Wednesday: driver’s ed manual
Mar. 27th, 2024 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutA. got up on her own around 8:30 am or so.
I got up later and got us each breakfast. There was some conflict when T. was headed out (late start for non-MCAS takers yesterday and today). T. saw all the bags lying around from last night. A. got out a bunch of bags from her closet and was systematically exploring whether any would be better for going to the new school than her backpack from this school year (so far, nothing is better than the backpack from this year). T. misunderstood and thought that we’d bought all this stuff and was wondering why. We were like, what? A. lost her temper, because he’s quite loud (not necessarily controllable by him, unfortunately, and if you are thinking, have you considered that might be an indication of ASD, chuckles, duh. It _does_ help to categorize a phenomenon but it’s still loud and managing is still tricky). Once T. was out of the house (with many I love you, have a good day, etc. from me, and a fair amount of grumbling from him about why does it always have to be like this), I had A. come back down and we tried to figure out a place to start.
I knew A. had gotten pretty bored, so I pointed her at the Massachusetts driver’s manual. Unfortunately, she reads these things the way a good lawyer reads a contract. Do I have to read the stuff about people in the military and whether they have to get a license in Massachusetts? No, you don’t. Sometime later, we bogged down in what about people whose parents don’t have driver’s licenses. I was _going_ to page by page the manual with her and summarize and answer questions, to catch all the stuff, but this was really the one she was hung up on. So we started walking around the house and R. found the state explanation for what kind of person is needed to sit in the passenger seat with someone who has a learner’s permit (over 21, licensed at least 1 year) in general, and more specifically junior operators during the Forbidden Hours (actual parent or legal guardian).
We got to a better place, and we talked a little about how does she know when she doesn’t understand something? When she remembers the words. !!! OK, where does she stash that stuff, waiting for an explanation? Somewhere in her head, and when that gets a little full, she gets increasingly stressed. OK! I know how to fix that! Big piece of paper, start a list, figure out a permanent storage and processing system later.
Here are the first two items on the list:
Arbitration
Indemnification
She’s been reading terms of service.
I had her brush her teeth, and I brushed mine, and she added some more:
Web beacons
Cookies, cache, text file, ASCII
EULA vs TOS vs Privacy Policy
Personal, sensitive and personally identifiable information
R. offered to do the cookies question, and I thought about that and talked it over with him. Then I discussed it with her, and now they are chatting upstairs about cookies, caches, text files and possibly web beacons. She already knew a bunch about ASCII and I think they’ll be digging into ASCII / Unicode as well. I was clear with both of them that she was going to want to know how all this intersected with people and people-type processes (lawsuits and politics and so forth). I felt that R. was not likely to want to engage with that, but if he did, that he was likely to not produce satisfying explanations for her, and I made sure she understood that he was going to cover the technical stuff in detail and she should hold her people-related questions for me. Murphy’s Law states clearly that they will delve deeply into the politics and enjoy the conversation greatly and I will be entirely shut out and I am _fine_ with that outcome.
Today is a perfect example of What I Worry About and What I Don’t. I’m not worried about A. learning. As R. observed, this is a degree of cereal box reading that wasn’t really available to us when we were her age, but we absolutely recognize the behavior, just like her hours in wikipedia are recognizable as our hours in encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs and similar reference material.
I _am_ worried about the massive volume of information and her efforts to navigate it. “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” was a valid observation more than two thousand years ago and it is not any better now. So I’m going to focus on the Basic Needs component of this:
Setting maximums on time spent trying to make sense of complex new material (n hours in a day)
Setting minimums on time spent walking around
Setting minimums on time spent talking about what one learned today, ideally with someone else, but in a pinch just talking to oneself or blogging or whatever
I also want her to be able to “feel her feelings” around this and articulate them. It’s Wednesday, so this might be worth discussing at therapy.
A component of trying to digest all the things all at once all the time (which is exhausting and impossible and a terrible life choice) is not trusting the process. So I’ll also be working with her to develop a trustworthy process of logging outstanding questions (maintaining that internally is stressful), identifying effective partners for getting answers (some people are better at answering some kinds of questions than other people) and decomposing complex things into simpler things, creating lists of the simpler things, banging them out and then returning to the complex thing and taking another swing at it with the simpler things already understood.
