The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius (27 page)

When all I could muster was a blank stare, Dr. Russell clarified his offer. Would we consider pulling Jake out of elementary school and sending him to college?

Part of me thought the whole thing was a prank. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see someone pop out from behind a bookshelf with a video camera. Yes, I had been convinced for a while that elementary school wasn’t necessarily the best place for Jake. And yes, Jake had been attending these college courses. Still, I thought of them more as a hobby, the way some kids are serious about ballet or gymnastics or soccer. To me, the time we spent at the university was simply a pastime, albeit an unusual one.

“You know he’s ten, right?” I couldn’t help asking.

Dr. Russell laughed. “Yes, we know very well how old he is.”

My mind was racing while Dr. Russell explained the application process to me. If we were interested, there was quite a bit to be done. First, Jake would need to have some formal testing, starting with an
evaluation of his current academic achievement. We’d need to be able to document that Jake was capable of sitting through a lecture without assistance, and we’d have to collect letters of reference from professors he’d already taken classes with.

I apologized to Dr. Russell for being dazed as he ushered me out of his office. There was a chair directly outside his door, and I sat down. I needed to think about how to break this to Michael.

The two of us had talked about pulling Jake out of elementary school before. Or, rather,
I’d
talked about it. Every time I saw how bored Jake was or noticed any signs of regressive behavior, I’d start talking to Michael about home-schooling Jake. Clearly, Jake wasn’t getting what he needed, and I felt that we owed it to him to explore other options. Didn’t it make more sense for him to learn during the day instead of staying up all night reading?

I can be a force when I feel strongly about something, and I didn’t marry a rubber-stamper. I’d seen plenty of couples argue over things such as which kind of plastic sandwich bags to buy. Michael and I never bickered unnecessarily about small stuff, but that isn’t to say we didn’t disagree. On the topic of school, Michael was adamant and unmovable. He prided himself on being able to give his kids the kind of childhood he’d dreamed about when he was young, and pulling Jake out of public school and home-schooling him wasn’t part of that vision. More specifically, he felt that Jake’s ability to make and keep friends would suffer. Jake was going to stay in elementary school, and that was that.

With every passing year, however, it became clearer that elementary school wasn’t an ideal environment for Jake. Still, I understood that Michael wasn’t ready to make a change. Now it looked as though we were going to have that conversation again.

It wasn’t as though I was wholly convinced myself. My knee-jerk reaction was to agree with Mike. Absolutely not, no way. This wasn’t just home-schooling; this was
college
. The idea of Jake attending university seemed ridiculous. The place where we live isn’t a college-driven area. Most people get married right out of high school, and the
majority of them go to work in a factory or in the automotive industry. Although Michael and I both went to college, we work in the service sector, as do most of our neighbors.

To add to my confusion, while I sat at a red light on the way home, I watched an aggressive shouting match between two homeless men, reminding me that I hadn’t yet considered how we’d make sure Jake would be safe. I couldn’t have my baby hanging around alone between classes on a downtown college campus.

But I couldn’t close the door completely on the possibility either. I had no intention of telling Jake about the opportunity yet. I knew that he’d snap at the chance to go to college. But Michael and I had to agree on the best course of action first.

That whole day, I went back and forth. When Michael came home that evening, the two of us sat under a blanket on our porch, watching the boys play with some of their friends in the playground across the street. Jake’s friend Luke was there. Luke’s a football kid, and the contrast in size between the two of them only reinforced how crazy it was to even consider Dr. Russell’s offer.

“It’s ridiculous, right?” I asked Mike.

“Completely. They’re insane. A ten-year-old does not go to college.”

I agreed. “Look at him. He’s not even as big as a regular ten-year-old. That kid can’t go to college.”

Of course, his size wasn’t the main issue; his social development was. How would he make friends? What would it mean for the friends he already had? And, most important, what would it mean for his childhood? The more I thought about the idea, the crazier it seemed. Yes, Jake was smart. But shouldn’t he have the chance to participate in all the usual high school activities? It’s one thing to skip one grade, but
seven
of them seemed extreme.

