One of the many facets of my job is to see children for Central Auditory Processing evaluations, typically these are children or adults that struggle with staying on task, focus or task completion. These are individuals who often find language based learning challenging, that misunderstand and misinterpret. One of the first comments I make to these individuals is that these differences in learning style have nothing to do with how smart you are. Unfortunately those that do not fit into the normative learning model often question their intellectual ability, in reality these individuals can often be the brightest and the best but they, themselves, do not know it. I wrote an article earlier on attention deficit disorder with this very theme. It is one thing to make this bold statement regarding intellect but it is another to get one to buy into their own giftedness. Here is a story that I love to tell regarding a spectacular example of the gifted child that was made to feel stupid.
I saw this child many years ago as a ten year old. This little girl was adopted early in life. In those days the parents that were adopting had little to no access to family history so these parents knew very little about the special needs that might arise for their daughter. At ten this little girl could not read at all, not even a little. This child was unable to do any of the required work for her age and grade. The situation was so dire that the school was moving towards putting her in a "life skills" class. This type of a class is for those deemed of low intellectual ability. The idea is to equip a child through the classroom to be able to deal with the basics of function in society. As we talked about our testing process and why we were looking at the Auditory Processing Ability our conversation finally came to the point where the Mom finally blurted out "but she is not dumb". This was really the crux of the matter. the message being conveyed through the school and the professionals that this girl was dealing with was that she was intellectually, significantly limited.
When Mom had made her assertion I asked her to tell me more and what I heard next blew me away. Mom revealed to me that she could take this little girl shopping with her and she could fill up her cart and this ten year old could calculate in her head what her groceries would cost her with tax. I could have fallen off my chair at this point. I agreed that indeed there was potentially much more to this girl than she was showing at school. After a long conversation with Mom we set out to find out what was going on. Upon further investigation it was found that this girl was off the charts brilliant when it came to mathematical thinking and off the charts in the opposite direction when it came to language based learning. So the question became what to do with this child? Was this girl a genius or was she "dumb" so to speak. My commentary is that she was obviously very bright. The problem at school was that even math had become language based at that age. This girl was given what she needed at school and began to flourish. When this child got to high school she was the annual winner of a province wide math competition each year that she entered and was taking University math while in high school and yet she was always a lousy reader.
This brilliant young woman had sadly spent her early years in life thinking that she was less intelligent than her peers and had started to give up her willingness to learn. In the end this child was far superior to the rest of her peers but didn't know it. The point is that we are all individuals with strengths and weaknesses but we are all taught the exact same way. Some traditional learners can thrive in this environment but others that potentially are the brightest and the best sometimes never have the opportunity to feel intelligent.
