ASD child says he can't remember anything I teach
There's information elsewhere on this site about supplements I used to help my oldest. Autistic kids may have metal poisoning or other health issues. My oldest has a serious medical condition and getting him generally healthier and better fed helped his academic performance enormously.
I mostly OBSERVED my kids to see what they could do. They didn't want to be quizzed.
I mostly didn't test them. They hated having to prove they knew it and my oldest has a scathing phrase about public school: "guess the teacher's password." In other words, public school isn't designed to educate children. Children survive it by memorizing what the teacher wants to hear and their competency be damned. It's not relevant to getting passing grades.
And he had trouble guessing the teacher's password because he's not neurotypical and struggled to figure out what the heck they wanted him to say.
When talking about testing, someone on a gifted list years ago said something like:
"... And if you asked my very young kid who discovered America, he would go on at length about how it wasn't CALLED America when Columbus bumped into it while looking for India and THOUGHT he found India in x year. It wasn't called America until after Amerigo Vespucci came here in y year and blah blah blah more detailed history....um what was the question?"
"Columbus" as an answer to "Who discovered America?" is an example of guessing the teacher's password. In other words, spitting back the PC answer they EXPECT even though it's objectively WRONG.
But it's part of the lore of USA history and it's essential you know that's the "correct answer" or you are stupid and a heathen and unamerican.
My son was absolutely FURIOUS when I finally explained to him that "x" in algebra is just a different way of saying "fill in the blank" and making it easy to move the blank space around.
He thought X had a specific definition, like e=mc squared. E is energy, m is matter and c is a constant. Those are defined terms, so his assumption that X was like that wasn't crazy and in linear algebra, X and Y are defined terms.
So sometimes X is a specific thing -- the horizontal coordinate in the (x, y) pair of numbers on a line -- and sometimes it is just a fancy way of saying "fill in the blank."
So X as "a different way of having a blank space in your question" wasn't obvious to him and not because he's stupid.
And he was FURIOUS because he said to me "I've been calculating X in my head for YEARS as a gamer. I already know algebra and teachers made it sound hard and scary."
If you have a kid who seems dumb but plays games, ask your kid what the damage output of that weapon in his game is and if he knows the value, ask him how he knows it. Did he look it up online or figure it out because if you shoot thus and such monster twice, it doesn't die but it does if you shoot it three times but some other creature does die in two hits, so OBVIOUSLY the value is seven hit points, duh.
That's algebra and it's not considered to be fourth grade math, no. I'm guessing the child in question in the above linked Reddit post can do algebra because he games while Mom thinks he's a retard because he TESTS poorly which can happen for a lot of reasons unrelated to ability to do the thing in question.
Twice exceptional kids can be good at MATH and bad at arithmetic and most elementary school teachers would have no idea they can't do arithmetic but can do algebra because "their stupid games are just entertainment and not educational."
Look up dyscalculia. It's also called "calculator dependent" in gifted circles where some kids -- like MINE -- will read calculus books I can't follow for FUN but still ask me or his brother to crunch numbers for him.
In MATH, understanding the concepts is more important than being able to crunch the numbers without a calculator.
I made sure he understood the concepts. He's still bad with numbers but better at MATH than most people.
I know because he GAMES and will talk to game developers online about their glaringly obvious math errors breaking the game mechanics while they look stupid and argue it until he proves to them it's wrong AND they don't understand the math in their own game that they wrote.
I also spent a lot of time helping him TALK about books he read and other things. He has output difficulties and I did a LOT of listening and prompting and patiently waiting for him to figure out how to say it.
Most adults will not patiently wait for the kid to fumble around trying to find the words he wants and jump to the conclusion he doesn't REMEMBER when the truth is he remembers he just can't spit it out easily.
If YOU are jumping to the conclusion that he can't remember it because he can't spit it out, don't be all shocked if your KID starts claiming "I don't remember." instead of saying something else like "I don't know what words I want to use."
"Words, words, words." is still a somewhat frequent exclamation of frustration in my household when one of us is struggling to express ourselves for some reason.