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I’ve heard that for people to be teachable they have to feel safe. Feeling afraid makes your body enter a defensive stance and this includes not only resisting harm but also resisting knowledge transfer. I assume that’s why people who struggle with a subject at school sometimes have a difficult time catching up even when with tutoring.
It would then be similar to how you can’t convince a stranger who believes in wrong things - controversial topics cause stressful situations and when you’re seen as an enemy their brain goes into a defensive mode, distrusting you and not letting new information in. You first have to build up a certain level of trust and mutual understanding.
Maybe that’s nothing new. Either way, this picture reminded me of that.
Due to me having adhd and corresponding anxiety with a healthy mix of trauma I’m not sure I should speak on this. Sorta biased towards that fear response.
Anyway, almost universally, people with ADHD overreact initially to mistakes they make. This is for a number of reasons, including and not limited to, well…childhood trauma and an education system and culture that severely diminishes their accomplishments while setting inappropriate expectations. Because of all of this (and more besides) people like me feel an exhaustive level of fear when entering new social and professional situations.
The small, inescapable mistakes many people make are magnified in our own heads. So while we often learn quickly, if we’ve learned to cope, we don’t really understand until later. Because of this it can make us feel as if we are incompetent because we display a rapid understanding of complex information and yet have this incessant need to ask questions, even if we could figure out the answer with time and patience.
All because we fear we just don’t understand something in the way we know others expect us to.
Hey though! I’m speaking for a lot of people here. Anybody else with ADHD have a different experience?
This is definitely my experience, even as a fairly social ADHD haver. I think sometimes I come on too strong because I’m trying to figure out and meet people’s expectations, though I think I’m not great at evaluating what exactly those are and heavily overestimate a lot.
I think there’s more to it than that - sometimes when you get too comfortable you can likewise become resistant to teaching. Probably reality needs to find a balance between those concepts.
What does “too comfortable” mean in this context? To me it sounds like you’re bringing up the situation where students don’t care or find the subject boring and then do other things like staring at their phone, doodling, chatting, etc. Is that what you’re referring to?
I don’t think that situation has to do with comfort directly, if anything people feel uncomfortable because boredom is not comfortable. The cause for that boredom could be bad teaching/presentation, or maybe the taught information builds up on knowledge that the student doesn’t have cause they missed a class or didn’t understand the subject at hand or they simply just don’t care and find the topic uninteresting. The brain is good at conserving energy so when a situation seems unimportant it shuts off focus or shifts it to something else. That’s not always helpful.
My elder found a loophole: “Did you do a mistake or did you do it on purpose?” “A mistake.” “Ok what was your mistake?” “Em… getting caught?”
That’s why you probably should ask an open question like “How did it happen?” And maybe follow up with “What did we learn from it?” or something.
But I’m neither a parent nor an expert so what do I know?
My elder has a panic button that is: “I’m too upset to talk about it right now.” And that by modern parenting it means timeout. It is though a pretty good idea because once every one has cooled down, it’s easy to talk out why there’s a coat of paint on the tv.
That’s actually kind of extremely mature, waiting until you aren’t upset/angry to talk about it takes a lot of maturity and usually helps
Probably still a teachable moment… somehow!? :-P
The most unforgivable sin, really.
Really important to keep in mind as a parent.
Idk, any more, my one kid(15) is too often telling me stuff he and others did wrong together that his mother and I have to stop him mid-sentence to ask “in what world would we want you to tell us about this unless you or others got hurt or need an alibi? Why would you tell us this in front of your little sister?”
We should have been so much harsher with his earlier mistakes, like our parents were with us, I tell you.
Isn’t it a good thing that he is telling you?
No. He and his (not much)older siblings are at an age where, like I said, we need to know if someone got hurt, got in trouble with the law, or broke something, but short of that, a blow-by blow of recent or not-so-recent shenanigans in front of a much younger sibling is doing no one any favors.
I should be glad he’s not tagging walls, or at least knows I would make him find any property owner and offer to re-paint or pay for such. Its the worst combination of he used to genuinely do and get in trouble for awful things, a lot, and now he’s like that one kid in the class who never does anything wrong beyond steal an extra french fry or ketchup packet, and won’t shut up about their condiment exploits(also still gets in fights and such, but doesn’t talk about that). When you have pregnant classmates, classmates in rehab, and/or pregnant classmates in rehab, everyone gets tired of this shit, not just parents.
This is the hardest thing to un-train with new employees: be honest about your mistakes. I will not get mad about a mistake. Everyone makes them. The best thing to do is call it out so we can move to fix it. If you keep making the same mistake, maybe we have a talk about your process to see if there are any blind spots.
So many people try to hide their mistakes or reframe them as successes and please do not do that. Own it, see if you can learn anything from it, and let everyone know so we can help you fix it.
You get them after parents have already had their way with them, so yeah it’s difficult for them to unlearn a lifetime’s worth of instruction, to now do the correct thing.
Not even just parents, sometimes school and the early shitty jobs do a lot of damage too
Sigh… yeah. When all, or at least most, of society combines together to say the same exact thing, then little kids in particular tend not to question it. Fortunately some of us continue to learn even later in life.:-) Unfortunately not all of us do.:-( Even so, it’s worth the effort to try to share the right way to go. Lately I’ve been thinking about that poem by Rudyard Kipling, “If—”: “If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs…”:-)
I don’t get angry when people make mistakes.
I get angry when people make the same mistake every time despite being told/shown how to do it properly.
At that point is either blatant incompetence or it’s on purpose.
Yup. And we are all human, but what if it were a choice to be angry or to be effective? I’m not proposing anything like not disciplining your kids, as some people choose, just… to be mindful of a teachable moment.
Also, being told/shown something vs. truly knowing it are different things - some people receive more readily visual or auditory or tactile cues.
Anyway, it’s your life to do as you please. But there are ways that are easier, and more fulfilling in the long run.
Be Excellent To Each Other…
the penal system in a nutshell
My parents whole strategy.
Practically 90% of parents.
That really depends on the person.
Does it? Are there people where anger is the best teacher? There are people it can be effective for, but it’s unlikely that it’s the most effective strategy for them. Seems like a lot of work to find out who those people are too. I’d rather find a teaching strategy that I can hone that is more universal.
Some people only respond to anger. Like, nothing will de-rail their non-sense version of (on-going)events until they are confronted with anger, and then they’ll just … do what the angry person says.
Its common enough that people should be aware of it, and sadly it seems far, far easier to accidentally traumatize/train someone into this patttern than to help them un-learn it.
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You didn’t read or understand what I wrote at all, did you? I have no problem communicating calmly even when very upset. The problem is there are a lot of people who will keep fucking up until someone yells at them, and suddenly, now their bullshit has been called out, they can do things the right way for a while with no further prompting or seemingly any extra effort. Shit that doesn’t fly in dangerous environments, for starters.
I get more worked up for having to yell at anyone than I do with whatever the original issue was; Unless lives are in danger: that gets me pretty worked up.
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It’s for brevity, one assumes, though you can always poke holes into any such generalized pattern that is being recognized in such manner - e.g. “people tend to eat food when they are hungry”, except people hooked up to an IV line, or those who eat on a schedule, or those who lack a proper hunger response pattern, etc. The presence of exceptions does not, generally, disapprove the “rule” (of thumb).