It might sound silly, but the idea that Jake wouldn’t have a prom was hard for me to accept. One of the bitterest pills I’d had to swallow when Jake was so lost in his autism was the realization that he might never find someone to love and support him, someone to share his life with, the way Michael and I had found each other. I knew from my
friends that having romantic relationships wasn’t always easy for autistic teenagers and young adults. (Not that it’s easy for neurotypical people either!) Since Jake had emerged from his isolation, I’d hoped that he would be able to find satisfaction in that part of his life, and for some reason I had a sentimental attachment to the idea of him going to the prom. I’d always imagined snapping a picture of Jake and his date (wearing the corsage he’d bought to match her special dress, of course) before they headed off to the dance.

Michael’s mind was made up: Jake should stay in elementary school. Part of me agreed with him, but at the same time I kept having a vision of Jake crammed into our bookshelf. I knew that auditing university classes had pulled him out of that space. I’d watched him on too many afternoons twiddling his pencil and staring out the window while the school friend he was helping labored mightily over a page of fractions. I couldn’t help contrasting that listless Jake with the dynamo who’d joust and parry with Dr. Pehl at the end of every astronomy class. Going to college at age ten wasn’t what other kids were doing, but Jake wasn’t like other kids.

I couldn’t accept that Michael and I were at cross-purposes. Folding socks while Jake did math sitting next to me in a pile of still-warm laundry, I wondered whether I felt so strongly because I spent more time with Jake than he did. Michael wasn’t there those afternoons when Jake was begging to learn algebra. He wasn’t at the university when Jake was making those professors’ jaws drop. Because of what I’d witnessed, I understood that our son was a scientist, while to Michael he was just a little boy.

We were never going to get out of this limbo without help. It was time to get an objective evaluation. So in August 2009, I took Jake in for a battery of achievement tests with Dr. Carl Hale, a neuropsychologist.

As usual, I went to the appointment with Jake, but I drastically underestimated how long the tests would take. In all, I sat in the empty waiting room for about four and a half hours, long after I’d finished the book I’d brought with me, as well as the magazine I’d found at the bottom of my bag.

Looking out the only window, I could see a gas station two long blocks away. A few hours in, I found myself staring at it wistfully, fantasizing about going over there to get a cup of coffee and another magazine. But I couldn’t leave. I didn’t know how much longer they were going to be, and I didn’t want Jake to come out to find me gone.

When he finally emerged, he looked like he’d had a grand time. Dr. Hale said that he would provide us with a formal report in about a week, but he was deeply impressed. Jake’s scores were off the charts, particularly in math and science.

Then Dr. Hale did a curious thing. He asked me about my own experience in the waiting room. I made a little joke about the padding on the chairs, but he was serious. He wanted to know what it had been like for me, waiting all those long hours in that empty room. When I finally admitted how bored and uncomfortable I’d been, he said something that changed my mind forever.

“Now you know what it’s like for Jake in a fifth-grade classroom. Being in regular school is like staring out a window, wishing your heart out for a cup of gas-station coffee. The worst decision you could possibly make is to keep your son in regular school. He is deeply bored, and if you keep him there, you will stifle every iota of creativity he has.”

I was horrified by the idea that Jake’s school days bore any resemblance to the mind-numbing hours I’d spent in that room. Instinctively, I knew that Dr. Hale was right, and I will always be grateful to him for having gone to such creative lengths to make his point. His waiting room wasn’t ordinarily so bare, but knowing that we were struggling with the question of whether to send Jake to college, he’d stripped it of magazines and other diversions before we arrived.

