it. This was 100% clearly because she didn't want to answer questions, and if we had our homework in hand, we might ask questions. That was the objectively worst teacher I had before college. (The all-time worst teacher I had was in grad school, but it was fun rather than stressful because first I could publicly humiliate him to general applause, then I could drop the class, to our mutual relief.)
Ugh, junior high was the *most* stressful. Even freshman year of college, living away from home and being sleep-deprived because of MY ROOMMATE, and my physics profs expecting us to intuit and apply math they hadn't taught us, and my various English class stresses that weren't the fault of the teacher so much as the system and my particular brain...didn't come close. (Besides, I'd escaped my parents! That was worth any amount of fears of losing my scholarships to physics and English grades.)
Ugh, I just want to say THIS, so much to everything I wrote in that comment.
Re: Another book rec
So I think there are several ways one can not get the correct answer:
(1) The kid has not been taught the thing they need to know to get the answer
(1.5) The kid generally understands the specific thing that has been taught, but has trouble with meta-skills needed to get the answer and/or has not been taught the meta-skills
(2) The kid does not understand the thing that has been taught, and therefore cannot use it to get the answer
(3) The kid understands the thing that has been taught, and in principle knows everything needed to do the problem, but is having trouble using it to get the answer (usually because the problem is more complex and requires more thought than simple application, and/or because the application is somewhat tricky and it's easy to fall into a logical flaw)
(4) The kid understands how to get the answer but somewhere executes incorrectly and gets another answer. (Mostly applicable for math-intensive subjects; I'm not sure how you would get an incorrect execution for an essay, except maybe writing down the assignment wrong / misinterpreting the assignment, like Jeff did in Solitary Blue. I guess for history you could just be super careless
like for a totally random example getting the Richelieus mixed up even when in principle the difference between Louis XIII and Louis XV is known)I think (1), and maybe secondarily (2), are the ones that really bother you (WHICH, NOT SURPRISING GIVEN YOUR SCHOOL HISTORY, OMG), and the one that your steps are focused on. And they are good steps! Now, I would say (1) bothers E the least of the four with math, where she has had the great good luck of, besides being lucky enough to have good math teachers, in addition having not only two parents who know a lot about math and care a lot about her math education, she also has one parent and a parental best friend who care a lot about math pedagogy. If she had ever been in the (1) situation in a math class, we would have identified it immediately and taught her the thing. (I was going to say that she did seriously luck out with the math teachers -- if she'd been two or three years younger, she would have been paired up with a couple of awful math teachers at her school instead of the couple of good ones she actually got -- but really maybe it's the school that lucked out, because I think we would have pulled her if she'd had the awful math teachers.)
Anyway, she's reasonably good about understanding when she doesn't know how to do something, and being cheerfully contemptuous that someone thinks she should do the problem when she doesn't know the material, and she'll ask for help saying "I need to know how to do X to do this problem and I haven't been taught that," or (if she can't ask for help, e.g. in a contest) she's fine with leaving it blank. (I mean... we have been working on this for years, of course, and I'm sure it also helps enormously that she doesn't have grades or tests.)
I mostly see her get frustrated with (1) when she confuses it with (2) or (3). My perception is that this confusion doesn't happen so much with her with math, but does happen a lot with other subjects that are not laid out with so much (ahem) deductive logic. For instance, this week she has to present a lesson in church, and she's been getting frustrated with it because she doesn't see it as technically hard, so she thinks she ought to be able to do it! But she's never done it before, and it involves a lot of skills she's never been taught and doesn't even know she doesn't know (what do you even put in your lesson? how do you take the suggestions in the manual and turn them into things you do with the other kids?)
(1.5) is not a problem she has with math at all, but I thought of it while rereading your middle school stories and also thinking about working on her church lesson this week, where we are doing a lot of asking a vague open-ended question, reading a scripture story, and trying to figure out an answer to the question from the story. So she can read, of course! And answer comprehension questions! But there's a meta-skill here of "first, see if you can retell the story," and then "okay, when you retell it, can you find something that sparks off the open-ended question?" and "okay, can you articulate an answer to the question?" and "can you translate your spoken answer into a written answer so you have notes for when you're presenting this?" (Not that it would have to be done in that order -- this is not actually how I do it -- but it seems easier for her to do it this way, and then later on we can work on e.g. getting rid of some of those intermediary steps.) So the specific meta-skills to do this kind of thing, additionally in the context of providing an answer to stimulate discussion (not "the right" answer), is something that she doesn't know. And that's hard for her. It would not work at all for her to try doing this without a lot of direction!
