You know what, I have a totally different perspective on PDA that is emerging for me. Stay with me here.
My son is definitely a chip off the old block, and I feel like we're seeing a lot of the characteristics that I had when I was little which caused so much friction for me. And whether he's PDA or not, he's very similar to me in one key respect: he really likes to teach. As soon as I get down on his level and ask him genuine questions about his special interest (currently Minecraft :), he becomes immediately animated! It’s so sweet to see him light up and genuinely love talking to me about something.
When I was struggling with math in high school, I actually signed up to tutor other kids in my grade, which weirdly gave me the ability to learn the material myself. And in fact I was learning about math in a very deep way, as I got interested in fractals and complexity science, and told everyone in my life about what I was learning. I found a special interest within math, and teaching others about it unlocked math for me.
My son and I, we were born to teach.
As a PDA person, I think of myself as being difficult to program. Humans are programmable in many respects, and the systems of control that have pervaded our modern world rely on the ability to program humans to do specific tasks for society.
For example, right now, we think it's perfectly natural to stick every kid in the neighborhood into a single brick-and-mortar building together, and insist they 'learn' everything they'll need to learn in order to function independently. But this has never been the way I’ve personally learned best, and I suspect humans will look back on this time and think it was absurd to expect children to learn anything useful this way.
There’s an obvious mismatch between what we learn in school, and what we’re actually responsible for in our adult lives. Learning calculus is utterly useless compared to the ability to do basic accounting. Taking health quizzes is laughable compared to actually learning how to prepare a healthy meal. Kids can sense this discrepancy, and they’re right to call it out. The school system sequesters them by law for their entire childhood and adolescent years, without actually being at all responsible for their well being once they’re out.
That’s deeply messed up if you ask me. Humans will surely look back on our school system and wonder how it took us so long to respect people’s individual learning needs.
There’s an obvious mismatch between what we learn in school, and what we’re actually responsible for in our adult lives.
PDA kids are the canaries in the coal mine for the school system. Their need for agency and autonomy is fundamentally at odds with a system that insists on controlling them. Kids having meltdowns after school is a clear sign that they’re internalizing an impossible situation. Either succeed at school or drop out and join the prison pipeline. The former is a non-starter if you’re in a constant state of panic at school, and the latter is obviously a terrible life choice.
My hack for this impossible situation was to pretend I was a teacher. I literally started dressing like a teacher, with a button-up shirt and tie. I’d sit in the math resource center and I’d teach the other kids. And when someone asked about something I hadn’t learned yet, I learned it with them. Looking back on it, that was a clever solution!
Reality was impossible for me, so I deployed a reality distortion that let me make progress anyway. As a pretend teacher, I put myself back in a position of control. Once I had control, I could teach myself what I needed to know in order to help others learn.
My hack for this impossible situation was to pretend I was a teacher.
That saying “Those who cannot do, teach” always pissed me off, but maybe there’s a clue here. Maybe this is a much more general technique for PDA folks. When you cannot do, you can still teach. And teaching is a kind of doing.
I had just always assumed that the first step in becoming a teacher was to be an excellent student. But now I think that’s wrong. The natural born teachers may actually be the very kids that are hardest to teach.
The natural born teachers may actually be the very kids that are hardest to teach.
It’s like there are two kinds of people, learners and teachers. Learners are programmable, teachers are not. When you’re readily programmed, you have the disposition of a student. When you’re not readily programmed, you have the disposition of a teacher.
So perhaps when a kid is having meltdowns after school, we should get curious about them. Maybe they have something they need to teach.
Very thought provoking piece PJ!
Your kiddo is so lucky to be raised with so much more awareness around this than we had.