This is indeed key, thank you for putting it more concisely than I
Am I right that you would find specific praise, or praise on something that you genuinely didn’t know whether you’d done well on, less annoying?
It varies. “Be specific” is usually better, but “be brief” is also often important to me. A slow break-down of specifics is important if I don’t know how to improve. A brief summary is fine if I’m improving on my own and really just need to get more repetitions. These days I’m usually aware of which one I need, and can ask for it. Previously, I’d just get frustrated if I needed more specific advice, because communication is exhausting, and learning is exhausting, and the combination of the two sucked.
I damn well like getting points for effort–they’re likely to be the only points I get for a while
I’ve found that it varies—if I have things down and just need to drill, I’ll often be entirely content off in a corner repeating something mindlessly with minimal feedback (an occasionally “good effort, you will improve on this, don’t worry” is very rewarding, but we’re talking every 15-30 minutes)
Basically, I can enjoy drilling. I actually find it a ton of fun with most skills I’ve gotten good at—the skills I fail to improve are usually the ones where I don’t enjoy drilling, and thus… don’t drill. The assumption that just because I’m stuck repeating something a lot, I must need encouragement… tends to de-motivate me, because it says “hey, you’re slow and abnormal and so I’m going to focus a lot on fixing you”, which has a lot of bad connotations for me.
I strongly suspect your teaching style would not annoy me (or that you’d quickly adapt it around me), but a lot of people get stuck in the meme of “ALWAYS follow this script” and start completely ignoring body language cues that indicate a particular student DOESN’T do well with a certain script.
As an example: I hate, HATE the “positive—negative—positive” sandwich. It means I associate positive feedback with a lead-in to “something bad”, and so any compliment is now a threat to me, a sign I did something else wrong. I also pattern-match fairly well, and once I figure out when it’s a sandwich vs a genuine compliment, I’ll get impatient to know why I was REALLY brought in to talk (i.e. what I did wrong).
Previously, I’d just get frustrated if I needed more specific advice, because communication is exhausting, and learning is exhausting, and the combination of the two sucked.
This sounds like a challenging situation. How were you able to move past this in order to be able to ask for more specific feedback when you needed it?
I’ve found that it varies—if I have things down and just need to drill, I’ll often be entirely content off in a corner repeating something mindlessly with minimal feedback (an occasionally “good effort, you will improve on this, don’t worry” is very rewarding, but we’re talking every 15-30 minutes)
You are very lucky to be content in this kind of situation. I wish I could be more content.
The assumption that just because I’m stuck repeating something a lot, I must need encouragement… tends to de-motivate me, because it says “hey, you’re slow and abnormal and so I’m going to focus a lot on fixing you”, which has a lot of bad connotations for me.
I think I almost have a good connotation around this kind of situation. There are at least two areas (singing as a strong example, and competitive swimming as a weaker example) where I started out pretty awful. I could have compared myself to the people starting out at the same skill level as me...but that would have been pretty pointless. Other people who were as tone deaf as I was at age 11 just didn’t try learning to sing. So I made my reference group the people who were doing solos in my choir. After a few years, I think most people actually forgot that they had originally considered me “slow and abnormal.” I started to get the comment “well, obviously someone with your natural musical talent...” Ha. Right. But I did succeed in proving, to myself if not anyone else, that if I put myself into situations where I am “slow and abnormal” compared to everyone else, I will make much bigger improvements than if I stick with the activities where I’m already stronger than average.
This sounds like a challenging situation. How were you able to move past this in order to be able to ask for more specific feedback when you needed it?
It’s not really exciting to say it, but:
1) I learned to identify, internally, what my emotions correspond to (most critically, if I’m frustrated, it’s probably because I’m practicing the wrong thing)
2) I’ve memorized a few phrases that tend to garner the feedback I need (“Can you be more specific?”, “Can you break that down in to smaller pieces?”, “I feel like there’s some little piece I’m missing that would make this all click together”, and “can you demonstrate slowly and narrate what you’re doing?”)
