Wrote my secrets on a birch bark strip
Today would have been my grandfather's hundredth birthday. I don't tend to think of "About Building" as a ghost poem for him and my grandmother, but I suppose it must be.
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larryhammer linking an article on the potential debunking of the Dunning–Kruger effect, I was reminded of my mother's research in the '70's. It was not a direct forerunner of their study, but it was not totally dissimilar in that she was studying how self-perception interacts with objectively assessed skills, specifically from the perspective of cognitive dissonance. The prevailing assumption had been that when people who believed themselves to be bad at, say, math were shown that they had actually done quite well on a math test, they would accept the new data and do just as well if not better when given the opportunity to re-take the test. Instead, it turned out that in cases where I am bad at math was an essential part of the subject's self-image, they resolved the dissonance by doing worse on the test than they had the first time—failing questions they had originally aced. They couldn't twist reality around to match the inside of their heads, so they sabotaged the inside of their heads to make them match reality. A percentage of subjects did just realize they were better at math than they had believed and did not, effectively, falsify their answers the second time around: there was no dissonance in play. But where there was, it was a whammy.
I was looking for citations when I discovered that my grandfather had actually done some similar work in the '40's, observing the selective recall of completed or unfinished tasks when viewed within a framework of success or failure, i.e., "No sweat, I zipped through that in no time!" vs. "I suck at this! It took forever!"
I am beginning to feel that Tiny Wittgenstein is some kind of family tradition, only expressed, since I am not a psychologist, as a personification rather than a paper.
From
larryhammer linking an article on the potential debunking of the Dunning–Kruger effect, I was reminded of my mother's research in the '70's. It was not a direct forerunner of their study, but it was not totally dissimilar in that she was studying how self-perception interacts with objectively assessed skills, specifically from the perspective of cognitive dissonance. The prevailing assumption had been that when people who believed themselves to be bad at, say, math were shown that they had actually done quite well on a math test, they would accept the new data and do just as well if not better when given the opportunity to re-take the test. Instead, it turned out that in cases where I am bad at math was an essential part of the subject's self-image, they resolved the dissonance by doing worse on the test than they had the first time—failing questions they had originally aced. They couldn't twist reality around to match the inside of their heads, so they sabotaged the inside of their heads to make them match reality. A percentage of subjects did just realize they were better at math than they had believed and did not, effectively, falsify their answers the second time around: there was no dissonance in play. But where there was, it was a whammy.I was looking for citations when I discovered that my grandfather had actually done some similar work in the '40's, observing the selective recall of completed or unfinished tasks when viewed within a framework of success or failure, i.e., "No sweat, I zipped through that in no time!" vs. "I suck at this! It took forever!"
I am beginning to feel that Tiny Wittgenstein is some kind of family tradition, only expressed, since I am not a psychologist, as a personification rather than a paper.
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That's a lovely poem; I can't remember if I saw it back at the time or not.
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I remember when that came out, especially since a lot of diagnosed-gifted now-adults identified it as a fear they had felt imposed on them: that they were only good for the things they had been praised for and useless for anything else. My mother's anecdata (as differentiated from her research) on that one is that there remains a population of children who will still beat themselves up for falling short of their self-set standards even if you praise them for their persistence and invention and it is incredibly frustrating.
That's a lovely poem; I can't remember if I saw it back at the time or not.
Thank you.
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--I believe all parts of this; I feel like I've witnessed it.
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
THE DEVIL YOU[r mother] SAY[s].
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It's unethical to do research on your own children, but there's nothing in the rules against anecdata.
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Sometimes it backfires in the form of ~me~ small children thinking adults are a bit thick, but still.
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This is why I don't like the "shit sandwich" school of delivering criticism: when it's transparently phrased as "begin with something nice, then criticism, then end with something else nice," writers often receive the negative forms of criticism as the only forms of criticism and the positive forms as formulaic, empty of content. When in fact "DO NOT FUCK UP THIS PART THAT YOU GOT RIGHT, THIS IS CRUCIAL TO KEEP IN YOUR STORY" is incredibly important and not just me being nice.
