Expectations!

I’m opening my mail today. I’ve got this letter from the Alzheimer Society.

 

I turn it over to open it and I’m stumped! No flap to tear open! I’m having difficulty performing a familiar task!

 

I turn the envelope back over and see the flap – on the WRONG side! A very clever demonstration of how we all operate with expectations most of the time and are confused when we encounter something that doesn’t mesh with our expectations! 

As far as I know I’m not showing any Alzheimer’s symptoms – I’m still functioning cognitively as well as I ought to be at 70. But for a moment I was confused. Just a brief moment when I felt what Alzheimer’s patients must feel for much of their day. 

What a clever idea I thought.

I wonder how many other people receiving this letter had a similar reaction? 

P.S. This evening when I was sharing my experience with a friend I SAW the question on the “front” (the address window side of the envelope): “Is it Alzheimer’s Disease?” – referring to my confusion about how to open the envelope – Brilliant!

Persistence

I think about my own persistence with a problem – a recent one is a sewing problem I ran into when making a shirt from the Pendleton wool fabric I had bought in Portland in June. Construction went smoothly until I got to the sleeve placket – the trim on the slit in the sleeve. The wool was too heavy to do a single piece placket with folds at the top – it was just too bulky to lay flat. I struggled with the problem until I finally decided to use some silk dupioni I had in my stash to make the placket – that turned out all right but I wasn’t completely satisfied with the result (although the colour of the silk blended in with the shades in the wool.) ( The placket doesn’t show in the photo – but this is the “Pendleton” shirt.)

I wrote to Pam Erny (a professional shirt designer and maker) about my problem and she sent me a link to a two piece placket she uses, particularly on heavy fabric. She also sent a link showing the reverse engineering of a men’s shirt sleeve placket.

I saved the links and when I set out to make a second wool shirt from the grey striped fabric I also bought in Portland, I printed out the photos from the reverse engineering article and improvised the shirt placket. This one turned out nicely! The placket is flat without any puckering in the sleeve.

I still wasn’t satisfied with the process because I’d had to guess at the size for the pieces of fabric for the placket – I wanted “pattern” pieces that I could reliably use – so I dug some more until I found an article in Threads Magazine that provided a template and straight forward instructions for making a sleeve placket. I’ve put that information with my shirt pattern to use on my next wool shirt which I will make from some lovely cherry red fabric I bought at the rug hooking shop (River House) in Petite Riviere.

This is the typical way I go about problem solving – to keep at it until I’m completely satisfied with the result. I’m happy to live with approximations as I go along, but I work toward “perfection” – or as close to it as I can get.

The thing is, I can’t remember being praised for being persistent, not by parents or teachers. Mind you that’s a long time ago – so maybe I’ve forgotten. I just know I always was willing to keep at something until I was satisfied with the outcome.

How NOT To Talk To Your Kids

I got an email the other day from a colleague participating in the program revision work I’m doing with Scouts Canada:

I know you enjoy watching TED Talks.  I saw this one recently and was interested in your thoughts on it.

I watched the TED talk and replied:

Duckworth’s point is that success isn’t determined by IQ – doesn’t matter how smart you are – what seems to matter is what she calls “grit” – a willingness to keep at a task even when not immediately successful. For me, the important element in the talk was Duckworth’s citing of Carol Dweck’s research on a “mindset for growth” – what Dweck’s research has shown is that helping kids understand mistakes are part of any learning – being wrong is how growth happens, allows many of them (bright or not) to be willing to stay with a task until they get the hang of it.

It’s an important aspect of what we’d like to convey to scouters!

Here’s an article about Dweck you’ll find interesting on “How NOT To Talk To Your Kids“:

The gist of Dweck’s argument ( I extracted a couple of quotes from the article):

“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” Dweck explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.” She contends kids need to understand ” the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter.”

“Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.  Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.”

“After reviewing 200 self image studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”

“Now he’s on Dweck’s side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction: He will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further.”

I offered back a You Tube video which shows the effects of mindset on persistence and willingness to tackle problems just outside the child’s comfort range. The point is not to offer praise affirming a child’s “intelligence” – more effective is praise that strengthens specific problem-solving strategies, stick-to-it behaviour, willingness to persist.

This is stuff Scouters need to understand to help them be more effective with youth.

Mistakes…

I had a hard time finding women for this poster!
There are a few… (not that women haven’t had useful things to say about learning and mistakes, just that whoever compiled this collection of several hundred I came across, doesn’t seem to value women’s experience)