Autistic student wins medals in scientific Olympiads – 10/04/2023 – Education

He was 11 when he began attending advanced high school classes that trained for Science Olympiads in biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics and astronomy. For a while, he stood on equal terms with the older students in learning. Soon he overtook them. Today, at 16, he surpasses his teachers.

Gifted and autistic, Alexandre Andrade de Almeida collects medals from the knowledge Olympics. There are already 76, won in national and international competitions. In most cases, he came first, and gold medals became routine. Last week, he won the Ibero-American Physics Olympiad, held in Costa Rica. At the beginning of September, in Spain, he had received gold among Brazilians in the Ibero-American Biology Olympiad and silver in the overall score.

In a NASA program in partnership with the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, the Asteroid Hunt, in which students analyze telescope images, Alexandre identified two possible new asteroids, which has already been certified by the IASC (International Astronomical Research Collaboration, in English).

Studying, studying and studying are Alexandre’s passions, it goes without saying. He thinks for a few seconds to answer what he likes to do most. “Playing with my dogs,” he says. “I also play chess and play the piano. I like thinking about the mathematical relationships in music.” Video games, he plays “a little”. He has a social network as an obligation, to communicate with the school and Olympics crowd.

He is a fan of books, all of them academic, at university level. He says he reads several at the same time and, currently, among others, he has on his head “Lehninger’s Principles of Biochemistry”, adopted by medical schools, a treatise on electromagnetism by Edward Purcell, Nobel laureate in Physics, studied by engineering students, and ” Organic Chemistry”, by John McMurry, considered a classic in this area in higher education.

Since he was ten years old, he has been reading books like this. It was at this age that Alexandre was enrolled at Colégio Objective, which has a program for gifted individuals – today he is in the 2nd year of secondary school at Objective Integrated, which brings together high-performance students.

In elementary school, Alexandre studied in the morning with the group his age at the unit on Rua Teodoro Sampaio, in Pinheiros, and, in the afternoon, he went to the headquarters on Avenida Paulista to participate in knowledge Olympics classes with the high school.

From the beginning, it was clear to the school that Alexandre would be able to skip internships and enroll with older students, like the character Sheldon, from the series “Young Sheldon” and “Big Bang Theory”, who entered college at 11.” We always talked about this with him”, says Alexandre’s mother, Paula Almeida, 42. “He looked at the teaching material from the higher grades and said: ‘I know practically all of this. But there’s a line here that I don’t know. And if this is a little brick of knowledge that I might need in the future?’. So he preferred not to skip any step.”

And there’s another good reason for Alexandre not to exchange school for college straight away (he wants to study medicine at USP): the scientific Olympics. As an athlete, it is competed by teams from different disciplines.

The question that arises, naturally, is: Isn’t it boring to attend a class in which you already know everything, or practically everything? No. For Alexandre, class is the coolest thing in the world. “Class is always a moment of learning,” he responds. “Review is also a way of learning. And it is always possible to learn from a new perspective, another interpretation. I think it is essential to have other views.”

He says he understands when teachers need to slow down. “I always knew that the class isn’t private, it’s for a group. If the teacher is helping students who are behind, I can do exercises from the booklet or advance other subjects.”

The difficulty for him is interacting socially with people his own age. He prefers to be among the oldest, but also enjoys teaching science to much younger children.

Don’t feel pressured to do the most common teenage programs. “He prefers to stay at home studying rather than go to the cinema, and he’s fine with that,” says his mother. The diagnosis of autism and giftedness (he has an IQ of 140, while his average intelligence is around 90), which he received in 2021, helped his parents understand him. “It was good to have this report. My mother was worried that I didn’t socialize much,” he says.

Paula agrees: “I learned not to get hurt by it. People tend to think of autism as just something very bad, we need to get rid of this myth”, she says.

“Alexandre is sweet, calm and has a world of his own. He doesn’t suffer from the most common angst of adolescence”, he says. “He gets excited when he gets a book, a physics pendulum or a pipette to do experiments. I was uncomfortable, I thought he was alone, but I understood that he’s happy like that. People are unique, we don’t need to fit them into categories”, teaches the mother.

Respect for Alexandre’s specificities was fundamental for Fernando Paiva, 44, professor of the biology Olympics, to be able to gain the young man’s trust and affection and become his mentor. “Our relationship was built over a long time. To get him to say ‘good morning’ or ‘good afternoon’ to me, I think it took me about six years”, says the professor.

Sitting next to him, Alexandre laughs. “See!?” points out the teacher. “Today he can even laugh at me!”

In his own way, Alexandre is moved, yes. “He looks at things rationally,” says his mother. “He doesn’t stop having emotions, but in a different way.”

It was like that when, in May, his father, who was 87 years old, died. “I miss him. But when that happens, I remember that we enjoyed the time we had together”, says the young man.