Tuesday, February 10, 2009

I Knew He Was Exceptional!

Benjamin just completed a second series of tests to determine his speech delays, if any. He did the tests in Swedish, and came out at well below his age level on passive and active vocabulary. Somehow, he didn't know words like swamp (trask) and rodent (gnagare) in Swedish, but had no trouble in English - in part thanks to movies like Shrek (swamp) and Alvin and the Chipmunks (rodent). But he sailed through the test in English, actually coming out above age level - 8 on one test and 9.1 on the other, despite being only 7.6.

But the really awesome news (I'm trying to be positive) was on the second series of tests, where he managed to fail so spectacularly that he is barely on the scale. I always knew he was "off the scale" creatively speaking, but to manage to be in the 1st percentile on the test of grammatical completion really says something. That means that 99% of the kids doing this test managed to do better than him. 99%. Ouch.

"His low score appeared to be influenced by his use of his own fantasy in completing statements rather than answering according to reason and given information..."

So in other words, he didn't bother answering any of the questions... just let his fantasy take flight. I can see that. In fact, I see it every morning when we try to get out the door to school... His creative writing teacher will be thrilled, though getting to that point may take some work...

Where to go from here? Well, the tests seem to do a good job of identifying problems, but we will have to see what resources we can muster to curb the creativity enough to get to the point where it will be appreciated.

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