Twice exceptional thinkers are among our greatest cultural and scientific leaders—but they have to get through childhood first.

Picture Albert Einstein as a school boy. Disorganized by ADHD, held back by dyscalculia from grasping simple arithmetic and full of big ideas that must have seemed detached from reality—because it would take Albert Einstein to develop the mathematical proofs behind them.

“Twice exceptional” or “2e” thinkers are individuals who have both high intellectual gifts and a learning, social, emotional or physiological difference. Throughout the centuries, they have made some of the greatest and most exciting contributions to human thought, not despite their differences but because of them. Having an unusual mix of skills or a brain that simply “works differently” presents a different understanding of the world, filling out the story of what it means to be human.

Yet these very differences can lead to highly challenging experiences as a child. Seeing things “differently” may be exciting as an adult, but it can make it difficult to connect socially with other kids. As is often said, twice exceptional kids’ gifts hide their challenges, while their challenges hide their gifts. After all, it’s easy to imagine how a well-meaning teacher struggling to get 24 kids to sit still and read might mistake dyslexia for a “behavior problem” when the brightest kid in the class “refuses” to sit down and read.

Despite the best of intentions, 2e kids are disproportionately experiencing academic trauma in mainstream schools

By definition, meeting the academic, social and emotional needs of twice exceptional children gets complicated. 2e kids’ needs strain traditional educational models employed in mainstream environments—and those models and environments strain these kids. 2e kids share all of the learning challenges of their “gifted” peers—just more complicated. They need intellectual challenges and pursuits pegged above their current abilities in order to grow, but those challenges must be presented in a way that doesn’t require them to run through one of their areas of disability in order to access those strengths. In some cases, this may require presenting content and analytical demands that are well above grade level, while making them accessible through reading, writing and math skills that ride well below. It’s like the differentiation Olympics.

Twice exceptional kids are more likely to see things “differently,” making connections that others don’t see or approaching problems from a meaningfully different angle. This often carries a high social-emotional cost, as peers may misinterpret 2e kids’ intellectual enthusiasm and differing perspectives as “weird” or “showing off.” Often, their internal life-lived experiences are meaningfully different from those of the typically-developing peers sitting beside them, making it difficult to grasp and conform to social norms set based on normative, “age-appropriate” development. They may find it incredibly frustrating to express those ideas or to feed their own appetites for information.

These disconnects can become points of friction beginning at a very early age—long before any child is developmentally able to appreciate that their internal experiences are not shared by those around them. All young children struggle to express their needs and wants as language and communication skills develop; this challenge is only exacerbated when the needs, wants and ideas you are experiencing meaningfully diverge from “the norm” for children your age.

Within school environments, each degree of difference provides an opportunity for an additional degree of creativity—but also the potential to be misunderstood. Sadly, the more novel a child’s perspectives and ideas, the more likely they are to be mistaken for a “failure to follow directions.” Consider, for example, the preschool teacher who instructs the class to “color the trees in the right color” and then penalizes Johnny for making them pink—without realizing that this is the color of Johnny’s favorite cherry tree in bloom.

Examples like these can become the jumping off point for a tragic, downward cycle that is causing real psychological, social and academic harm to some of our most talented and uniquely-creative children. To the child, repeated experiences like these can lead the child to conclude that caretaker and/or educator expectations are arbitrary, denying 2e children the certainty that all kids need to feel safe and take the learning risks required to grow. Where a child’s learning, sensory, social or emotional differences are misread as “behavior problems,” it further undermines their self-esteem while failing to offer any tools or strategies they can use to predict which tasks will be disproportionately challenging for them. Pop culture steps into the void when 2e kids’ needs go unmet, supplying three storylines that can overtake their personal narratives: “I’m stupid,” “I’m bad” and “I don’t fit.”

There are few things more detrimental to a child’s future success than these three diabolical phrases. They are “proof” of a child’s inadequacies, drowning out any internal evidence of their own value or abilities. Among adults, unique perspectives and ideas draw the greatest cultural and economic value, yet for twice exceptional children, the seedlings for these ideas are all too often stamped out before they’ve even had time to take root.

Academically-related trauma leads to freeze-fight-flight reactions that are often mistaken for defiance in 2e kids

The result, for far too many 2e children, is that they simply shut down. Academic and intellectual opportunities that once excited become threatening opportunities to fail. It is tragic to see a child with off-the-charts verbal reasoning, comprehension and vocabulary scores thrown into freeze-fight-flight at the mere mention of the word “writing.” And yet, it’s hard to argue that this reaction is “irrational” when repeated experiences in academic environments add up in the child’s mind to a veritable mathematical proof that taking risks as an author make you vulnerable to reprimand or refute. Soon, many 2e kids learn to choose the safer, “survivalist” mode of preemptive failure, refusing to try at all.

