DD perceives any kind of instruction as criticism.
Wow, that's my dd10 to a "T." She is so hard for me to teach anything b/c she gets so angry and defensive and constantly interrupts me. It is a real test of my patience! I am still working on letting her talk and explain what she's doing even if it makes no sense to me. I'm also still working on getting her to be polite and give me a minute to explain another way. It is an ongoing challenge, though.
We had this also. I clearly remember the morning when I was driving DS - then 11 - to his day camp, a wonderful engineering-orriented camp with tons of peers, and he admitted - for the first time in his life - that one of his factoids that he gave me yesterday, was infact wrong.
I almost drove the car off the road - I was so suprised!!!!
Up until then he not only 'did battle' with me, he used to do it in school if the teacher tried to correct his writing samples. Our little town certianly didn't know what to do with a 3rd grader who, when told that he didn't do his writting correctly, handled it by telling the teacher - right to her face - that she was the one who was wrong. They had never seen a kid like mine, but let me know that it was all my fault for bad parenting. Perhaps it was, but jeesh!
((No wonder it was hard to see the difference between strong willed and totally insecure.))
What helps (slowly) was working together with Aleks.com, so that it wasn't ME saying he was wrong, and the reinforcer was really prized (new more difficult problems and beating the level.)
Also, I learned to say: "Oh, that's an interesting perspective" instead of "You are so wrong!"
Or "hum, that's not how I remember it, lets look that up, ok?"
It certianly was also true that lots of outlandish sounding factoids that sounded implausable to me that came from DS's mouth, were in fact true. That made the whole thing more tricky.
I'd console myself by thinking of all the dear men in my life who I've never yet heard 'Oh, I was wrong about that' from. Eleven might be late for that sort of admission, but it could be worse!
Love and More Love,
Grinity
