There are no prodigies.
I met a "prodigious" child last night. She started reading numbers at 13 month. Today, at the age of 2, she can read anything you put in front of her. She loves reading road signs. That combined with her geographic memory, makes it easy for her to predict directions to a variety of places. Her reading abilities seem startling. But, that's not what I took away from spending time with her. Watching her provided me with evidence as clear as daylight that each of our brains; her's, yours, mine and that of every other being, are each unique and different. None is better than the other. They are each just different. That's all.
This little girl is learning differently from every other child and so is every other child. No child learns like any other. A recent article I read in Ode magazine says this well:
Instead of pretending that hidden away in a vault somewhere is a perfectly “normal” brain, to which all other brains must be compared (e.g., the rose psychiatrist’s brain (reference not relevant to this quote)), we need to admit that there is no standard brain, just as there is no standard flower, or standard cultural or racial group, and that, in fact, diversity among brains is just as wonderfully enriching as biodiversity and the diversity among cultures and races.
Most often, any conversation about brain differences is couched in the apologetic, almost desperate tone of finding redemption for those people that don't seem "normal". Its like we go around searching for an explanation that will make "abnormal" into being "okay" and "normal". That is the exact wrong way to consider this topic. And that's what the little girl taught me last night.
Her learning abilities will be as much a challenge for her as a child who might struggle with reading. As an educator, I would struggle teaching her as much as I would another child who doesn't read with ease. And, that's what it is with every child, every person. We are all just diferent. Not same, different. It just so happens, as the Ode article says, that some skills and abilities are more valued in the context of today's society. I have often said to my students that if I had been required to pass a music exam to finish high school, I might not have graduated. But there wasn't such a requirement and so I got lucky. I happened to fit into the "norm" of the day.
That's my point — I just got lucky and happened to fit the norm of the day. I am not better than someone else who can pass the music exam and not the reading test. I don't deserve more than someone else. I just got lucky that at the point in time when I was graduating from high school and college, society valued the skills that my brain managed to learn easily and well. I'd like to believe that we can create and live in a world in which luck and fitting in is not a dominant factor in determining the quality of treatment met out to people. That we can look beyond the need to be "normal" and recognize that all there is, is different.