That's an awesome story, and shows up some limitations in the screening for early childhood learning disabilities. Sometimes, a genius child comes across as disabled because their behaviors are so different from those of other children.
I was a "different" child. I did not speak until the age of four. I spent a lot of time by myself. I was very mechanically minded, and I amused myself by playing with mathematics. By the age of eleven, I had figured out elements of calculus on my own, and only recognized that when I took calculus in college. My notation was different, but the functions were the same.
In today's world, I would likely have been diagnosed with some sort of learning disability and pumped up with drugs. Thank God, the doctor my mother took me to (when I wasn't speaking) recommended that she read to me more and left it at that. Plus, we were too poor to do anything fancy. I pretty much was free to develop naturally. So I eventually got the PhD and now oversee several medical research studies...
“screening for early childhood learning disabilities.”
Excellent comments.
I have discovered that autistic children are very intelligent, but need to learn logically and not emotionally the way virtually all preschool and elementary schools teach.
Several years ago I worked with an eight year old girl that had flunked kindergarten three times. She was under the care of a psychiatrist and diagnosed as autistic. We played a match game with cards, where the goal was to flip over two cards and find matches so you could keep those cards. She beat me, and her older brother.
I asked her father to purchase several duplicate sets of flashcards with the picture and word on the same side of the card and play the match game with them. She very quickly learned the words she could not learn otherwise.
You can’t emotionally learn organic chemistry!
Autism is super masculine consciousness and masculine consciousness locks on to the location of the memory where emotional consciousness locks on to the memory in the location. The logical masculine aspect of consciousness is excellent for memorization and often provides a photographic memory while the emotional feminine aspect is excellent at creativity(as it thinks outside the box or location where the memory is stored).
This is easy to demonstrate as I can have an emotional person lock onto an object I am holding, close their eyes, and their physical body will move in the direction I move the object. The logical masculine aspect of consciousness that is locked on to the space the object is in does not move their physical body when I move the object from the space. I only learned this as I physically feel their consciousness.
If teachers understood this, they could help all the inner city children who become slow learners due to a premature shift in consciousness from the emotional child to a premature sense of self for emotional trauma protection. These are the 7 year olds going on 35!
Normally the shift begins at age 8 (third grade when they teach long division and multiplication), and increases gradually. However, in children with trauma it often happens very young to block emotionally painful memory retrieval. This is also what causes childhood amnesia in that many people do not remember early life events.