And when I say, "This story is basically working," that is not me not putting effort into a crit, that is me examining the story closely and feeling that it's basically working.
tl;dr I have lots of intense feelings about the conflation of "praise" and "any positive remark."
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I don't think I have as many negative associations as you with the term or the idea of praise—although your comments are making me think of the ambivalence of it in Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (1994)—but I agree strongly on the discussion of strengths. I have my problems, but as far as we can tell, I got to skip the entire set of problems that started this thread because I knew from almost the time I was sentient that certain kinds of information were easier for me to process than for most other people and certain kinds of information were more difficult for me to process than for most other people and it made me faster at certain kinds of tasks and slower at others and this situation was presented to me by my parents in that deliberately, successfully neutral language: which did not safeguard me entirely against other children or other adults, but the worst damage to my sense of self-worth was done by grad school and chronic illness, not by the attitudes of my upbringing toward my neurology.
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Clarification appreciated. How do you distinguish the varieties, then?
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--You can have informative positive commentary, where it happens to be positive but the main focus is on the information contained. Example: talking about how Marissa finds math intuitive in order to talk about what this might be used for, or how others do not find it similarly intuitive so adjusting expectations.
--You can have positive critique, where you're looking to have the other person act on the positive information in particular ways, such as "keep this section, this section is really working."
--You can have praise, where you just want to express the positive thing fairly purely without necessarily needing it to be integrated into an action item related either to another thing or to itself. "This poem is really good" might lead the other person to write more poetry, write more poetry of that type, write more in some form on that topic, etc. But that's not why you're saying it or how you're saying it, you're saying it for the pure joy of "wow, good thing here, I point at it." Which is a good thing to do! They're all good things to do!
And they do overlap. But I think that having some of each kind and not confusing them all for each other works better. It's really nice to hear, "Thank you for making supper, it's very good!" It's also useful to hear, "I really like what you made for supper, can you make it again? and/or incorporate some of the technique from it into other thing you make?" And it's also interesting to have someone say, "I really like this thing you made for supper, can we talk about how you did it? I don't see how it works, and I'd like to." But they're not the same.
When we're talking about how to praise small children, I feel like most of the examples ("You're really good at this!" AND "You must have worked really hard on this!") are the third kind. Hardly any of them go further with the conversation or seem inclined to have another purpose. And so they end up being treated as alternatives to each other with no thought to the other purposes a conversation about this sort of thing could have.
As a small child I got treated as a collaborative partner a lot, and I was encouraged to treat my parents as collaborative partners as well. I did get praised ("You did a great job at the piano recital, sweetie") but I also got the other two kinds of positive commentary, and I think that was great, it gave a positive and useful range of interaction. But also I think that it did more than just straight-up praising effort in the direction of me treating my work as, well, my work. Something I could work on and think about.
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Yeah, I recognize this. < / anecdata >
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I always accepted the innate talent thing until I realized (quite late in the game) it was "easy" for me to read music and hear it in an analytical way because I grew up with a musician and ditto writing and reading because both my parents were intensely into that. I have actually witnessed in myself the whole "I can't do X, I suck at it....wait I am doing X and quite well! oh no other people are witnessing it, I am failing at X immediately" thing and just thought it was my own fucked-up psyche, lol.
Probably the worst thing about being a sorta-child prodigy was the crushing weight of absolutely unfulfillable (is that a word?) expectations from my parents, nearly every teacher, myself, &c &c which I don't think I'll ever get out from under. My tendencies to freeze when observed and freeze when anxiety hit and freeze when criticism was expected didn't help. ....IDK, I'm just babbling to myself here.
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No, no, I hear you.
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It's true that the failure modes of "You're innately smart" are "I failed at this: I must not be innately smart [at it]. There's no point in trying." and "Oops, I never learned how to persist at things I don't understand right away!"
