Interesting. But what about comedic intelligence. Would that fall under linguistic intelligence? Several people, adults and children, have told my son that he should be a comedian. A gifted friend who is my son's age said this a few days ago when we had dinner with him and his mother. But I have known quite a few people who seemed linguistically gifted but lacked the ability that my son has to make up jokes to fit any situation, even very difficult situations. When bad stuff happens, like when my mother couldn't remember my name for the first time even though we visit every day, he verbally pretends to be writing a combination soap opera/sitcom/parody of our life that he calls "Unhappy Days." I can be close to tears because of things that are very sad and depressing before he tells me the latest episode of Unhappy Days, but then I laugh so hard that I cry anyway. The more depressed I am, the funnier he gets.
He jokes about his mild disability. Instead of finding it irritating when someone pointed us to the special needs dressing room at the YMCA a few years ago because they saw him in homeschool PE, he can joke about it. When he is sitting down and people hear him talking, they think he is really smart and make comments about it, but when he tries to do physical things he somehow loses IQ points in the minds of some people.
My son knows about multiple intelligences. His dad, who works for a university, is in charge of training for his office, so we got to listen in on a training conference where they discussed using different teaching methods because of different learning styles and different intelligences. My son whispered "We already know this--are they just now learning it?"
Some teachers in our small town public school act like they still don't know anything about different intelligences and I don't think they really understand how a child can be twice exceptional.
My son's friend asked him again why he doesn't go back to public school and my son made up a funny story about his difficulty with getting up early in the morning. He finds this easier than telling him the real reason.
I have thought about asking my artist uncle to give my son drawing lessons so that he could possibly advance from being several years behind in drawing ability to maybe one year behind in drawing ability, but he chooses to work on skills that he has a reasonable chance of doing well. He admires the artistic work of others and he likes to learn about their work, but he says he doesn't want to be take drawing lessons when he doesn't have the natural ability in this area. I think he is self conscious about his drawing ability and he will only draw stick figures for people. I think his uncle would be a good teacher since he is family. And he keeps trying to talk me into buying him something called Flash because he is interested in doing animation and games and I think he needs to be able to draw for this.
