[...] On a meta level, for someone even the idea of “learning” or “improving” or “changing” may be already associated with pain, so they will resist any such process if they notice it. A human mind can be messed up rather easily.
This becomes painfully common (and obvious to any observant third-party that knows these concepts) for subjects that students “are just not made for”, such as large amounts of students that “just don’t get” maths. They’ve been trained in so many ways to associate actual learning (especially the actions taken when attempting to learn a concept) with negativity that it becomes obviously so much more rewarding to just guess the teacher’s password, and so they are positively reinforced into doing everything they can to avoid mental modeling and seek password-guessing through aggregation and correlation of symbol-data. In most cases I’ve observed, they become experts at the skill of subconsciously forming “truth-tables” of teachers’ passwords through brute-force trial-and-error tactics. What’s more, this tactic, which they’ve been trained to do and learned so well and associate so much with positive feedback, often feeds itself into a vicious circle through several possible methods, which makes getting out (or, for that matter, even realizing that it’s there and you need to get out of it) so much more difficult than if that behavior had been blocked immediately when it first appeared.
When I realized that, I’ve started to feel sad for every student I see showing signs of spending hours upon hours studying and memorizing and headsmashing against the same math problems “until they finally understand them”, when in truth they haven’t really gained anything worthwhile (IMO) from the experience.
This becomes painfully common (and obvious to any observant third-party that knows these concepts) for subjects that students “are just not made for”, such as large amounts of students that “just don’t get” maths. They’ve been trained in so many ways to associate actual learning (especially the actions taken when attempting to learn a concept) with negativity that it becomes obviously so much more rewarding to just guess the teacher’s password, and so they are positively reinforced into doing everything they can to avoid mental modeling and seek password-guessing through aggregation and correlation of symbol-data. In most cases I’ve observed, they become experts at the skill of subconsciously forming “truth-tables” of teachers’ passwords through brute-force trial-and-error tactics. What’s more, this tactic, which they’ve been trained to do and learned so well and associate so much with positive feedback, often feeds itself into a vicious circle through several possible methods, which makes getting out (or, for that matter, even realizing that it’s there and you need to get out of it) so much more difficult than if that behavior had been blocked immediately when it first appeared.
When I realized that, I’ve started to feel sad for every student I see showing signs of spending hours upon hours studying and memorizing and headsmashing against the same math problems “until they finally understand them”, when in truth they haven’t really gained anything worthwhile (IMO) from the experience.