My degree was in accounting, but I only worked as an accounting analyst for one year before being laid off. I also worked in finance and payroll, but my favorite job was my last one--an executive assistant for a developmental disabilities council. I loved that job because I got to meet a lot of wonderful people, many of whom had disabilities or were parents of children with developmental disabilities.
Now I homeschool my son who is twice exceptional and much smarter than I ever was but his dyspraxia causes difficulty with writing. While I relied heavily on my superior notetaking skills in school and at work, he has to learn to work around difficulties with writing so he relies more on his superior memory and he types most of his work. Math is more of a problem because typing won't solve this problem. He has to double check any numbers that he writes to make sure that 2 is really a 2 and not a backwards 5 and this slows him down. So far, he has been able to compensate by doing as much mental math as possible and writing only what is absolutely necessary to find the answer which totally goes against any "show your work" requirement. Aleks lets him move on if he gets the right answers and it doesn't matter so much how he got them.
The mother of two of my son's gifted friends is a special ed teacher. She is one of the few people who really gets that a child can be both gifted and have a disability. She also understands why I have to homeschool. I have noticed that my son really seems to enjoy talking to her. He also enjoys talking to his piano and voice teacher who used to do quiz bowl and debate. She encourages him in academics but she also understands that dyspraxia makes it harder for him to do some things in piano. I wish there were more people like them. Sensitive kids like my son need to feel accepted for their gifts as well as disabilities. I am hoping that his musical theater teacher will finally get that it is not okay to yell at kids or make unkind remarks when my son has a little more difficulty than the others learning difficult dance routines. He does learn them, he just has to work a lot harder than the others to do it and he will never be able to learn new dances at the last minute.
I wish I could educate our educators in my state's public schools and anyone else that works with kids about twice exceptional kids.