However, the failure modes of "You're trying so hard/you never give up" are "I'm not succeeding, so I must not be trying even if it feels like I am" and "[especially for learning disabled or developmentally disabled or mentally ill kids] I'm being blamed for not trying hard enough/at all, despite trying very hard, because only success is taken as evidence of effort." (possibly with a corollary of "Looking busy is the most important life skill"), and "Making a strategic retreat, or cutting my losses, or even just regrouping and trying a different approach, would mean I'm useless and terrible."
This stuff is hard.
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Admittedly I speak from observation rather than progeneration, but I have gathered there are no foolproof ways of not fucking up your kids. (This statement should not be taken as an endorsement of Philip Larkin.)
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--and I like your internal monologues by the kids freaked out by the hard-work praise (or lack of it).
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I will think good birthday thoughts in honor of your grandfather. If T. Witt is allowed sugar cereal with dyes, I will bestow him a Froot Loop, but not a candle for it. T. Witt is not allowed candles in his jam jar currently. If he is not allowed sugar cereal with dyes, understandably, it'll have to be birthday kiwi.
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Wasn't planning on bringing it up over dinner!
I will think good birthday thoughts in honor of your grandfather.
*hugs*
If T. Witt is allowed sugar cereal with dyes, I will bestow him a Froot Loop, but not a candle for it. T. Witt is not allowed candles in his jam jar currently.
Look, we already had the hot-air balloon experiment and Mac went after him.
(He can probably eat dyed cereal. It doesn't do anything weird to me except I don't like it.)
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That's great and I appreciate it but all my experience with your mother's kin suggests amply to me that if she wanted to know she'd just find OUT. This is literally the reason I still put out honey and liquor on solstices and equinoxes! I understand when a subset of folk tradition does not come to play!
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I'm trying to figure out if it's a case where the phenomenon is real but the research that modeled it is flawed, because at least experientially, it feels like something that does work.
Speaking of the past -
https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*TIvkzxrq5BIw70sqOpxKZw.jpeg
As with most glass-plate exposures, you can zoom in and look around.
Re: Speaking of the past -
I've never seen that image before. Now I wish my copy of Laurence Yep's Dragonwings (1975) was not in a box.
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I always learn things reading your posts.
Whether it's a failure of innate talent or 'lazy' effort, I have nothing else to say.
(I wonder if anyone has researched the impact of negative epithets in embodiment? Frex: I had strabismus when I was a child, first glasses age 4. Doctors and parents all called it "lazy eye.")
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I am glad to be informative. Thank you.
(I wonder if anyone has researched the impact of negative epithets in embodiment?
I am confident someone has, even if I can't point to it. Words build the world.
Frex: I had strabismus when I was a child, first glasses age 4. Doctors and parents all called it "lazy eye.")
I believe that was the language used in my mother's childhood for what she calls her wandering eye. Her parents did exercies with her from infancy, she had corrective surgery as an older child or adolescent, now that she's in her seventies the surgery is wearing off and she is doing the exercises regularly again. It's most visible when she's tired, but one of her eyes just drifts off toward its corner. Other children called her a witch because of it. Part of me finds it fascinating that superstitions of the evil eye (speaking of the language of embodiment) apparently persisted in the 1950's American Midwest and the rest of me just unfairly wants to kick a bunch of mid-century kids.
EVIL EYE!
...I'd never made the connection before!
I managed to avoid surgery. Did have an eye patch and occluded lens for a couple years. Thank heavens my innate talents didn't run to ball sports, since I never have had real depth perception.
'The Dig' - Do you know of this?
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210127-the-buried-ship-found-on-an-english-estate
Re: 'The Dig' - Do you know of this?
I know of the ship-burial at Sutton Hoo: there's a piece of it in Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising (1973), which I read for the first time when I was eleven. I didn't know its discovery had been dramatized! Nice cast.