I’m changing zones here on the blog this week because I felt this was something worth not only photographing but sharing for other parents who may be dealing with some of the same issues. I have shared Wyatt’s diagnosis with y’all, but I haven’t gone into detail about where He currently stands on the spectrum or what the specifics of that diagnosis are. His teachers, therapists, and I all had such an AHA! moment, and it brought so much relief to all of us that I felt it required sharing.
( I am prefacing this by saying I am not a doctor, I am not a therapist, I am just a mom who spends a great deal of time educating herself and working with as many specialists as possible to do everything I can not only for my own child, but as many others as I can help as possible. So this is not a medical diagnosis, it is simply something we have discovered on our own personal journey.)
Ever heard of the term “Eidetic Memory”? If you haven’t, thats ok, I hadn’t really until the last couple of weeks either. What is it?
“Eidetic memory is the ability to recall images in great detail for several minutes. It is found in early childhood (between 2% and 10% of that age group) and is unconnected with the person’s intelligence level. Like other memories, they are often subject to unintended alterations. The ability usually begins to fade after the age of six years, perhaps as growing verbal skills alter the memory process”
No it isn’t “photographic memory”. This is different. It is similar I guess, but different, more limited, and it’s something people usually grow out of. It is also something that is, according to a great deal of research studies, more common in children and those on the spectrum. Some people say it doesn’t even technically exist and that’s fine, but it’s the term I am going to use for what we are dealing with. 🙂
Since starting 3rd grade in August, school has been incredibly challenging for Wyatt. Heart-breakingly so. Anybody that knows him knows he’s smart, he’s kind, he’s a hard worker. He isn’t a lazy kid at all and he does his best at everything. However, he was failing or nearly failing almost every single one of his tests, and he was redoing a great deal of his in class work at home. Especially anything that required writing or answering questions in written form. This meant a full school day, hours of therapy, and then MORE hours of homework every night. HOWEVER, when I would ask him questions about the topics on the tests or papers that he had just failed, he could spout off facts and definitions to me like an expert. Things just weren’t adding up. We thought maybe he didn’t have enough time, so he received a time accommodation. No change. We thought it was because of his struggle with handwriting, so we made an accommodation that he could write everything in cursive (his brain somehow mastered cursive and not printing). That didn’t work. We thought He was just giving up or overwhelmed, so his teacher gave him more one-on-one instruction and I bribed him with trips to Harry Potter World for good grades. I was probably a little harder on him than I should have been. That didn’t work. His therapist suspected some form of dyslexia, so we got referred for testing for that. We were trying everything. I have been at my wits end trying to find a solution. I hate seeing him lose precious hours of childhood to school work like that.
SO…… we discovered something HUGE this week. In the midst of my pure frustration and going over more failed work, Wyatt’s pivotal response therapist had a lightbulb moment and we began doing little tests to see if her hunch was correct. He brought home a failed science test. Science is his thing. He loves it. His homework that he does with me is spot on most of the time and he spouts science facts to me almost as often as he rambles off math equations (he does math in his head freakishly fast). His therapist sat him in a chair and looked at him and asked him the same questions that were on his science test that he had given some random unrelated answer to on his test paper. Not only did he answer them, but he answered them VERBATIM with the exact words/answers in his science book. Every single word, sometimes up to half a page worth of information. As if he was sitting there reading it. Except the science book was back at school and he hadn’t looked at it in 5 days. That is eidetic memory. If you go by Temple Grandins theory of three types of autistic thinkers, Wyatt is most definitely the visual type. We recorded him speaking his answers, had him transcribe his answers onto paper and took them to his teacher. When he looked at it his face was about as shocked as mine had been. It all finally made sense. I said “Wyatt, in your head, can you pull up the page of your science book about mineral hardness and tell me what the mohs scale is?” 5 seconds later, he was rambling off definitions and explanations. He is literally seeing images of his school book pages in his head. It’s just that his brain can’t translate that to written words the way he can speak it. When he gets his pencil to paper there is a disconnect and things get jumbled and reversed or entirely lost.
How did we not see this before? Well according to Wyatt, he assumed everybody saw things that way. I guess that makes sense. It just never occurred to him to tell me that’s how he was memorizing things. He just didn’t know any different and well, us mere mortal adults never thought to ask “Hey Wy, can you see detailed pictures in your mind when recalling things?”
So what does this mean? It means that effective immediately. Wyatt gets to take all of his tests verbally from now on until we figure out how to solve the disconnect that is happening when getting the answers to paper. It means we change the way we do homework and he won’t be redoing 2 hrs per night anymore. It means that I may just be paying for trips to Harry Potter World after all, and it means we finally get some “be a kid and play time” back that we have been losing.
We are so blessed to have such a team of people that work with him in order to figure out these things. In most any public school he would be tossed into special ed classes or fail. So grateful that his teacher has found so many ways to take the #Wyattisms and magnify the strengths of them.
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