Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Cross road - need advice

I think that it is possible for PGness to be mistaken for AS, and I think that the reverse is true too, some kids with AS are hard to diagnose because they use their PGness to cover it up. I would go so far as to tell you that I believe in my heart of hearts that ADHD + PG and AS + PG might be their own catagories that have very little to do with 'garden variety' AS or ADHD. At some point it becomes so hard to tell what is what that it just doesn't even matter: Unless they are trying to ship your kid off to a school to work on the AS without accomidating the gifteness. That could lead to serious trouble if the AS is a misdiagnosis. Think back to your description of your family life - is your son showing some flexibility in navigating the social waters at home, or does he just avoid the teens and call all the shots for the younger sib?

http://www.sengifted.org/articles_counseling/Amend_MisdiagnosisOfAspergersDisorder.shtml

I wouldn't begin to try and figure out your particular situation, but a phone call to Dr. Ed Amend might be a good idea. But I can say that AS doesn't turn 'on and off' - although it can be less noticible at home where everyone sort of accepts each other's quirks. In a way that is the sort of classroom experience you are looking for, a more accepting place.

For example, if the teacher doesn't like that number of trips to the bathroom, what other places could the teacher invent for the child to make trips too?

My DH's somewhat mythologized version of DS's gradeskip goes like this: DS was so bored that he was very distracting to the children who sat next to him. The teacher kept moving him from child to child as the children and their parents complained that sitting next to DS was too distracting. Finally there were no more kids for DS to sit next to in her classroom, so the teacher moved him up a grade.

This BTW isn't literally true, but it captures the spirit of the thing nicely!

Love and More lOve,
Grinity

At our school, we aren't allowed to pick teachers, but we're allowed to provide additional information for the school to use in making the assignment. "My kid does best with X, Y, and Z," where X, Y, and Z are characteristics of only one teacher, is an effective way of getting the assignment you want.

In our case, we said "We want DD to have a teacher who wants a grade-skipped kid," and got a teacher who was a perfect match for her. (And is generally considered to be the "best" teacher in the grade.)

Actually, 5 years is not long at all! We've had complains from the school about DS's behavior for 3 years now. It means just 2 more years. When the school suggested the special needs school, I think they believe there's nothing else they can do for me.

Yes, just two more years, or even five. I can handle that...

And that's what they are suggesting right now, to ship him off to a special school where there's no provision for his giftedness. I think the situation will only worsen as he'll either go to sleep, or find something really creative, like a riot. He's done it before when he was really bored. Stand on the chair to lead a protest.
Ha ha! I like this way of describing things! Perhaps we've got enough complains from the parents to consider moving DS up as well. He's gone through enough corporal punishment for this year because of the numerous complains from parents.

I'm going to try this out next week at the meeting with the school.

Yup - that isn't AS - that's PG! DS, at 8, organized a sit down strike on the playground of a summer program that he felt cheated of learning by. It's so embarassing to me. Yet now that DS has learned to 'be cool' and not expect anything of school, how I wish for those earlier times! Maybe the current placement will raise my son's expectations of what school will be.

I used to tell the school - if idle hands are the devil's playground, than an idle mind must be a whole 6 Flags amusement park! No, that didn't actually work, we had to switch to a private school to get the gradeskip, and but he did get to keep it when we switched back to public. And we did reverse it this year when we figured out that high school grades are all about 'following directions' and DS really needed an extra year of maturity to even be able to figure out what the directions were.

It's all about flexibility. There is no magic answer sheet for our kids. It's just try and see, try something else and see, try not to overcorrect when something is actually working pretty well.

love and more love,
Grinity

Another question: Is it possible that my son is just mildly gifted child but managed to be tested PG? Can there be a mistake or is there a flynn effect and that children are getting higher and higher scores on the WISC IV? If tested PG, what kind of percentile are we looking at? 99.999... or something else? One in a ____ (thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand, million?). PG probably means very bright, so how often does a gifted education teacher meet with a PG student? One a year, or one every decade or a few a year?

An expert, which I'm not, will be along shortly, but I reckon:

- Really mildly gifted: Not likely. WISCIV test scores are not as stable as people sometimes think, but at the very least, your DS has on one occasion demonstrated the ability to answer extremely well. Suppose he were retested and tested 20 points lower (it does happen). What would that tell you? It wouldn't tell you he'd guessed the first time round - it would tell you that for some reason his performance was uneven. You'd still have these issues.

