I'll bet you got some weird looks, acs! LOL!
As for this:
I think our biggest challenges will come when he has to learn about the things that he's not interested in. If it's something he wants to learn about: no problem. He'll master the subject quickly. But if he becomes disinterested--like he has been lately with math--forgetaboutit.
I'm someone who has always cycled through obsessions, just as my son does--something I hadn't really been aware of until DH and I were discussing DS's obsessions and DH pointed out that I do it, too.
What I've realized as I've thought about it lately is that for those of us who have serial obsessions, the more we learn, the more interested in things that *aren't* our obsessions we become.
Here's my analogy: the things you already know form "pegs" in your brain. From these pegs you hang new knowledge like strings. At first, you only have enough pegs for your obsession because the pegs are pushed tightly together all in one spot in your brain. There's no place for anything else to fit. But as you rotate through obsessions and pick up other bits and pieces of learning along the way, more pegs develop in other places in your brain. And pretty soon there are lots of pegs in clumps all over, so you can start weaving all the knowledge you gather into a much more complex way than you otherwise might have because you have more pegs in a more solid pattern. You can see the big picture in a way that you couldn't have if you hadn't focused so narrowly at first.
I think as a result of this, a serial obsessive can suddenly switch over and become a generalist, suddenly interested in everything.
It happened to me sometime in college. I went from being very focused on my obsession and nothing else to being fascinated by everything. Choosing classes was nigh unto impossible because all of a sudden I wanted to take everything!
I still have my obsessions, though I rotate through them much less frequently than my son does. But I'm not the "novels only, please" person that I used to be. One of the reasons I didn't write my dissertation was because I couldn't persuade my committee to let me write about everything from 18th C. American lit to 19th C. British lit for boys, to contemporary South African lit by a Nobel Prize winner! They wanted me to pick a period and stay there, but I saw all these connections that I wanted to explore.
I don't know if I'm making sense. I guess what I'm saying is that it will probably be a slog for a while to get your DS to learn stuff he doesn't care about, JBD, but I'd bet he'll get over it. There's too much cool stuff in the world to learn about, and I suspect he'll figure that out pretty quickly.
