Because a mind is a terible thing to waste..

And by the way he loves to read your blog……

Trust me, this thing you’re talking about here doesn’t just happen with autistic people. I’m not autistic as far as I know (at least, have never been diagnosed as such). However, I AM fairly severely visually-impaired (20/200 if that helps). I was also born 3 months prematurely.

Unfortunately, (as is pretty typical) my family and school didn’t know what to do — how to handle my situation. According to my mom, I jumped completely over the “single word” stage of language-aquisition, directly to complete sentences. None of this “me want moo” to ask for milk, from ME. That happened again when I learned to read — jumped from “learning my ABC’s” to reading at an eleventh-grade level within about three months….it was actually quite peculiar, according to everybody around me. (Maybe I’m “hyperlexic” I dunno.)

Anyway, this caused my academic performance to be really “lopsided” in school: I would basically top out language/comprehension/general knowledge tests, but (and this is important to note, here) performed AT GRADE LEVEL in mathetmatics when I was in First Grade.

Now, normally, you’d think that “average” performance wouldn’t be a problem, right? Wrong. Coupled with my “exceptional” ability in language/reading AND my severe visual-impairment, the “Powers that Be” came to the conclusion that I must be “learning disabled” in mathetmatics. (See, according to them, it HAD to be a “learning disability”, because if it wasn’t, I would have performed at the ‘exceptional’ level both in math AND in reading. Doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to me, even now.)

So my whole educational experience consisted of being in “gifted” programs because of the reading, being in “remedial” (mis)education for the math, and getting really half-assed mobility training and stuff like that for the visual impairment. So, understandably, even though I am a furious autodidact (I self-teach myself agressively every chance I get), there’s still a lot of residual bitterness and a general “lopsidedness” to my knowledge-base. Thanks, public “education!”

Anyway, my main point has to do with another “exceptional” skill that I’ve always exhibited:

When I was a kid, my “fine motor skills” (as they classified it on my IEP) were rather poor. They taught me to type before they taught me handwriting, and even now, I type at about 125 WPM, and my handwriting sucks. Oddly enough, they were also “suprised” by the fact that I’ve always been extremely quick at picking up musical instruments. If it’s a stringed-instrument, I can pretty well learn the rudiments of it inside of a week. Guitar, banjo, mandolin, bass, some limited tinkering with violin, etc…won contests and all that. Been in a music group that I founded back in 1991, and had radio/tv airplay, etc.

But my point is: people STILL become peculiar over the fact that I read (and retain) better than most “speed-readers”, or that I can figure out musical instruments really easily, or similar, but have really bad handwriting. I dunno what it is….why they expect that my particular “skill-set” (which is always changing anyway), would neccesarily resemble that of a so-called “normal” person.

My Mom used to be particularly bad about this: when I began to become skilled at the music thing, and started to do gigs/get intetviewed about it (back wien I was, like, twelve or so), she’d always have to bring up the supposed paradox of my “poor motor skills” and/or that I was a “miracle baby”. It could NEVER be about “He did something really well” with her — it was always “he does really well for an (insert-catagory-here) person.

So, in the circles I traverse, I’ve always been somewhat of a “token.”

She’s NT (or non-autistic, anyway), BTW. Looking non-American and speaking with an accent even seems enough to get the “idiot” part of that idiot-savant dynamic going in people’s heads.

Boy, Does THAT sound familiar!
I’m not autistic (at least I’ve never been diagnosed that way.) My “Problem” was that I was born 3 months prematurely. Due to “retinopathy of prematurity”, I am fairly severely visually-impaired. Problem with this is, I also taught myself to read when I was three, and was testing out at “adult levels” in reading/comprehension by the time I entered first grade.
I can also play damn near any musical instrument I come across — I just understand music and recording equipment and stuff in a way that tends to freak people out. My problem is that every time I did something well (like the music, for example, or writing articulately, or reading “above my grade level” or etc.), it could NEVER just be about how I did something well — it was always about how I was a “miracle baby” and/or “beat the odds”, etc…

Likewise, whenever I did something clumsily and/or didn’t pick up on it as fast as they thought I “should”, I was either just being lazy/milking my visual impairment, or just fundamentally incapable of learning it because I was “special.”

So it’s not just autistic people who deal with that shit.

I have a cousin whose child is autistic yet he is a genius. I will never call him an idiot savant..because he is not an idiot. He is hyper sensative to the negativity of the human condition and the environment it creates. That is all.

Just my opinion.

Sincerely,
Dena

Although I think you can say the same sort of thing without being discriminatory. For example, when a 6 year old solves a grade 6 level math problem, that kid is good at math *for a six year old*. An adult doing the same thing would not be an indication of high math ability, the way it is for a six year old.
But often a group is stereotyped as less able than they are, or having less variation in ability, or both. When I think of really good authors (in my opinion) I think of Emily Rodda, Garth Nix and Tamora Pierce. All three of them are very different authors, all three are authors I consider good. And two of them are women. And I can think of things in each author’s writing I don’t like. That just means I don’t consider them perfect, not that I don’t consider them good.

Going back to the earlier topic of writing: regarding the whole “you’re so amazing” thing, it’s like how if a woman writes something, she’s ‘a woman writer,’ not just a writer, and everything she does is interpreted as having something to do with her gender. “This is good (name of genre) writing, for a *woman.*” Because it’s assumed that ‘normal’ women ordinarily write only silly romantic fluff or something, and so what might be considered only average for a male writer in a certain genre is hailed as an amazing achievement coming from a woman. Women are supposed to write things that only other women are interested in reading, “chick lit” and the like, so when a novel by a woman appeals to men and boys, everyone acts like it’s incredible.

Something I also get very tired of, re ability, is the assumption that everyone who has a certain ability X must naturally have another ability Y, that it follows as some sort of logical consequence, and the incredulous reactions when you try to tell people you can do X but not Y (or can’t do Y well, or can only do it under certain circumstances), and the disbelief. “Well, I’m sure you really can do Y– you just must not want to/don’t believe in yourself.” (The “just doesn’t want to/lacks self-confidence” idea is one that has cropped up repeatedly in others’ assumptions about me, throughout my life.) “It’s unbelievable that someone as good as X at you couldn’t do Y, so I’m going to assume that you’re trying to manipulate me by claiming you can’t do Y and trying to get out of doing the things you need to do.” (This has happened even when I just asked for *help* with doing Y, not to get out of being asked to do it.) Or they keep conveniently “forgetting” that I can’t do or am not good at Y, again and again, and acting surprised or irritated when I ask for help, as if being helped once should have taught me how to do it for all time.

I don’t blame people for not knowing that it’s possible to have X without Y until told otherwise. I do blame them for deliberately disbelieving or finding ways to ignore it once they’ve been told.