It Started with Rainman…

I promised I would write about twice exceptional students. And I will. A lot. But this is not really that post. This post just tells you about my first introduction to twice exceptional students — long before I even knew they were a thing.

It started with Rainman. If you don’t know the movie, it starred Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise, and it won four Academy Awards in 1989. In the movie, Charlie Babbitt (Cruise) discovers, after his father’s death, that he has an adult brother named Raymond (Rainman). As it turns out, Raymond is an autistic savant: an incredibly brilliant mind trapped inside the need for rigid routine and anxiety — who was living in a mental institution. Regardless of his ability to perform complex calculations in his head and retain a ridiculous amount of facts and trivia (he was a Jeopardy whiz on his couch), Raymond was unfit to care for himself or survive the pressures of society . His obsessive compulsive behaviors and his acute anxiety prohibited him from living outside the confines of a mental institution.

Raymond’s story was an extreme case (and obviously full of Hollywood). Still, though I was only a year into teaching when the movie was released, he reminded me of a student I had worked with. We’ll call her Aubree. She, too, had been institutionalized. I worked with her while teaching summer school at a lock-down detention facility for troubled girls. Many of the students in my class had been sentenced to years of incarceration for assault, armed robbery, even murder. This girl was no exception — she was serving a sentence for aggravated assault as well. But she was different from the others. She was quiet and, though I didn’t know it at first, she was very smart.

She was also non-verbal. In other words, she didn’t speak. As I recall, she was about 14 or 15 that summer — they didn’t group the girls by age or grade, just by “elementary” or “high school”. She was in my high school class, but she was one of the younger girls. I had given a journal assignment at the beginning of the period, and I noticed that she wasn’t writing. I asked her why, but she didn’t answer.

“She don’t talk,” one of her classmates offered.

“Not ever?” I asked.

“I ain’t never heard her,” the girl returned.

“Well, do you write?” I asked — looking at her, but willing to take an answer from anyone.

“She don’t have no pencil,” her neighbor replied.

So I gave Aubree a pencil and asked her to respond to the prompt. Instead, she stabbed the pencil through her hand so that it bled — badly. I had to call for a guard to take her to the infirmary.

A couple of days later she returned to class — with a bandage over the stitch in her hand.

Determined not to be intimidated by her violent act, I stopped her at the door and asked if she planned to participate. I told her she didn’t have to talk, but I needed her to write.

“I don’t care if you spell words correctly or if the sentences are complete. I just want you to write down your ideas like you hear them in your head. It doesn’t matter what you write, but please write something.”

Day 1 she wrote “Something.”

So I wrote back: “You stuck a pencil through your hand when you were angry. I think you have more to say than that.”

Day 2 she wrote “I have a lot to say, but I don’t think you can handle it.”

So I wrote back: “Try me.”

By day 10, this young lady was writing silver-tongued prose, describing a horrific childhood in a violent home. Her words painted powerful and genuinely painful images of physical and emotional abuse — so vividly that I felt abused after reading it.

Let me clarify — I did not teach this student how to write. She was already an excellent writer. Her ability seemed almost innate. Nor do I know if everything she wrote were true. It may have been. Maybe not. Good writers embellish, but fact can be freakier than fiction. It’s hard to know and it didn’t matter. Because we were in a lock-in facility, she was safe. As a rule, I had to report what she shared, but, as a rule, I received no follow-up reports of the validity of her stories or what action (if any) was taken.

What was impactful to me though, beyond the truth or fiction of her nightmarish tales, was the fact that she was such a good writer — by all measurements, a gifted writer. And she was in jail. And she had been willing to keep her words — her masterfully expressive words — to herself. I was a very new teacher — in fact, that day when she had stabbed herself was my first day in a classroom outside of student teaching. (Welcome to your new career.) This was a disconnect for me. At that time, in my world, gifted students were extraordinary students. They were excited about their brilliance and ready to share — even show off — to the rest of the world. This young lady wrote well beyond her years, but she was anything but a good student. After the first week of class, she diligently wrote in her journal every day, but she would never turn in a test or a quiz, she would never speak in class, she would never complete a worksheet on anything.

Her story was very different from the story of Rainman. Hiis autism — not his crimes or his violent childhood — kept him in a prison. Yet, their stories were the same, too. Both were incredibly brilliant, yet neither were fit to live among the free.

I couldn’t help but wonder if anything could have changed that.

