Bucket errors are one (out of many) possible reasons that an elephant might not listen to what’s being said. Briefly, people learn to associate a bundle of concepts with what certain words, that might not match the intended meaning of the words. They might put together the concepts of “time to eat” and “stop having fun” such that, even if you have their favourite food, they’ll have to parse the sentence negatively. Navigating bucket errors is quite tricky, both when it occurs to others and to yourself. But you can still mine their reactions for information. Does the child react negatively only when I tell them it’s time to eat? Can I entice them with the smell of the food, the sight of me eating their favourite dishes etc.?
Another possible reason an elephant might not listen to what’s being said is that they incorrectly seperate words/concepts. For instance, in the case of your students, their value shards aren’t latching onto the right triggers. The shard “this is a waste of time” doesn’t fire when their brains interpret words, it fires instead when they are doing something repeatedly and failing, or have noticed some things in the past that seem to save time when it previously took a long while, or when you tell them after just having struggled to complete a task that their is a much faster way to do things by designing their algorithms beforehand. Or their “will get good grades” shard may only fire in contexts where you explicitly tell them that X will contribute to their grades, or be on their exam or so on, because that’s historically how information about how get good grades appeared in the past. Telling them that “this is a good habit” often hasn’t resulted in clear improvements to their lives, so they ignore utterances of that sort. Thinking about things that would have historically resulted in reinforcement events for/against the behaviour you want is a good way to generate hypothesis about this kind of stuff.
The elephant doesn’t learn from deliberate thought, nor present its operations, nearly as easily as we’d like.
Bucket errors are one (out of many) possible reasons that an elephant might not listen to what’s being said. Briefly, people learn to associate a bundle of concepts with what certain words, that might not match the intended meaning of the words. They might put together the concepts of “time to eat” and “stop having fun” such that, even if you have their favourite food, they’ll have to parse the sentence negatively. Navigating bucket errors is quite tricky, both when it occurs to others and to yourself. But you can still mine their reactions for information. Does the child react negatively only when I tell them it’s time to eat? Can I entice them with the smell of the food, the sight of me eating their favourite dishes etc.?
Another possible reason an elephant might not listen to what’s being said is that they incorrectly seperate words/concepts. For instance, in the case of your students, their value shards aren’t latching onto the right triggers. The shard “this is a waste of time” doesn’t fire when their brains interpret words, it fires instead when they are doing something repeatedly and failing, or have noticed some things in the past that seem to save time when it previously took a long while, or when you tell them after just having struggled to complete a task that their is a much faster way to do things by designing their algorithms beforehand. Or their “will get good grades” shard may only fire in contexts where you explicitly tell them that X will contribute to their grades, or be on their exam or so on, because that’s historically how information about how get good grades appeared in the past. Telling them that “this is a good habit” often hasn’t resulted in clear improvements to their lives, so they ignore utterances of that sort. Thinking about things that would have historically resulted in reinforcement events for/against the behaviour you want is a good way to generate hypothesis about this kind of stuff.
The elephant doesn’t learn from deliberate thought, nor present its operations, nearly as easily as we’d like.