I'm grinning at this description:

She is a sweet, beautiful, cuddly little shark.

YES. smile

I never, EVER underestimate DD's potential for this kind of thing. Ever. My responses to DD's outbursts (which are admittedly a bit rare now that she's a teen) often strike others as callous or even a bit... chilly... but-- I've learned.

A highly Socratic method was for many years the ONLY mode of learning and evaluation that was feasible with DD. If you made the demonstration of the skill an assumption, or a condition of participation, well-- it took care of itself. If you made it the main event, fuhgeddaboudit. You had just embarked on the express train to Hades, with stops only at "you can't make me" and "I'll show YOU."


I also learned to trust my gut. If I saw something once-- I had to evaluate based on very limited data. So could my DD actually write like a 9th grader? Well, most of the time, I'd have been hard pressed to say so. On the other hand, I did see her do this once when she lost a file and needed to turn something in the following day-- she banged out a 3 page paper with full citations in just a couple of hours. So I had to be content with the fact that she COULD do it-- but only when she chose to.



Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.