1988 — the year I saw Rainman — marks the year that I realized that our most gifted students are rarely our best behaved students or our most achieved students. It was the year I accepted that, while some students don’t do the work because they can’t, there are many, very capable students, who just won’t. Moreover, some of those students who “won’t” are our best and brightest. Gifted students may, like Rainman, be suffering from a secondary exceptionality like autism or Asperger’s or dyslexia, or, like Aubree, may be suffering from trauma or other emotional disorders. Years later, I would learn that these gifted students who experience inherent roadblocks to their learning are classified as “twice exceptional” learners. Along with second language learners, they are the least likely students to be identified as gifted. As a result, these students tend to get left behind, falling off the radar as exceptional thinkers and generally dropping out of school — either literally or figuratively. Some go on to achieve greatness without their education (think actor Robin Williams and Virgin mogul Richard Branson), but most do not. Some, like Aubree, spend a good amount of their life in jail; others may get a job that satisfies them and raise a family, while others live hand-to-mouth, paycheck to paycheck. It’s hard to know.

What we do know is that when extraordinarily gifted students don’t learn how to deal with their emotional demons (which, as part of their giftedness, are more intense than what others experience) or when gifted students have a secondary learning disability that isn’t addressed, those students often move to the fringe of society. They are more likely to abuse drugs, have unhealthy relationships, and feel dissatisfied with their lives as adults. We know many stories about people on the fringe — Broadway’s musical Assassins by Sondheim and Weidman, as well as Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart paint pictures of people who, disenfranchised by their communities, choose to wreak havoc on them as a result. While I don’t claim that planting more GT Centers all over the country or even training teachers to work with gifted populations in every school will eliminate tragedies perpetrated by dissatisfied learners, I do think we can do a better job of valuing all students where they are with what they need.

In my last post, I wrote about being “purple,” and I explained how gifted programs aren’t simply for “bright” students. We have MANY bright students in this country, and most schools — especially high schools — provide them with honors programs and AP courses and STEM classes, not to mention clubs and other activities. Many of the students in those classes and clubs are also classified as gifted, and sometimes these opportunities are fulfilling enough to allow them to reach their potential.

But what about those we lose along the way? The Raymonds and Aubrees? Is it possible that, if we identify those students earlier, we can provide interventions that support them enough that they may walk and work and flourish safely among the rest of us?

Effective centers focus less on achievement levels and more on learner profiles when placing students. The gifted student may not excel at everything, but she demonstrates above average intelligence, task commitment, and creativity. These qualities are the essential characteristics of the gifted child. We focus less on curriculum and more on passion. We determine strengths and build on them. For these students, the secret to academic success lays in allowing them to pursue what they love and giving them the freedom of creativity. But success for them also relies on learning something called “affective” skills. This includes learning how to manage their strong emotions like anxiety and depression, learning how to relate to others effectively, learning how to manage time and resources appropriately, and learning how to self-advocate. For whatever reason, these “common sense” skills evade many gifted students and must be taught.

We have many types of students in America, with needs too varied to count. I am not professing that schools will ever be able to fix all our ills — society is too complex. Furthermore, I am not suggesting that we abandon essential curriculum frameworks — all of our students need to be literate.

It turns out that (today) I’m not proposing anything. I’m telling a story — my story — of discovering the complexity of students. Of the stirring revelation that they don’t simply come in four sizes: special ed, under-achieving, general, and honors. Of the questions I had upon learning that “Autistic Savant” was an actual condition — wondering how I would work with such a student if I came upon him in my future. Of realizing that my job was more important and complicated than I had ever dreamed.

I don’t know what happened to Aubree. At the end of that summer, I moved to another state to start my career in earnest. Contact (outside of school) between teachers and students in detention centers was completely forbidden. Of course, I’ll always wonder — did her life get better when she got out of the detention facility? Or did she grow into an adult like those in her stories? Did she understand the value of her gift? Did she have any idea how to use her words to open doors and change not only her life, but the lives of others? Or did she lack the skills to navigate into the realm of a professional?

It’s impossible to know, but I guess I’d like to think she somehow became a famous writer one day, or even that she went to college and got work in advertising. I know the statistics aren’t in her favor, but I stay hopeful. She’s a middle aged woman now. Maybe I’ve read one of her books or seen one of her commercials. Anything is possible.

What Aubree and Rainman helped me understand is that every student — no matter how quirky or difficult or angry or stubborn — every student has a story that is much deeper than his or her behavior. And every child deserves access to both academic and affective skills instruction to prosper in this challenging world.