Other points:
- it’s not mutually exclusive with any other neurodivergence, in which case they’re “twice exceptional”;
- In an environment with unprepared people and professionals, they may be wrongly diagnosed as having some other neurodivergence.
- It’s not just a high IQ score;
- Gifted kids can be problem students and have low grades;
- Homework feels like torture (this is true to any child, tho);
- They’re very likely to question authorities and point out perceived hypocrisy (emphasis here on perceived, because pointing something and being right are different things);
- As kids, they may have weird quirks for executing tasks, such as wanting to hold pencils the “wrong” way, or wanting to press against a wall to do homework;
If you’re Brazilian or can understand Brazilian Portuguese, this is the podcast I listened to - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apnuIIePeeA
Aos brasileiros que acabarem encontrando esse post, o podcast que assisti é o que linkei acima
Honestly don’t know about the specifics to verify or checked the sources but on first blush it feels pretty correct.
My mental situation is such that I have a very strong memory recall and approach learning pretty voraciously. Around topics I enjoy I build a sort of mental map to compare and recall things creating a sort of landscape of understanding over a wide range of topics. I pick up a lot of fabrication based tasks quickly in part because I’ve realized that my imagination renders things in full three dimensions allowing me to imagine builds in stages and troubleshoot at the concept stage… which as I have come to understand it isn’t ubiquitous for most people and is tied into the form of dyslexia I have.
All in all though it’s a pretty isolating experience being this way. I chose a career that is non academic and a lot of people at some point or another imply that it’s a “waste” of my mind. Some people react to me as a threat, as though I am judging them or showing off or lying about my interests or must be exaggerating the things I demonstrate some small mastery over. Listening to those who have known me over a long period of time describe me to other people is often sobering. While it’s often flattering the impression is that I am sort of a sort of wonderous jack of all trades eccentric who operates on a different scale of time than other people.
To experience it from my perspective though, I have a sense generally of the line where most people are likely to absorb or remember things and know from people’s reactions exactly how much of a weirdo I come across as when I step past that boundry. Neurodivergance is a neutral term, it just boils down to “a different brain”. The more different one is generally the harder it is for other people to intuit your needs. My experience with teachers in school is that I could understand as a child that the system of reporting progress required me to do things that I found intolerable so that essentially the system could report metrics back to measure things in a systemic way. But that system wasn’t serving me what would have been personally tolerable by actually challenging me and also didn’t particularly care about me as a person. I figured out that most of that scorecard was meaningless while I was beholden to the system. A number of teachers realized I was imbibing the lessons I just wasn’t playing the game and their reactions to that were often pretty sympathetic.