My son watched the videos. He saw one of them not too long after the boy won the spelling bee and we read comments on teachers.net that made me wonder if we should reconsider trying out for our spelling bee. This came at a time when my son was talking about feeling that some people thought he was a "freak and a geek" in our sports obsessed town and he was beginning to realize that it was not just in our little piece of the world that people sometimes react negatively to extremely smart kids and think of them as "weird."
When my son was eight, my own sister who thought she had to be smarter because she has a college degree, seemed very irritated at a family dinner when my son knew something that she did not and said something that she disagreed with. My son was right and she was wrong. While he was sitting there she said he must have Asperger's because she had read an article in Time magazine and she thought it sounded like him. He calmly told her that he had read the same article and that he knew he had some similarities but that he did not have it. We told my sister that the doctor said he did not have it and she said the doctor must be wrong.
People have told me he must have Asperger's when they found out that he read at 2 and that he memorized things very quickly and he talked more like an adult. We never see anything on television about 2E kids like my son, so people try to classify him based on the few things they have seen or heard about gifted kids. The kids in the gifted classes at our public school are not doing some of the things at the levels my son did and then he had the sensory based motor issues on top of that so I can see why people might think my son has Asperger's. He is different from the normal gifted kids at our school. To me, he seems more articulate and verbal and at a higher mental age than the gifted kids his age that I have seen.
At one point he said he might just add Asperger's to the list of disorders that he tells people he has when trying to explain his differences, even though he knows that he does not have it, just to make things easier, because more people have heard of Asperger's and he has some similar issues. Most people have not heard of motor dyspraxia. He tries to laugh some of this off but I think it must bother him sometimes. In addition to "freak and a geek" he is now saying that he is a "sarcastic dyspraxic" and he was thinking of making up a little rap song to go along with it. I think his attitude about his disabiity and his ability to joke about it is one thing his friends like about him.
My son realized that he made some people uncomfortable with questions that were not easily answered or when he pointed out exceptions to the rules that he noticed. He has become a lot quieter since that realization. I feel sad about this, but like my son once told me, we have to deal with what is, not how it should be.