- Mistake: not likely, given that he has similarly high scores in several indices. If you have the raw scores I'm sure someone will check the calculation for you!

- Flynn effect: the Flynn effect is real, but the WISCIV is a current test, so you don't need to worry about the Flynn effect here. (In fact the Flynn effect may not apply to the upper tail of the curve in the same way that it applies to the middle, anyway; I remember it being suggested that it didn't, but I don't know what the state of knowledge is.)

- The WISCIV is based on a standard deviation of 15, so your DS is more than 3.5 DSs above the mean. Based on a normal curve that means at least that he's above the 99.9th percentile; but in fact, he's higher than that and the IQ distribution is fat-tailed (there are many more children with very high IQ scores than would be predicted from the normal curve - but it's still very rare, don't get me wrong!) so I don't know exactly. Anyway, "1 in 1000" is a conservative estimate I guess. You certainly can't assume that a teacher, even a gifted teacher, has ever known a child at that level well. (Let alone one at that level who also has AS!)

If you haven't already found Hoagies you may find it useful, e.g.
http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/highly_profoundly.htm

Thanks for the information. Here are the breakdown. I'm curious if DS could be mistaken PG. I sat through the test, there was no lucky guess. He either knew the answers and answered them correctly, did not want to attempt, or did not know the answers.

Similarities 18 (did not want to attempt 2 simpler questions before the last question, but answered the last question correctly - did he hit the ceiling?)
Vocabulary 16
Information 18 (cannot answer last question)

Block Design 16
Matrix Reasoning 17
Picture Completion 16
GAI = 154

Digital Span 19 (answered all questions in the test correctly - hit the ceiling?)
Arithmetic 19 (answered all questions in the test correctly -hit the ceiling)

Coding 11
Symbol Search 14
FSIQ = Not interpretable

The psychologist had to do three additional subtests on a separate day because on the first test day, DS had a problem with his vision and did not want to attempt most of the questions when we did the first 10 tests. I did not know he had a problem until the psychologist pointed that out to me.

It is a hard call for me. The gifted teachers say they cannot handle his AS, because they have never met anyone like him in their 25 years of gifted education (50 students per intake). I'm just wondering how the autism/special needs teachers can handle him, if he is PG. If I send him to the special needs school, will they be telling me they cannot handle his PG because they would not have met anyone like him in their practice? Even if PG is one in 1000, it will be highly unlikely an autism class teacher would have met a child like him. That's why I wonder if the diagnosis of PG or AS could be a mistake.

This does not necessarily mean the diagnosis is a mistake, only that your child is a rare bird. (Like mine, gifted/AS.)

Think about the length of any one teacher's career. If they have a class of 30 each year, they might see 900 kids in 30 years of teaching. It's a significant slice of humanity, so they start to feel they've seen it all. AS kids are often bright, but the AS/gifted combo of the type my kid has is perhaps 1 in 10,000 kids. I can't be surprised that he seems odd to them, and that they don't know what to do.

You are right that the special needs school is unlikely to have seen one like yours. The regular school too. A gifted school likewise. The odds are against it.

I think you should approach this not theoretically, but practically. Go talk to the special needs school about your child. See what they could do. Watch what they do. See what kind of kids are there, what kind of peers he'd have. Some schools like that are terrific about accelerating (if everybody's needs are unique, stands to reason that they'd be equipped to think outside the box); some just don't.

There is an argument to be made for doing everything you can to remediate the AS now, before he's a teen; once he's recalcitrant it gets much, much harder. In your shoes I would choose private behavior therapy (ABA, CBT) and really work on problem behaviors as intensively as can be managed. Giftedness, in our experience, doesn't go away, but problem behaviors stay until they're resolved. You could choose to remediate the problem behaviors now, negotiating the best academic content you can for the moment but prioritizing good social functioning, and get him back into the gifted program again once he's operating in a more socially acceptable way.

The other option, of course, is to request training for the gifted teachers and support in the gifted classroom so they would know how to deal with him. You can make a Least Restrictive Environment argument; kids are supposed to be kept in the regular classroom if at all possible, even if it means adding staff or therapeutic support. However, if the gifted teachers don't want to help-- if they already want him gone-- this will be tough to do, because turning attitudes around is hard.

DeeDee