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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
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. :)