No One Can Make You Feel Inferior
Students are not hardwired to helplessly mimic your incompetent authority.
It is a very common trope in education to think of rules, procedures, and algorithms as practically compelling students to follow them unthinkingly. Here’s a 2-in-1 example from the platform formerly known as Twitter:
[I'm] no longer in the classroom, but I have a good idea of the state of math ed based on what my math tutees know and don't know.
PLEASE STOP the rush to standard algorithms before building the foundation.
Yeah, I am judging some of you. Not everything can be blamed on the pandemic.
This makes me think about how standard algorithms train students to not ask questions. You're expected to "just know" how it works. The only ideas that can be explained are the ideas limited by the steps. You're never expected to know *why* it works.
The implication is that rules, procedures, algorithms themselves—rather than how you consent to teach them—lead inevitably to blind compliance. But of course that's not true (how could it be?). In fact, it's a well known myth, as Dr. Sarah Powell, Associate Professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Texas at Austin, explains here starting at 6:45.
And, to the extent that this trope or myth is based on the deficit-model notion that students are hardwired to helplessly mimic authority in any form, there is certainly loads of evidence from developmental psychology that this underlying notion is also false. Here is a sample from Perspectives on Imitation (Volume 2):
One study [Meltzoff, 1995] involved showing 18-month-old infants an unsuccessful act. For example, an adult "accidentally" under- or overshot a target, or tried to perform an act but his hand slipped several times; thus the goal state was not achieved. To an adult, it was easy to read the actor's intention although he did not fulfill it. The experimental question was whether infants also saw beyond the literal body movements to the underlying goal of the act. The measure of how they interpreted the event was what they chose to reenact. In this case the correct answer was not to imitate the movement that was actually seen, but the actor's goal, which remained unfulfilled. The study compared infants' tendency to perform the target act in several situations: (1) after they saw the full target act demonstrated, (2) after they saw the unsuccessful attempt to perform the act, and (3) after it was neither shown nor attempted. The results showed that 18-month-olds can infer the unseen goals implied by unsuccessful attempts. . . .
If infants can detect the underlying goal or intention of the human act, they should also be able to achieve the act using a variety of means. I tested this in a study of 18-month-olds using a dumbbell-shaped object that was too big for the infants' hands. An adult grasped the ends of the dumbbell and attempted to yank it apart, but his hands slid off, so he was unsuccessful in carrying out his intention. The dumbbell was then presented to the infants. It is interesting that the infants did not attempt to imitate the surface behavior of the adult. Instead, they used novel ways to struggle to get the gigantic toy apart. They put one end of the dumbbell between their knees and used both hands to pull it upward, or put their hands on inside faces of the cubes and pushed outward, and so on. They used different means than the experimenter, but these acts were directed toward the same end. This fits with my (Meltzoff, 1995) hypothesis that the infants had determined the goal of the act, differentiating it from the surface behavior that was observed.
