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Doctors and teachers are careful not to give their patients or pupils "false hope." But do they ever give them "false hopelessness?"
I was told over and over again by well-meaning physicians and scientists that I could never develop stereovision, that I had missed a "critical period" in early infancy for the maturation of certain visual skills. I even lectured on critical periods in my college classes. When I learned to see in 3D, thanks to the help of optometric vision therapy, people were understandably skeptical. Some even argued that I must not have been cross-eyed to begin with! Rather than asking how my case could suggest new ways of thinking, they stuck hard to their theories and tried to dismiss my account. That's why I wrote Fixing My Gaze. In it, I explain how the change in my vision makes sense from a scientific point of view.
False hopelessness is just as bad as false hope. When a person in authority tells you that something is impossible, then you are set up to fail. I see false hopelessness all the time in my students. Here's an extraordinary example:
Many years ago, I had a very smart older woman of about sixty-five in my basic science class. Let's call this woman Jean. After one class, Jean came up to me and very hesitantly told me that she couldn't do the math for the class. This surprised me as the only math needed was a little multiplication and division.
"I never learned to multiply," she said.
Jean had gone to a very strict grade school, and the teachers there had told her she wasn't good at arithmetic. So she was put in a class where math was not taught. All her life, Jean assumed that multiplication and division were beyond her. This angered me. I told Jean that I would teach her to multiply and arranged to meet with her that Friday in my office.
On Friday, Jean appeared in my office at the scheduled time. She seemed so nervous that I tried to get her to relax by asking her what her hobbies were. She told me that she made quilts. In fact, her quilts consistently won prizes at the local country fairs. This gave me an idea. I drew a picture of a small quilt with 3 squares in 2 rows.
"How many squares are there in this quilt?" I asked Jean.
"6," she answered immediately.
I drew another quilt, this time made up of 6 rows of 5 squares. When I asked Jean for the total number of squares, she immediately replied with the number 30.
I put my pencil down and just quizzed her for the total number of squares in a 12 X 12 quilt.
"144," Jean answered without hesitation.
"I don't think you need any tutoring after all," I said to Jean. "That's multiplication."
"No, it's not,' Jean insisted, "that's quilting."
Jean was so convinced that she could not calculate, that she did not recognize her daily use of multiplication in making quilts. This meeting reminded me of how powerful the words of a person in authority can be, and how careful we must be, when in a position of authority, not to deprive people of hope.
False hope and false hopelessness: it's a tricky balance.