Certainly, there are 2e kids who have the resilience to thrive wherever they land. But we have been heartbroken, since launching Cajal Academy, by the dozens of families, here in our own community, who have called us with a child who has reached this state long before they even reach fifth grade. Those children who physiologically tend towards the “freeze” mode quietly fail. Meanwhile, the ones who “go big or go home” become painted as “behavioral problems” and shuttled to “therapeutic” schools where consequentialist systems penalize them for failing to check their frustrations rather than addressing the real issues that drove that resistance in the first place. This only increases the child’s anxieties, further entrenching the survivalist reaction, without neurologically preparing the child to do a better job the next time around.

2e kids need a range of educational options, including environments specialized to meet their needs

By the time a child reaches this state, they are simply outside of what mainstream public and private education systems are tooled to do. For the child, this is a tragedy—and for the school districts, it’s a problem that becomes disproportionately expensive to solve. Creating one-to-one programs of pull-out instruction while paying for tens of thousands of dollars worth of community-based therapeutic services and outside educational consultants is extremely costly, both financially and in terms of the educator and administration resources it drains. At the end of the day and all of that expense, the student is still losing out, because they have lost the promise and experience of being educated together with their peers.

Other cohorts of special needs kids are typically out-placed to special education schools tailored to meet their needs long before they reach this point. Indeed, both state and federal education law and financing embrace the idea that there will be children for whom a specialized and expert environment is both the most appropriate and least restrictive environment in which to meet their academic, social and emotional needs. Kids whose complex profiles require a level of integration that pull-out services cannot provide. Yet nationwide, Cajal Academy is one of just a handful of schools that are specifically designed to meet the needs of twice exceptional children of any profile type—a capacity that is vastly outstripped by the number of children in need.

Thus, twice exceptional families and their districts are left scrambling to find—or create—appropriate environments where their children can develop their gifts, ideally before a child has been put through this distress. Where it is financially and emotionally possible, many families make the difficult decision to homeschool—a great solution for some but not the right fit for all. Others shift their children to schools offering 1:1 instructional models, or agree with their districts on a period of “homebound instruction” consisting of a limited number of tutoring hours each week. Rather than addressing their social challenges, these approaches only further the gap between twice exceptional children and their mainstream peers.

The net result is high long-term rates of anxiety, depression and social isolation. College—a rich educational opportunity that should delight high-intellect children—can begin to look like an emotionally and socially treacherous landscape. This harm can persist well into adulthood, as many 2e children to grow into adults whose storylines are determined by disabilities that could have been addressed in childhood, rather than by the talents that our economy desperately needs.

These tragic realities cannot be allowed to persist. As life-long public education advocates, we look forward to a day when we really can fulfill our public policy of inclusive education for all—but we recognize that we have some work to do to get there and must make sure that we meet all children’s needs along the way. Under federal education law, every child is entitled to a free education that is appropriate to their individualized needs—whatever those needs may be. Yet those rights are meaningless until we give educators the training, data-driven tools and spectrum of settings that are required to identify and meet the vast range and diversity of 2e needs. We need to design new, flexible models that bring children together across different learning profiles by solving for the needs of our most complex learners—not trying to squeeze them in to systems that were designed for the middle. And we need to leverage all available science to develop a toolbox for addressing the disabilities that threaten to hold back 2e kids and all special education populations, so they have the opportunity to experience their own gifts.

We founded Cajal Academy to develop these tools and innovations. Within our flagship school, our expert multi-disciplinary team, led by an internationally-recognized neuropsychologist, is developing highly-individualized programs delivered through socially-engaged learning models, and leveraging neuroscientific advances to empower children while addressing their disabilities. And we are building on the trauma-informed approach by integrating into it deep expertise in how children’s neurophysiological differences influence their learning, social and emotional behaviors and experiences. Over time, we hope to disseminate those innovations through packaged curricula, teacher trainings and new certification programs, to benefit children far beyond the walls of our small flagship school. It is our hope that one day, this work will help provide the tools that educators in all environments need to realize the vision of inclusive yet effective education for all.

Cajal Academy is currently reviewing applications for the 2020-21 school year. Apply now to join us.