Authorities Told Mom That Her Son Was Stupid

Interesting talk he gave - hints of the kid in him showing through the mind power. I like him. I might just take his advice now and again, too. Thanks for the share.

He does seem a little autistic. NOT an insult! I wonder how this would have changed if he weren't. It might have been more boring. And I never heard of autism explained that way. It makes PERFECT sense! Autistics, that people can understand, tend to hyperfocus, notice obscure stuff, and "not have executive function". That last part basically means that there isn't a good point at which they say "I have been doing this too long, I must do something ELSE"! In theory, they could do one thing seemingly forever, and then they WOULD seem pretty stupid.

But yeah, nice kid! It would be interesting to see what HE does when he "stops learning" at this point.

He got a nice writeup at TED also:

http://tedxteen.com/speakers-perform...-jacob-barnett

Steve

That was very inspiring, just goes to show what can happen when you don't do what everyone else is doing and think in your own unique perspective.

BTW I thought this video was funny, and it fits here!


Steve

I abhor labels. In our infinite wisdom we slap a label on someone because it makes them easier to manage. I watched this video thinking this kid comes across slightly different than other kids might, a little more intense maybe. But still, he's not nearly as "unusual" as Robin Williams, Jim Carey, Eddie Murphy, George Carlin or perhaps a dozen other high-energy people. Thank God not everyone is average or we'd still be communicating with smoke signals.

So called educators need to pigeonhole certain kids because the system as it stands isn't equipped to deal with them. So what do they do? For some they give them mind altering drugs to make them less of a bother. And for this strategy we, the taxpayers, give these knuckleheads billions and even trillions of dollars over the course of decades.

The result? Standardized test scores continue their downward trend. And to stay competitive in science and medicine the US needs to recruit academic talent from up and coming countries like Pakistan and China. Nice, huh?

When I was a kid I was an academic failure. I got mostly Ds and Fs. I was never held back because my reading skills were very high but I related to almost nothing going on in school. My father would go to the school and defend my performance saying that what they taught wasn't challenging enough. The teachers had no answers. Thankfully, now, the system is beginning to see that not all kids learn in the same way and they are making allowances for it. Still, we have a long way to go.

This kid was a true inspiration. God bless his parents for having the guts to take matters into their own hands. Humanity will be better off with this kid in the mainstream and not locked in some freak closet. The video actually made me a bit misty. Here's to being different.

Some geniuses had autism including Einstein and Newton which all of us are aware of. Children with autism mostly have high IQ and others as high as a genius. I learned some things about autism because of a special someone. What makes it very interesting is that it's hard to teach a child with this condition to follow instructions but he knows how to operate a computer and find his favorite game. Autistic children have something in common that should inspire us. They have the motivation in getting what they want and they have the initiative. You can't get them to listen to you and with more serious conditions, won't even speak to you but they learn on their own. They find ways on how to get what they want.

Thank you thunderbird, that was a very entertaining video.

I too like travlinguy abhor labels. When my son was in his early elementary years he had a problem with being a bit hyper and he also had a problem paying attention in class. One of his teachers suggested we put him on some mind altering drug. I don't even remember the name of the drug now. But she also recommended a doctor where we could get this drug. After discussing it with my wife - we decided that there was no way that we were going to subject him to any drugs. After all I've known many hyper kids through the years, and its a phase many kids go through. But seldom (and I mean very seldom) do you need drugs to cure it.

Anyways we later realized that the rate at which they were learning at school was just too slow for him and he was getting bored, so we enrolled him into higher level classes. It was an instant cure for him. He recently scored in the top 2% in the nation on his ACT and has been getting offers from colleges everywhere. And I still shudder at the thought of what might have happened to him had we decided to go with the drugs.

Um............
I don't care either way about labels - everything is labels - that's what words are. They're labels for a concept. It's not the labels that are messed up, it's the human connotation of the labels, don't change the word - change the concept of that word. Autism = has certain common characteristics, so we use the label to describe. It takes human subjectivity to make those characteristics negative or positive.

Pharmaceutical companies want us to think of Autism as a negative condition ..........that way they can sell drugs for it. It's not medically treatable, it's an altered central attention pattern. Autistics can concentrate on something longer at one time than almost any other person who isn't. That's not an illness, it's an altered pathway in the brain. You can't drug that out of a person, and considering how amazingly gifted some autistics are, I'm really not sure that we should try.