The Onion Project: Week 5 ~ Misunderstood Intelligence

Week 5  The Educational Layer: Misunderstood Intelligence

Peel again, and we find the classroom. For many Deaf children, and for many who are also autistic or ADHD, school is the first place where the story of being “misunderstood” begins. Intelligence, for them, is often measured by how closely they can fit into hearing norms or neurotypical expectations by how well they perform within systems never designed with their minds, rhythms, or languages in mind.

A Deaf child may be labeled “behind” when, in truth, they were never given full language access in the first place. Imagine trying to build knowledge without the foundation of communication. The delay is not in the child, it’s in the system that withheld language until it was too late.

An autistic child may be called “defiant” or “disruptive” when their behavior is not rebellion but an overwhelmed response to sensory overload: the hum of fluorescent lights, the scrape of chairs, the relentless buzz of chatter. What looks like misbehavior may actually be survival.

An ADHD child may be described as “unfocused” because they fidget, doodle, or shift attention often. Yet inside their mind, a thousand ideas may be sparking at once, connecting dots others never notice. Their movement is not distraction, it’s momentum.

In all these cases, the problem is not the student’s capacity to learn. The problem is the lens used to measure them.

Too often, schools mistake lack of access for lack of ability. When lessons move forward without interpretation, when captions lag or fail, when teachers do not sign fluently, Deaf students are left piecing together fragments of meaning, stitching half-heard or half-seen information into a patchwork of confusion. And then, cruelly, the system blames the student for not keeping up. The same happens to neurodivergent students who need more processing time or alternative pathways to show understanding. Instead of questioning the system, educators question the child.

But when education is done right when Deaf children grow up surrounded by fluent language models, when autistic or ADHD learners are given space to process in their own rhythm, something extraordinary happens. Intelligence reveals itself. Creativity blossoms. Curiosity finds air to breathe. The child who was once labeled “slow” suddenly soars, simply because the environment stopped holding them back.

This layer of the onion stings because it exposes how much brilliance the world has missed. How many Deaf students have been underestimated because their knowledge was measured by how well they could speak or lip-read?

How many autistic or ADHD students have been dismissed because their style of learning didn’t match the standard template?

How many minds have been quietly pushed aside, not because they lacked intelligence, but because they expressed it differently?

The cost of these misunderstandings is immense, not just in lost opportunities, but in the erosion of self-worth. Each time a child is told they are “behind,” “too slow,” or “too much,” a seed of doubt takes root. Over time, it grows into silence, hesitation, or self-doubt. Children begin to measure themselves against an impossible ideal instead of recognizing their own gifts. The tragedy is not that they couldn’t learn, it’s that they weren’t truly seen.

Education, at its best, should never be about trimming children to fit narrow boxes. It should be about unlocking doors and revealing possibilities. A good teacher doesn’t demand sameness; they cultivate difference. They recognize that every mind carries a unique language of thought, some expressed in hands, some in words, some in patterns, some in movement. True education honors those languages equally.

When classrooms become places of linguistic and neurological inclusion, something powerful happens: diversity stops being a challenge to manage and becomes a resource to celebrate. Deaf students bring visual precision, narrative skill, and spatial intelligence. Neurodivergent students bring deep focus, pattern recognition, and creative insight. Together, these strengths create a richer, more complete picture of what intelligence can look like.

Peeling this layer leaves us with a hard but necessary truth: misunderstanding intelligence is not a small mistake; it is a theft of potential. Each time a system fails to see a child’s ability because it doesn’t match the expected form, something precious is lost, not only for the student, but for all of us.

And yet, beneath this painful layer lies hope. The next layer in our journey leads us toward self-worth and language, the place where children who were once misunderstood begin to reclaim their voices, their confidence, and their power to define intelligence on their own terms.

~ A. Bret Cummens, M.Ed.