Terri Windling on Perfectionism

>>Our educational system has become hostile to anyone who sticks out even slightly.<<

Sadly so.

>> The Japanese at least teach their young children how to be A PART OF A GROUP while the children are still in kindergarten. I wish we did here in the US--particularly with our strong trend toward one child only families. So many kids arrive in kindergarten and they've never had to share toys or their parents'/babysitter's attention with anyone else before. They don't know how to be a part of a group and many don't have the social skills necessary for making friends. What's worse, there's a large percentage arriving at kindergarten these days who don't even have enough vocabulary to make a success of it.<<

My experience is that being part of a group is almost always a detriment. The other people can almost never keep up with me, unless it's a subject I suck at, and even then I'm alarmingly likely to be the best anyhow. They're obnoxious. They don't want me there. I don't want to be there. Less work gets done. I wind up doing almost all of it. Or I say "fuck it" and only do my share of the work because I could afford to fail one assignment and nobody else could.

I'd rather see schools teach self-directed learning so people know how to work on their own. At least then they wouldn't be interrupting other people's work, and businesses would stop bitching about workers who have to be told how to do every little thing because they were never allowed to make decisions on their own.

>>I've noticed that creative people often don't learn in quite the same fashion as ordinary people do. They get bored quicker than most when asked to do things which don't involve being creative in some way.<<

That's true. And when they're bored, they're destructive, and then people blame them. Or they learn to tune out the blather, which is the opposite of what school is supposed to accomplish. It tends to be an extremely impoverished environment.

>>Following step-by-step directions is a learnable and teachable SKILL. The problem is that most schools don't bother teaching their first-graders how to do it.<<

And then they wonder why kids can't do it.

>>You'd think learning how to follow directions was an easy thing to do. I reckon it must be to those of us who regularly do creative things because we must follow something along the lines of a process in order to do them. BUT--have you ever watched someone do even a simple art project who's NOT the creative sort?<<

Everything has a process. Most people are good at following some and bad at others. Telling how to do a dance doesn't give me the ability to do it, or even remember the choreography. But I can pot a plant, do a craft, write a poem, and many other things. The same kids who flop at art or writing may be brilliant at picking up a sport move just by watching someone. They're different kinds of intelligence -- artistic, kinesthetic, linguistic, and so forth.

But worse than people who can't follow directions are the ones who can't do anything without directions. They've spent their whole lives being pushed around every minute, so they were prevented from learning basic skills of self-motivation because someone else always chose what they were doing. Starting at 18 is a very bad time to try catching up to that curve, which is why so many young people today flail in college. It's all dumped on them at once, with heavy punishment for failure ... at doing something they were never allowed to learn.

That's exactly why scores and performance are dropping. Because schools have reduced everything to a formula that actually works very poorly outside rigorous clinical situations (the tests) so that minimal learning occurs. It doesn't happen in school; kids are too exhausted and stressed to do much on their own. So they focus on being pleasing, if that's something they're good at. Then society changes the rules on them and suddenly the stuff they learned is no longer pleasing, but they've got nothing else to fall back on.

Real-world thinking and problem-solving, skills like self-regulation and self-motivation, aren't even on the list. Most schools have cut not only enrichment activities like art and music, but also the practical stuff such as shop and home economics. That is, pretty much everything of any practical value where kids could apply the stuff their learning in other abstract classes. So for many kids, school has no practical benefit than being required so adults don't destroy their lives. They usually can't get classtime on how to cook, wash clothes, make a grocery list, form a relationship, identify a bad relationship, or anything else that happens in real life. It's very frustrating.

>_< Higher levels of learning are NOT that hard to gauge objectively. However, they do require different methods which are more time-consuming and, as you said, require higher skill from the teacher. They don't lend themselves well to multiple-choice tests that can be graded on a computer. But they're very easy if you know what you're doing.

Here, my young scientists, is a substance, which I certify to be safe but anyone who spills it is going to write an extra paper on lab safety. There is the lab. Pick a partner and identify it.

For a term paper, conversely, one looks to see if it has proper structure, a thesis statement, supporting arguments, well-chosen quotations, and makes some kind of meaningful observation for analysis.

I've written rubrics for scoring poetry, something else people have said can't be objectively measured. For fucksake anything has objective aspects, you just have to know how the damn thing is built to measure them.

You perceive the problem with that.

>>I wonder where anyone got the idea that five-year-olds are supposed to "make friends." <<

Probably over-achievement. They look at a development chart and want to push it. Does not work well. Children begin with solitary play (infants), then parallel play (toddlers), then cooperative play (pre-K/K). Only after they have mastered cooperative play do they tend to start deepening relationships. Some children, high in emotional intelligence, zip through these stages and are forming lifelong bonds at 5-6 the way I, with my linguistic genius, was reading adult books by then. Sure I had the capacity to form attachments -- but they were every one of them with adults, the few of those who weren't threatened by me.

>> They *don't.* Not in any meaningful sense. At best they learn to play games together. <<

True for most 5-6-year-olds. By 7-8 most of the them are into friendships. That's why a lot of clubs and lessons start around then, when kids understand schedules, rules, truth and lies, friends and enemies, etc.

>> I learned to play games with other little children but I always felt that playing those games was killing time until I could do something worthwhile, alone. <<

Yeah, I felt that way about most group activities. *ponder* Okay, I still feel that way about most group activities. I can get engrossed in a good game with people I like, but few are on my wavelength. Give me a Fluxx deck and some fen, we're good. Ask me to play poker and I'm bored. Boooooooored. Even if pretty girls are taking their clothes off in it I tend to get bored.

>>I learned that some kids were more obnoxious than others but I didn't have friends, in any sense I would now use that word, before grade six at the earliest, and that would be if we counted my brother and our pets. "School friends" were what I'd now call contacts or acquaintances. Certainly didn't miss them during vacations; have enjoyed bumping into a few of them in adult life, but never made any effort to look them up.<<

Doesn't help that people say "friends" for everything from classmates to queerplatonic partners.

That's true. However, it raises the chance by providing other children to interact with regularly. An only child without near-age neighbors is more dependent on adults to procure such opportunities. But all children are largely reliant on adults to teach how social skills are supposed to work. Only an emotional genius can bootstrap past bad or no examples.