3) Most important, I have a strong CONCEPT of “this technique is actually a series of smaller techniques that I can drill separately”. It’s very hard to ask someone to break something down in to simpler steps when you’re stuck thinking about it as a single step. And I’ve broken things down often enough that I can communicate the idea to an instructor who doesn’t have it as a concept.
3rd one also helps me evaluate things in advance: “this skill is beyond me—I will need to do something smaller and simpler first, otherwise I’ll feel totally overwhelmed and have trouble learning.” The tricky bit is usually just finding smaller pieces, but that’s where an instructor is useful :)
This is indeed key, thank you for putting it more concisely than I
It varies. “Be specific” is usually better, but “be brief” is also often important to me. A slow break-down of specifics is important if I don’t know how to improve. A brief summary is fine if I’m improving on my own and really just need to get more repetitions. These days I’m usually aware of which one I need, and can ask for it. Previously, I’d just get frustrated if I needed more specific advice, because communication is exhausting, and learning is exhausting, and the combination of the two sucked.
I’ve found that it varies—if I have things down and just need to drill, I’ll often be entirely content off in a corner repeating something mindlessly with minimal feedback (an occasionally “good effort, you will improve on this, don’t worry” is very rewarding, but we’re talking every 15-30 minutes)
Basically, I can enjoy drilling. I actually find it a ton of fun with most skills I’ve gotten good at—the skills I fail to improve are usually the ones where I don’t enjoy drilling, and thus… don’t drill. The assumption that just because I’m stuck repeating something a lot, I must need encouragement… tends to de-motivate me, because it says “hey, you’re slow and abnormal and so I’m going to focus a lot on fixing you”, which has a lot of bad connotations for me.
I strongly suspect your teaching style would not annoy me (or that you’d quickly adapt it around me), but a lot of people get stuck in the meme of “ALWAYS follow this script” and start completely ignoring body language cues that indicate a particular student DOESN’T do well with a certain script.
As an example: I hate, HATE the “positive—negative—positive” sandwich. It means I associate positive feedback with a lead-in to “something bad”, and so any compliment is now a threat to me, a sign I did something else wrong. I also pattern-match fairly well, and once I figure out when it’s a sandwich vs a genuine compliment, I’ll get impatient to know why I was REALLY brought in to talk (i.e. what I did wrong).
This sounds like a challenging situation. How were you able to move past this in order to be able to ask for more specific feedback when you needed it?
You are very lucky to be content in this kind of situation. I wish I could be more content.
I think I almost have a good connotation around this kind of situation. There are at least two areas (singing as a strong example, and competitive swimming as a weaker example) where I started out pretty awful. I could have compared myself to the people starting out at the same skill level as me...but that would have been pretty pointless. Other people who were as tone deaf as I was at age 11 just didn’t try learning to sing. So I made my reference group the people who were doing solos in my choir. After a few years, I think most people actually forgot that they had originally considered me “slow and abnormal.” I started to get the comment “well, obviously someone with your natural musical talent...” Ha. Right. But I did succeed in proving, to myself if not anyone else, that if I put myself into situations where I am “slow and abnormal” compared to everyone else, I will make much bigger improvements than if I stick with the activities where I’m already stronger than average.
It’s not really exciting to say it, but: 1) I learned to identify, internally, what my emotions correspond to (most critically, if I’m frustrated, it’s probably because I’m practicing the wrong thing)
2) I’ve memorized a few phrases that tend to garner the feedback I need (“Can you be more specific?”, “Can you break that down in to smaller pieces?”, “I feel like there’s some little piece I’m missing that would make this all click together”, and “can you demonstrate slowly and narrate what you’re doing?”)
3) Most important, I have a strong CONCEPT of “this technique is actually a series of smaller techniques that I can drill separately”. It’s very hard to ask someone to break something down in to simpler steps when you’re stuck thinking about it as a single step. And I’ve broken things down often enough that I can communicate the idea to an instructor who doesn’t have it as a concept.
3rd one also helps me evaluate things in advance: “this skill is beyond me—I will need to do something smaller and simpler first, otherwise I’ll feel totally overwhelmed and have trouble learning.” The tricky bit is usually just finding smaller pieces, but that’s where an instructor is useful :)
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Thanks :)