My teenage son is very good in maths, but he can hardly speak English even though he is now in secondary school. Is that a normal thing?
The answer to your question can be a very simple yes or no, but can also be a lengthy dissertation on learning theory. As often happens in life, the truths must lie somewhere between these two extremes.
A story might be helpful in explaining some aspects of the situation as we understand it.
When in primary school in the 1950s, our teachers routinely set mental arithmetic tests on Friday afternoons. Based on their results, Monday morning saw the clever boys and girls sit on one side of the class, while the rest sat at the other end.
To help those who did not get good grades improve, the teacher used a wooden ruler to hit them on their fingernails.
That done, children who had done well were encouraged to sing (loudly) a song that stated in essence that those children who did badly in class were like frogs. They did not have buttocks and their throats would swell like frogs. The humiliation could not have been more severe.
In tears and discouragement, the children went home to spend yet another weekend in misery, often in the knowledge that the following Friday, a similar fate would visit them.
In due time, some of the children left school. Some of the girls got married, while many of the boys ended up with various challenges in life, including crime and abuse of alcohol and other drugs. Their lives were ruined by the ignorance of well-meaning teachers. Tutors failed to understand that the children did not “choose” to do badly.
Many years later, as a post graduate student of Psychiatry in London, the memory of those miserable children came back to me, when we learnt about problems in school, and more specifically about learning difficulties evident in childhood.
We were taught about specific learning disorders. In one case, we learnt about a condition called dyscalculia. In this case, (unlike your son) the person is good at languages and all other learning, but has no ability to understand or manipulate numbers. There was one such boy in our class and he suffered a great deal. Because he was good in all the other subjects, the teachers called him lazy on Friday testing because he did not pass mental tests. He was forced to leave school after Standard Seven because he failed maths. He died early in poverty and alcohol use.
The more common form of learning difficulties and one that many people are familiar with is dyslexia, which is a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling.
Without any further information, it is possible that your son may be having dyslexia as defined here.
If that be the case, then he would be very good in those subjects (like maths) that do not involve much reading and are based primarily in the manipulation of numbers.
Subjects such as English, Literature, History and Geography would all cause him nightmares as they all involve a great deal of reading. It is, therefore, possible that what you are describing is not only a problem with English, but a more general problem with the written word.
We must, however, consider another possibility that your son has a learning problem that is associated with language development. In this field, you will find multiple theories on how language is acquired and how it develops in the normal person.
Without going into the academic complexities of social and cognitive theories of learning (among others) let us state that different human beings are “gifted” in different ways.
There are those who have great ease with the spoken (and written) word, while there are other (normal) people for whom language is a lifelong struggle. We simply do not know where your son falls in this spectrum.
Now that he is already in high school, you might find it useful to obtain an opinion from his teachers as to the extent of his problems with English. Only then can you decide the extent to which he exists at one extreme of the spectrum or the need to get help for him.