When Dr. Hale’s report arrived a week or two later, his recommendations were crystal clear. Jake had scored 170 on the Wechsler Fundamentals: Academic Skills achievement test, which measures broad skills in reading, spelling, and math. The normal range is between 90 and 109, superior between 110 and 124, and gifted between 125 and 130. Scores above 150 fall into the category of genius. Furthermore, Dr. Hale believed that Jake’s numerical operations score, which measured
his math computation skills, was probably higher than 170 but could not be measured due to “ceiling effects”: One hundred seventy points is as high as the test can go for a kid Jake’s age.

Dr. Hale’s conclusion: “It would
not
be in Jacob’s best interest to force him to complete academic work that he has already mastered. Rather, he needs to work at an instructional level, which is currently a post-college graduate level in mathematics, i.e. post master’s degree. In essence, his math skills are at the level found in someone who is working on a doctorate in math, physics, astronomy, or astrophysics.”

There it was, in black and white. This wasn’t my opinion, but an objective evaluation made by an expert. Jake belonged in college. (Actually, Dr. Hale seemed to be recommending that he proceed directly to graduate school, but this wasn’t the time to split hairs.) I took a deep breath and brought the report in to show Michael.

“
Not
in Jacob’s best interest. That’s bold
and
underlined,” Michael read aloud, his eyebrows raised. I nodded. He was still shaking his head, but there was a look of resignation on his face, and I knew that, thanks to Dr. Hale, the door had opened a crack.

After the report arrived, we finally told Jake about Dr. Russell’s offer. As we knew he would, he lit up like a Christmas tree and said, “Can I go to college? Please, Mom? Can I go to college?”

Michael was now open to a conversation, but he was far from convinced. I argued that going to college early couldn’t damage Jake’s chances for the future; it could only improve them. He was way ahead of his class, even in the elementary school’s gifted program. Even if Jake went to college and failed, if he didn’t learn a single thing or make a single friend, he could come right back and do junior high like everybody else. Ironically, the fact that Jake was so young also tipped the odds in his favor.

“I’m so far out of my comfort zone, I can’t even see it from here,” Michael grumbled. But he didn’t protest when Jake and I went ahead with an application to the university through SPAN.

F
rom that point on, everything accelerated. Once I really understood how bored Jake was, that we’d unknowingly put his brilliant, active, growing mind in a box too small to contain it, college seemed like the only option.

Convincing Michael had been a significant hurdle, but the application itself was another. Dr. Russell wanted to know that Jake was capable of sitting through a longish lecture without acting out. Jake had been attending university classes for two years without a single issue, but I’d usually been in the seat next to him. Jake would have to do this on his own.

One of the deans at our high school had brought his kids to daycare when they were little, so he knew our boys. When I told him about this challenge, he offered to let Jake sit in on a math class, a review session to prepare the students for their calculus final. I wasn’t sure how it would go. Jake was good at sitting still, but he’d never had any formal math instruction past fifth-grade fractions, and they’d be covering an entire semester’s worth of work from the hardest math class in the Indiana public school system.

The class was scheduled two weeks out. I explained the situation to Jake: “Don’t worry; you don’t need to know calculus. All they’re watching for is your manners. You just need to be able to sit nicely through this class.”

Jake looked at me. “I’m not going to sit there if I don’t know what’s going on,” he said.

I sighed. Of course not.

He wanted textbooks, so we bought them for him. Then he sat on the porch in front of our house in the spring sunshine and learned the formal language of geometry, algebra, algebra II, trigonometry, and calculus. He did it all by himself and all in two weeks. As we subsequently discovered, Jake had already figured out the fundamental principles of math on his own. Just as you can understand the principle of addition without knowing what a plus sign is, Jake had already developed his own private system for calculus. He simply didn’t know yet how to write it down so that other mathematicians could understand it.

Jake took that calculus final along with the rest of the kids and aced it. In fact, he was the only one in the class able to answer the extra-credit question—a question so hard that the teacher asked him to come up and write the explanation on the board. The day I picked him up from the final, I found him surrounded by admiring high school students, all of them towering over him.

Even with that hurdle cleared, there was a lot to do to complete the SPAN application.