My 8yo son has a 139 verbal IQ but a performance IQ of 105. He is currently being thrown out of his third school in five years.
Problems include:
- low frustration tolerance,
- work refusal (particularly writing but also plain old worksheets),
- some meltdown behavior (outbursts, negative talk) when he feels threatened, pressured or "told what to do" (normal school directives)
- a tendency to rip up his work or scribble it out (sometimes to avoid doing it, sometimes if he doesn't like what he produced).
- some aggressive behaviors (throwing a set of keys at a smartboard, pushing a kid at recess)
When he feels appreciated/valued/heard he is an incredibly sweet kid full of creativity (he loves to build with paper, wood, legos, cardboard boxes... anything he can get his hands on). Loves to engage with other kids who are into fantasy play. He has a completely neurotypical little brother, 18 months younger (they are in the same grade, different schools) and they play together a lot.
READS. Would read 8+ hours a day if we let him. Interests span history (esp. WW II), science, technology (esp. apace and deep sea exploration), nature/natural world (esp microbiology) as well as kid classics (e.g. Dahl). His has a library of over 5k books. He loves to draw and fills notebooks with ideas, diagrams, sketches of inventions. He loves to show and explain them.
School has been a fail x 3 (Montessori, traditional public, small special needs class in a public setting) -- all fails. All because of work refusal and behavioral issues.
We think the best thing to do NOW is to place him in a private special needs school for autistic children (he's had an autism dx since age 4).
Developmentally he is not at a place where he can turn on and off his interests to complete on non-preferred work without support. With proper support, he absolutely can. When I work with him 1:1 I just have to make "deals" as in, "We can talk about CRISPR after you do 10 problems, OK?" and I'll make a mark on his page. I may need to say, "Keep going, you can do it" a few times, but the work gets down.
In the classroom, this doesn't happen so little work gets done. And if there is insistence (without little "deals") there can be a meltdown.
Our goal is to help him learn to better flow with the basic mechanics of a classroom (not to take having to do X "personally"), learn some social pragmatics (back and forth conversation/tempering monologs), turn-taking, rule following.
The problem is that the episodes of aggressiveness have caused him to be rejected from "2E" schools. So we may need to send him to a school that educates kids with a mix functioning levels (including verbal but low IQ). I just don't know - as he becomes a tween and teen - if this peer group is going to help him develop.
Any thoughts welcome. We're in NYC.
