Get this term: “multiple exceptionalities”. Try to remember it long enough to research it on the internet, and you will find it refers to people who are gifted and disabled at the same time. In the context of underachieving children, the expression describes intellectual gifts that are masked by specific disabilities, or difficulties which a child uses his or her extra abilities to overcome.
Either way, neither the disability nor the gift is correctly targeted by the school. This mean that a bright child, assessed as average or below average, can become extremely frustrated.
Perhaps I should count myself lucky that in our case this frustration has spilled over into challenging behaviour, so that we have all been forced to ask ourselves why an obviously clever child is consistently underperforming. Hard as they have been to live with, the moodiness, lack of co-operation and propensity to needle others might be interpreted as a healthy cry for help.
Papers on the subject of multiple (or dual) exceptionalities describe cases where a physical disability, like poor sight or hearing, is masked by a child’s superior ability to cope. They also say the situation can be far more subtle than that: high ability coupled with behavioural problems, or with poor motor skills that make it hard to write. Children displaying these often get no help because even when they are spotted, they are impossible to pigeonhole. In today’s UK educational parlance, they belong to the “gifted and talented” and to the “special needs”.
Look more closely at the exceptionalities literature and you might even find yourself described somewhere. People may argue that the term applies to “too small a population to merit concern”. But the more I read, the more I think it describes vast numbers of us who experienced problems at school.
Our compulsory western school system, of which we should be so proud, has failed us by becoming a universal machine that cannot accomodate the extremes. In its on-size-fits-all environment, the task of addressing some children’s problems while encouraging their extra skills can be lost in the scramble for league-table ratings. Officially sanctioned efforts to remedy this, in the form of specialist help, have to be fought for instead of being available as of right.
But children just do not come neatly trussed and packaged, waiting only for a school to anoint them with the balm of standard education in order to grow and flourish. They develop in fits and starts and even those with no serious problems at home may display extremes of ability and behaviour. There is no better argument than this for treating them as what they are: individuals.
