(this post is a continuation of yesterday’s post - Why do we have to show the work?)
This youtube video is by a woman with Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of autism). Her observations are very insightful. I encourage you to watch it in the entirety, because she covers a lot of interesting points that are not limited to people with Asperger’s syndrome.
People who do not understand people who are “different” have a hard time reaching them. The loss is on both sides.
I was pleased to see her analogy about reading different kinds of sentences. It was similar to something I’d been thinking about:
When Roger Bannister ran the first under-four-minute mile (3′59.4″) in 1954, they didn’t take his medal away because he couldn’t explain how he did it, did they? He did it. That proved that he could do it, by doing it.
That doesn’t seem to be good enough in math class. Why? Is it because the student can’t do it, and doesn’t understand it? Of course not. S/he just understands it in a way that the teacher has no way of relating to. So why is the student graded on this and not the teacher?
Control.
From the video:
“The biggest problem of the school system, as I see it, is that the value that the school system espouses is conformity.”
“There is no recognition that I am experiencing, or someone else is experiencing, in school, things differently from the other children. It’s this idea that everyone has the same thing, and they have to accomplish it through the same pathway.
It’s important to keep in mind that the woman in the video is talking about people who understand very difficult and often counter-intuitive things. She is not defending the kind of childish arguments that some people use when defending opinions; for example, “So-and-so is a communist. Don’t ask me how I know – I just know it.”
She’s talking about thought processes driven by obsession to logic, not personal agendas.
The difference between the two is that when an person with Asperger’s gives you the answer to “What’s the fifth root of 992,436,543?” as “63,” you can check if it’s right. If it’s wrong you can correct him. You can’t correct a person with a loony agenda. The person with the agenda is obstinate. The person with Asperger’s is not. The tragedy is that most of us don’t have the acuity to tell between the two kinds of thought processes.
And that is part of the tragedy of having a dogma of ”you must show your work, or else…” It doesn’t take into account that different people have different processes, therefore it doesn’t help teachers understand how to relate to them, leading them to often mistake obsessive logic for arrogance, ignorance or obstinacy.
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