From the time my son started talking, people were telling us how smart he was in front of him. One of his friends called him genius. Complete strangers would listen to him talk when he was younger and tell us he talked just like an adult. He could listen to the news and retell it better than I could and add a little bit of humor just for fun. One time we went to a museum restaurant and my son noticed that everyone around us had stopped talking and they were looking at him. They were watching him excitedly talk about what he had seen at the museum. When he realized they were looking at him, he stopped talking, looked at me, and said something like "Did someone call for prayer?" I think he was about seven then. I think it was around the time he really started noticing that he was different. He started referring to himself as a freak and a geek and an "un-normal-y/anomaly." I worried about this a little, but he told the developmental pediatrician and educational psychologist that he would rather have the disability and his intelligence than to be normal. I expected that his IQ would show the high verbal intelligence because his disability does not seem to affect him verbally.
He has a sensory processing disorder, hypotonia and motor dyspraxia. It makes him inconsistent in anything that requires visual motor integration--pencil and paper stuff, piano, even dancing. His disability makes him tire faster than the average kid and when you add the frequent migraines and sensitivity to pain, it is very difficult to predict how he will do on any kind of test that requires visual motor integration. I definitely think his 2E issues affected his IQ score.
A very gifted lady on another message board who has mild cp told me that she was tested over more than one session to get an accurate IQ score because of her fatigue and endurance issues. My son was tested over one long session and he was getting a headache. I asked the neuropsychologist about this and she said she didn't think it would make that much difference in the scores. I can't afford any more testing and I won't put my son through that again.
I don't need additional IQ testing to confirm that my son is a very gifted learner. There is no other way he could be reading and comprehending at a 12th grade level when he doesn't spend half the time on school work that public schooled kids do. He can't spend as much time on school type learning because he is working around pain and trying to tune out the discomfort of a scoliosis brace that normal kids describe as a torture device when he used to be sensitive to clothing tags. Despite having motor dyspraxia and fatigue issues he always managed to learn all the dances for musical theater class. He is able to compensate with a little bit of understanding from the musical theater teacher. She is a gifted choreographer and college student. She seems to really understand learning outside the box. She was one of the few people who understood why he needed to be homeschooled because she graduated from the same school that wanted to focus on my son's inability to color in the lines but offered no help or accommodation for his disability and no accommodation for the giftedness. She understood the effect of teachers who don't really care about students.