For (2) I have a small sample set with her (at this point she generally doesn't have issues with understanding), but it does frustrate her when she doesn't. I'd like for her to get more practice with this and with asking for help when she doesn't understand things.
(3) was what I referred to when I said "Which she also hates, but I also think it's also very important for her to be able to tackle problems that she can't immediately solve." She gets frustrated by this, sometimes a lot. But I think almost everyone gets frustrated by this to some extent (A. seems to have a much lower frustration level in general, but particularly with this, which I think will serve him well in life), and I also think it's extremely important to be able to work past this frustration and to know that working past it being frustrating is sometimes a process one has to go through when one is solving a hard problem.
(4) is the thing that she is atypically extraordinarily worried by (and also what she was referring to when she was annoyed by Alcumus taking off credit for wrong answers -- I think she always knows how to do the Alcumus problems). This is true across the board for both academic and non-academic subjects. Earlier this week (to be fair she was tired and hasn't been getting enough sleep because holiday weekend) she pitched a fit because she was cooking strawberry sauce and executed the (clear, easy, she'd made the sauce successfully before) instructions incorrectly. And again when she was building a Lego set and did one of the steps incorrectly. These were things she was doing voluntarily because she enjoyed them, nothing she didn't understand, and mistakes that had no consequences (easily reversed, sauce was delicious; Lego set is of course completely reversible) but she was still really upset about it. E and I are pretty similar in most ways but this is a way in which we are different -- I'll get frustrated, sure, but a lot of it has to do with the waste of time and relative difficulty of reversing mistakes (I found this out when l learned to crochet, where although the time thing still applies, it's easy to fix mistakes! Much less frustrating than making mistakes in jewelry making), not this, which appears to be an actual reaction to incorrect execution. We have been working on this since she was two years old, with progress, but it's still very much a work in progress.
You are correct that feedback, especially instant feedback, is also definitely a really hard thing for her in general, and this intersects in a big way with the fear of incorrect execution. but that's a different comment, which I promise I am *not* writing right now! We are definitely working on that a lot too, though.
Re: Another book rec
Holding off on more for now. :)
Re: Another book rec
Of course it's not exactly the same, but you can see the application to starting to encourage modes of thought analogous to collaborative problem-solving in grownup jobs! Pedagogically, as well, most brains (idk about yours, as we've talked a lot before about your brain working in nonstandard ways in ways that may intersect with this) work in such a way that learning through doing the problem when possible, even with hints or some mentored help, is way, way more efficient than not knowing how to do the problem and then reading the solution and then getting another problem. (In addition, it also encourages the "working through not knowing how to do things" skills. And logistically, there may a limited number of good challenging problems at the appropriate level available for the particular topic.)
Re: Another book rec
most brains (idk about yours, as we've talked a lot before about your brain working in nonstandard ways in ways that may intersect with this) work in such a way that learning through doing the problem when possible, even with hints or some mentored help, is way, way more efficient than not knowing how to do the problem and then reading the solution
If we're talking about math problems specifically, yes. If we're talking about learning in general, it depends on the skill being acquired.
learning through doing the problem when possible, even with hints or some mentored help, is way, way more efficient than not knowing how to do the problem and then reading the solution and then getting another problem.
Yes, what I meant was, after you've gone as far as you can without having the solution (using the usual method), instead of then submitting your assignment to be judged by someone else (which is the part that is stressful and in my opinion, less efficient for learning because of the longer feedback loop), you get unblocked on going further in a shorter amount of time with less stress.
I'm glad she's getting practice with the collaborative problem-solving method! It sounds like really what she needs is help with the emotional aspects of feedback (which I have many opinions on, am holding off on a full reply on that topic because I found I was composing my opinions in my head instead of sleping, which is No Good. ;))