This is DD-- to a tee.
She's entirely rational about it-- if you explain the point, however advanced/esoteric, she's happy to go there.
And unlike Dude's DD, she is simply
not extrinsically motivated. At all. Oh, sure-- she's happy to collect her awards, and all, but it's the intangible aspect of it that matters to her-- the internal satisfaction of BEING the best, not getting the medal, if that makes sense. She didn't even (really) care about the trappings of being valedictorian (which it turns out she was, in the end-- in spite of how it was announced at commencement).
Times tables? YUP. But I had the same problem. It's a holistic thing-- my brain simply doesn't DO blind algorithm or working memory tasks without larger significance attached. Not happening. What I am incredibly good at, though, is remembering extremely
complex system information and manipulating, using parallels and analogies, etc. I've always attributed this to having a very poor working memory. Brute force rote memorization tasks play to that very weakest of my skills, and my brain rebels-- significantly-- when it is required to "hold this" without being told
where to file the information. I don't have a good buffer to hold information like that. I HAVE to know where to file things in my brain-- where does the information
belong?? With 18th century Italian history? Or with plane geometry postulates??
Low level stuff like this*
has to be turned over to my subconscious processing, though-- has to. I can learn it, but only through application. DD seems to be the same way. It's incredibly difficult for her to learn "these ten things." Not so much for her to "use these ten bits of data" forty times in rapid succession, or to explain how they fit into some larger framework. Come at it from the more complicated (for most people) side of things, and she can learn those ten things more rapidly than her peers. Come at it from the simpler side, and you might well conclude that she is developmentally delayed.
* sitting with my daughter in Driver's Education has been a wake-up call to me this way. I seriously
cannot say what it is that I use as "landmarks" in positioning my vehicle. I do it holistically within the first few minutes in ANY vehicle-- and so does my DD. Yet she's going to be required to approach it algorithmically for the course. This may not go well-- her processing and retrieval speed for the algorithmic approach is
unsafe. FAR far better to not have her thinking about that as a distraction. But what do I know, right?? This is precisely the kind of task that she has to briefly explain to her subconscious before turning it over-- and if you prevent that from taking place by insisting on conscious, deliberate processing, you just cut the SPEED of that processing by at least 80%. :disappointed:
