arnie
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In my business I work with kids from the special ed dept of our local high school. They can get a couple of hours a week of hands-on work experience. Most of them are relatively high functioning, but this quarter I'm working with a guy who is quite severely autistic. He can't carry on a conversation, he sort of jumps around a lot, needs to be redirected and kept on task a lot, etc. When his teacher brought him in to meet me, she and I were trying to talk and he was being kind of disruptive. She wrote some 4 and 5-digit numbers on a piece of paper and said he likes to multiply so that would keep him busy. I was thinking busy for 5 minutes at least, but he took maybe 5 seconds to multiply two 5 digit numbers! He pretty much would do it as fast as he could write. Didn't show any work or anything, just looked at the numbers and wrote down the answer. As if we were doing 1st grade addition problems! I was amazed, and the teacher said, "Yes, that's how fast he does the problems, and don't bother to check them because they are right. Always." Over the weeks I have had him add up my books for me, which was actually quite useful because it's something I don't like to do. I have also helped him learn a few things about working on bicycles, and he is really not too bad at that, but his math skills are amazing. I had a bank statement with 27 numbers on it, from 3 to 6 digits, and he added them up in about 20 seconds. Again, just looking and then writing the answer. He was in today and I gave him two 8-digit numbers to multiply. (yes, eight digits apiece!). He took the paper into the work area (he usually just does the problem wherever he happens to be), sat down on the floor and looked at the paper, looked away, moved the paper around a little, looked around the shop, and after about 30 seconds of that he wrote down the 16 digit answer! Again, no work or anything. Just the answer! I checked it on my calculator just for the heck of it. The calculator only goes to 8 digits, but the first 8 were correct so I'm sure the rest of it was, too. Isn't that amazing? He also has a really good memory, and an almost Rain-Man like ability to count stuff. He can pour tiny objects back and forth between his hands, and after doing that 2 or 3 times he will know how many there are, and I'm talking maybe 150 little cable tips or something. His teachers say he does that with puzzle pieces, too, and is always right, even when there are hundreds of pieces. I counted the cable ends after the first time he had (he said there were 142) and I got a different answer. I then carefully counted them again and put them in piles of ten, and it turned out that he had been right.
Anyhow, I just thought I would share that, since we all have a certain interest in how brains work. Also, even though we have all probably read about math savants it is much more amazing to see them in action.
Cheers!
Anyhow, I just thought I would share that, since we all have a certain interest in how brains work. Also, even though we have all probably read about math savants it is much more amazing to see them in action.
Cheers!