A mental calculator

Jedediah Buxton, a mental calculator. Etching after Mary Hartley.
Credit: Jedediah Buxton, a mental calculator. Etching after Mary Hartley. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

If you can put aside for a moment what a pediatrician or other neurotypicals have to so about your child, what if they are wrong? What if we’ve been using the wrong tests to quantify intelligence in children with a learning disability? Your child’s not less-than, but different. Your expectations for your child may change over time. They might include marriage, children, self-sufficiency. And they might not. But I guarantee you, if we let the world set expectations for our children, they’ll start low… And they’ll stay there. Maybe your child’s capable of much more than we know. And maybe, just maybe, your child doesn’t understand how to tell us. Or… we haven’t yet learned how to listen.

The Accountant (2016)