Testing...Testing...

In my last journal entry, I see that I was disquieted by Mindy's questions about what number comes after 10, after 20, after 30, and so forth.

I wondered, way back then, why she didn't already know that stuff, or why she couldn't figure out some of it on her own.

Looking back on that journal entry from the space of more than twenty years, I can confidently state that Mindy had figured out most or all of that stuff. She surely knew the words eleven, twelve, and so forth, and their order, but she probably had not seen or written these words very often. With the need to match up words like eleven with their numeric form, she probably created a mental model of how the numbers past 10 worked (1-1, 1-2, 1-3, and so on) and was testing her mental model against reality in the quickest-and-easiest way open to her—by checking with Mom.

Why am I so confident about that, now? Because over the years, Mindy showed herself to be quite good at mathematical thinking—she demonstrated an almost instinctive grasp of many concepts I had to grapple with to learn—and because she also showed herself to be quite a careful, cautious learner. She often sat back and watched others do things and only began to do them herself when she could do them right. She wasn't particularly the type to rummage around a topic, making messes and learning from mistakes—instead, she was the type to absorb-absorb-absorb, and then plunge in with competence.

A wise, grandmotherly type of woman I knew when Mindy was young said she called that sort of learner a "watcher."

Strangely, the pattern isn't true of some of Mindy's pursuits in her teen and adult years. She mucks about with computers, trying things out without the fear that tends to paralyze people of older generations. She rarely looks at manuals or instructions. Instead, she just experiments—with everything from physical set-up, to program features, to programming itself. I think that, in the case of computers, Mindy can quickly get the feedback she craves from the machines themselves—what she tries either works or doesn't, and she quickly reacts to the latter situation with a variety of new ideas about what might end up working.

If we can trust my journal entry, I reacted calmly and even patiently to her requests for information. She had confidence in my answers, and confidence in our small group—it was “safe” to ask her questions and test her theories.

If I didn't already know this about Mindy, I soon learned that she really gets pleasure out of organized concepts and checking things off in her well-ordered mind. I think that on that day so long ago, doing a dot-to-dot puzzle, she got a little click of satisfaction each time her guess turned out to be correct.

She was a watcher...a builder of mental models...a tester. She figured out an answer, then tested it against reality. Always testing, testing.