My 3 year old is going through a phase where he will argue about everything - insisting that he is right about everything, even when demonstrably wrong (e.g. your brother is smaller than you.. "no, I'm smaller than him", or "it's tuesday today" -"no, it's thursday", or "I won that game" when mummy clearly has all the pieces on the board and he has none". Whilst friends reassure me he's only "being 3", it struck me that I have come across this before in one of my grad students.
This student hangs on to a theory or hypothesis that they have proved to be wrong via experiment and observation, just because they can't conceive of being wrong. How long do I go on helping the student devise ways of proving himself right, knowing that they, and acres of past literature will prove him wrong and that he won't accept the answer?
And who will grow out of the exasperating phase first????
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