by Galen Gregory

Created on: March 12, 2009

Jason is the apple of his parents' eyes. What a precocious 3 year old he was! He could spell his first and last name out loud, repeat every nursery rhyme word for word, and use the most sophisticated phrases when he was talking. Now his mom did wonder at times why he couldn't seem to get his shirt on right or why he always bumped into the wall or why his younger sister could work puzzles when Jason couldn't get one piece to fit right. But he was obviously a bright little boy, so she dismissed her concerns.

Then Jason entered school. Deep down, his parents expected glowing reports from his teachers, since they had always thought of their son as gifted because of his amazing verbal skills. But they began to dread conferences with the teacher, because it was always something. In kindergarten and first grade, his attempts at writing the letters looked like random marks on the paper. On the wall outside the classroom door, where all the children's cut-and-glue artwork was displayed, Jason's parents could always pick his project out: it was the one that looked as if it had been chopped and hacked with a butter knife, rather than cut with scissors. He avoided the art center, the block center, the home living center; he just seemed to want to talk incessantly to the teacher. His teacher complained that Jason couldn't be sent by himself to the nurse's office or the library, because he always got lost. She reported with slightly veiled annoyance that he reacted with a "meltdown" any time there was a change in the schedule or a substitute teacher. But Jason's reading was coming along nicely, so his parents just figured that the other things would fall into place eventually.

But as Jason moved into the older elementary grades, things only seemed to get worse. Yes, he could read quite well, but he didn't seem to understand anything he had read. He could do the basic math computations, at least when he got the numbers lined up right on his paper, but he just couldn't figure out those pesky word problems. He got a lot of zeroes, because he never turned in many assignments. The ones he did turn in were barely legible. In various activities, he could repeat many facts about the subject, but he never seemed to understand the big picture, the main idea, a cause and effect relationship; it was like he couldn't see the forest for the trees. And, as for friends, well, he just didn't have any. When he was with other kids at school, he invaded their space and was constantly interrupting

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