Ah-- my misunderstanding, evidently.
Surely there is something less derisive than "spoon-feeding" to describe the process of learning in a student who requires-- or merely prefers--
some instruction, though?
Perhaps I just see this as a continuum, with spoon-feeding at one end and total autodidactism at the other. Most of what we call "autodidactic" wouldn't have even been possible a generation ago, given the lack of opportunity and access yesterday's students had in comparison to Gen Z.
After all, perhaps TRULY "talented" individuals don't require anything but their own discovery and cognitive ability to achieve greatness... but it seems a bit much to expect even quite precocious individuals to, say, ignore Newton's work in favor of doing all of their own derivations and inventing notation themselves. Is it being needy to use a textbook to learn from those who have already figured things out? If a textbook is okay, what about a YouTube video? Surely one's own daily environment being enriched or not counts in some way... maybe one can only be truly autodidactic in a cave somewhere, alone with nothing but one's own thoughts, a stick and dirt to write in...
Perhaps I just believe that there's something in between because that seems to be the child that I have. Also-- I suspect that because I
see all of the inputs (as most parents with 'schooled' students do not), that I can say quite confidently that she requires NOTHING like spoon-feeding, but she could soar a LOT higher than she does if she weren't being
expected to learn in a relative instructional vacuum. She really does NOT get instruction from anywhere but a few power-point slides and her textbook. IMO, it shows.
Most here probably WOULD consider her an autodidact if they knew how little instructional input there is for her. I don't consider her an autodidact, because she does BETTER (about 30-40% better, IMO-- raising herself from "highly proficient" to "mastery") with fairly minimal (an hour or two a week) of human instruction.
I think that it significantly and unfairly maligns such students to derisively claim that they need spoon-feeding or hand-holding, or any other patronizing terminology.
I venture a guess that most of the kids who play chess-- even at an elite level-- do so after some
instruction on the subject (shocking, I know).
In fact, I'd be willing to guess that most of the kids here who play chess get more CHESS instruction weekly than my DD gets math instruction-- in
both of her college-level (dual enrollment) math courses.
So-- does she need "spoon-feeding"? Is this evidence that she lacks math talent? I'd say not. Perhaps she lacks DRIVE in the domain, and this might explain why she is not autodidactic there to the extent that some students are. But her raw ability is a different matter.
