Re:Autism and 'normal' (Score 2)

My son, Jeremy, started kindergarten last year. After a few weeks, his teacher called my wife and suggested that he be tested for autism. These days, teachers are taught to look for signs of potential learning disorders, like autism or dyslexia; this is much better than when I was in school thirty years ago, when children with these problems were just labeled 'stupid' by teachers. I was appreciative that his teacher was concerned by Jeremy's unusual personality. After all, we had noticed his quirky behavior for several years, and knew that there was something different about him that he did not share with his brothers (two older, two younger). We mentioned his kindergarten teacher's observation to Jeremy's head start teacher, and her reply was, essentially, "bunk". This shows the extremes of what society, and the teaching establishment in general, understand of autism, or even "mild" autism, if there is such a thing. I don't know if my son has mild autism or not, but he does, as I mentioned, have an unusual personality. In many aspects, he acts like a two year old. It is also difficult to have a conersation with him, as he he will sometimes answer a question with a bizare statement totally off topic. Even his younger, and completely normal by society's standards, brother gets frustrated by Jeremy's weird behavior. Then again, he taught himself to read! One day last year, after arriving home from school, my wife saw him holding a book, and talking to himself. Imagine her surprise when she noticed that what he was saying to himself were the words printed in the book; some of them were quite large too, such that he brother in third grade would not be able to read them. Now, he easily reads at a fourth grade level, though he's only in first. The other children in his class, the "normal" kids, are going through the typical struggle of learning to read, as most of us did way back when. Granted, this is not exceptional mental performance, just above average for the skill of reading. But what about his quirky personality? I'm sure that this will present certain difficulties for him to overcome in the future, as far as personal relationships go, but so what! Maybe these difficulties relating to "normal" people will drive him into acedemics, where he'll feel more comfortable. In the end I don't give a rats a__ what society thinks of Jeremy. I just want him to be happy. And every indication is that he is quite happy about life, whether that life leads to many pleasurable hours lost in the world of the written word, or programming computers, or staring at the stars and coming up with a new theory-of-everything, or even falling in love with an equally quirky girl and having a family or his own. You know, there are, what, 6 billion or so people on earth? I think we could accurately catagorize their skills, IQ's and personalities with, say, 6 billion different catagory headings.