1:33pm July 20, 2013

➸ Janna's weird crap: The ultimate--and unspoken--"gifted problem"

In the gifted community, it has become trendy to talk about “twice exceptional" kids who are both gifted and learning disabled. Many parents of gifted kids have come to realize that it’s possible to have reading, or math, or attention, or social,…

YOUNEEDACAT STARTS HERE:

I really don’t like the whole concept of gifted.

And I feel like it ruined my life in a lot of ways because people even attributed my struggling because of disabilities to boredom. And because I heard it all the time I repeated the word bored.

I was never bored. Ever. I find it very hard to get bored.

What I was, was so in over my head that it was unbelievable.

But gifted kids aren’t allowed to be in over our heads. They’re only allowed to be ~bored~ and ~so far above this level of work~. So when you are called bored you get skipped forward. And forward. And forward. Until it finally breaks you.

Sometimes skipping forward made it worse, sometimes better, sometimes both.

Because there a huge secret nobody tells you.

Knowledge does not exist on a continuum from easy to advanced. School makes it look that way but it doesn’t. There’s just one kind of knowledge and another and another, and it’s customary to teach them in a certain order.

My friend was in remedial math all through elementary school. She was indeed with dividing by zero, and they took this as an example of her ineptitude. Then she REINVENTED CALCULUS FROM SCRATCH.

She still can’t do basic math to save her life. Because basic math if not more basic than calculus. It’s just different.

My IQ went from near profoundly gifted at age five, to merely above average at fifteen, to below average at twenty two, and who knows where it is now

Did I “get less intelligent”? No.

I knew how to do things that look really impressive in a five year old. Most particularly, read. Hyperlexia alone can jack up your IQ a good deal if you test someone young enough.

And all the signs of classic hyperlexia were there on the test. Because hyperlexia is, by definition, both a skill AND a learning disability. And the test showed the exact uneven skills.

In fact, I found a tape of the proceedings after my testing, and it sounded as if she deliberately downplayed my weaknesses in calculating the scoring because back then there was no such thing as twice exceptional. So they literally would frequently either ignore your strengths as meaningless savant skills, or ignore your weaknesses as boredom or disinterest. So I don’t know what my score really “should have” been. I was later told my tester was highly traditional and didn’t believe in gifted kids with learning disabilities. So she noticed my low math and comprehension scores, but downplayed them as totally irrelevant to the test.

So what happened next?

Some of my abilities started out ahead of most kids, but didn’t keep growing at the rate that most kids skills were growing. Being able to read and repeat words at a 14+ level looks super impressive at age five. Not so impressive at fifteen or twenty two. It’s not like that skill kept on going, at some point it plateaued and lots of other kids surpassed me.

Another thing that happened is weaknesses that looked like tiny cracks at a young age, can grow into giant crevasses at another age.

Also, those seemingly insignificant weaknesses. They can be in areas that are truly basic and fundamental. Which means that when you try to build skills on that foundation, the foundation can crumble and send the entire tower crashing down once you need to use skills that aren’t there, in order to build other skills.

Another thing that can happen, is that skill can change around in very complex ways.

There was a big portion of my childhood where I coasted by because I appeared to have skills, or was simply assumed to have skills, that literally did not exist at all.

And add I began to hit adolescence, the facade began to crumble and crack and break apart completely. So some things that looked like a loss of skills were merely the loss of the ability to fake those skills. Because there were more tasks that truly demanded those skills that weren’t there, and it couldn’t be faked anymore.

Then there were skills that I really did have, but only through doing the cognitive equivalent of running marathons every single day. I lost the ability to do that. Those skills vanished.

Then there were skills I’d always had beneath the surface. My greatest strengths in fact. All the marathon running had obscured them. Had required using skills that temporarily annihilated my best skills. (Like using language skills destroys certain perceptual skills, in my brain anyway.)

And those skills, my best ones, those became nothing but enhanced. While my weaker skills (even if they’d looked strong, it was through constant effort… true strengths require much less effort to pull off) got even weaker. And my ability to fake skills nearly vanished.