I got up later and got us each breakfast. There was some conflict when T. was headed out (late start for non-MCAS takers yesterday and today). T. saw all the bags lying around from last night. A. got out a bunch of bags from her closet and was systematically exploring whether any would be better for going to the new school than her backpack from this school year (so far, nothing is better than the backpack from this year). T. misunderstood and thought that we’d bought all this stuff and was wondering why. We were like, what? A. lost her temper, because he’s quite loud (not necessarily controllable by him, unfortunately, and if you are thinking, have you considered that might be an indication of ASD, chuckles, duh. It _does_ help to categorize a phenomenon but it’s still loud and managing is still tricky). Once T. was out of the house (with many I love you, have a good day, etc. from me, and a fair amount of grumbling from him about why does it always have to be like this), I had A. come back down and we tried to figure out a place to start.
I knew A. had gotten pretty bored, so I pointed her at the Massachusetts driver’s manual. Unfortunately, she reads these things the way a good lawyer reads a contract. Do I have to read the stuff about people in the military and whether they have to get a license in Massachusetts? No, you don’t. Sometime later, we bogged down in what about people whose parents don’t have driver’s licenses. I was _going_ to page by page the manual with her and summarize and answer questions, to catch all the stuff, but this was really the one she was hung up on. So we started walking around the house and R. found the state explanation for what kind of person is needed to sit in the passenger seat with someone who has a learner’s permit (over 21, licensed at least 1 year) in general, and more specifically junior operators during the Forbidden Hours (actual parent or legal guardian).
We got to a better place, and we talked a little about how does she know when she doesn’t understand something? When she remembers the words. !!! OK, where does she stash that stuff, waiting for an explanation? Somewhere in her head, and when that gets a little full, she gets increasingly stressed. OK! I know how to fix that! Big piece of paper, start a list, figure out a permanent storage and processing system later.
Here are the first two items on the list:
Arbitration
Indemnification
She’s been reading terms of service.
I had her brush her teeth, and I brushed mine, and she added some more:
Web beacons
Cookies, cache, text file, ASCII
EULA vs TOS vs Privacy Policy
Personal, sensitive and personally identifiable information
R. offered to do the cookies question, and I thought about that and talked it over with him. Then I discussed it with her, and now they are chatting upstairs about cookies, caches, text files and possibly web beacons. She already knew a bunch about ASCII and I think they’ll be digging into ASCII / Unicode as well. I was clear with both of them that she was going to want to know how all this intersected with people and people-type processes (lawsuits and politics and so forth). I felt that R. was not likely to want to engage with that, but if he did, that he was likely to not produce satisfying explanations for her, and I made sure she understood that he was going to cover the technical stuff in detail and she should hold her people-related questions for me. Murphy’s Law states clearly that they will delve deeply into the politics and enjoy the conversation greatly and I will be entirely shut out and I am _fine_ with that outcome.
Today is a perfect example of What I Worry About and What I Don’t. I’m not worried about A. learning. As R. observed, this is a degree of cereal box reading that wasn’t really available to us when we were her age, but we absolutely recognize the behavior, just like her hours in wikipedia are recognizable as our hours in encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs and similar reference material.
I _am_ worried about the massive volume of information and her efforts to navigate it. “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” was a valid observation more than two thousand years ago and it is not any better now. So I’m going to focus on the Basic Needs component of this:
Setting maximums on time spent trying to make sense of complex new material (n hours in a day)
Setting minimums on time spent walking around
Setting minimums on time spent talking about what one learned today, ideally with someone else, but in a pinch just talking to oneself or blogging or whatever
I also want her to be able to “feel her feelings” around this and articulate them. It’s Wednesday, so this might be worth discussing at therapy.
A component of trying to digest all the things all at once all the time (which is exhausting and impossible and a terrible life choice) is not trusting the process. So I’ll also be working with her to develop a trustworthy process of logging outstanding questions (maintaining that internally is stressful), identifying effective partners for getting answers (some people are better at answering some kinds of questions than other people) and decomposing complex things into simpler things, creating lists of the simpler things, banging them out and then returning to the complex thing and taking another swing at it with the simpler things already understood.