One reason that I loathe calling what happened in adolescence a regression, is that it wasn’t. I was not growing backwards. All of my best skills were improving by leaps and bounds. Other skills were disappearing, almost as if to make room for what really mattered.

It was a reordering of my entire brain. Sometimes I wonder if my brain saw me trying to force it to bend to the wishes of everyone around me, and said “this is enough, you weren’t made you do this, do what you were made to do”.

I lost the ability to pretend I didn’t need to stim in public. I lost most useful speech, quite gradually. I lost some elements of language comprehension, and gained others. I gained the ability to consistently communicate in words, just as slowly as I lost speech, and I do think the
two were connected.

But what I gained the most was in those areas that language tend to suppress. A somewhat water-like, perceptual awareness of everything that goes on around me. The ability to notice patterns in that awareness. Not conceptual patterns but perceptual ones. In fact, everything that became engaged was perceptual and sensory skills, not so much conceptual ones.

I worked really hard to gain the ability to communicate accurately and consistently, in words, about my inner experiences. Mine. Not what other people expected it demanded me to say. Mine. It was slow going and hard work and it didn’t progress in a straight line. But it was truly gaining a skill, it was not like in earlier childhood when I propped it up on stilts and faked it in an elaborate manner. And it lacked the frantic and temporary nature of earlier childhood.

But the thing is? Most of the skills and fake skills I was losing, were ones that help you on IQ tests. Most that I was gaining . Don’t help you that much. So that’s another factor.

And in case you’re wondering, all development involves trade-offs like that. It’s just that when nonautistic children lose abilities in the course of learning others! We focus on what is learned and we call it progress. When autistic children do the exact same damn thing, we focus on what I’d lost and call it regression.

When is the last time you heard it called regression when NT children lose the ability to distinguish sounds from languages they’re not exposed to? It’s just considered normal, forward development.

Advanced doesn’t mean anything. I found my first year of college easier than seventh grade or ninth grade. Not because I’m advanced for my age, but because I could control what courses I took, had lots more breaks during the day to study, and happened to do better in at last some of the areas being taught, than I did in areas taught in supposedly less advanced classes.

That’s not to say college was easy. In fact, it nearly broke me, and there’s no coincidence in the timing of my suicide attempts. And I flunked chemistry despite studying day and night, and was furious at my teacher for suggesting I wasn’t trying. Putting art and music classes on my schedule helped me balance out the harder classes. It was hell on earth.

But I got through the year. In 7th grade, I got through only part of the year before my parents demanded an individualized program to deal with my “boredom” (crashing). Even when I did badly, as in crying and slamming my head on the desk during tests, the material was considered advanced so I got more credit for doing it badly than I’d have gotten for normal classes. In 9th grade, I only lasted three months before the pressure and bullying forced me to drop out.

So I did better in my first year of college than in seventh or ninth grade. Obviously this isn’t because of being advanced. If I was just advanced, then “easier” stuff would be no problem.

I see it as, every single class in every single grade requires a different set of skills. Anyone can have ANY COMBINATION of those skills. Doing well in some “higher” classes doesn’t mean you have the skills required to do “lower” classes. It does not make you gifted. It just makes you different.

IQ tests start with “easy” questions and progressing to “harder” questions only if you get the “easy” ones right. This is a horrible mess for anyone who would do well in the “harder” questions but can’t do the “easy” questions.

Someone who can only handle the academics at grade school level but not high school, and someone who can only handle high school but not grade school, really are not that different. Each has one set of skills and lacks another. But the 2nd kid will be seen as either more gifted or more disabled, depending on what ppl notice.

Think about it. I could have gone either way depending on many circumstances.

I never know what to say for my education level. Going to college didn’t erase the fact that I will never in my life have completed junior high or high school. I didn’t skip over those things because I would’ve understood them. I skipped because I’d never have finished them. I only ever graduated special ed. WTF.

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