Parents and teachers of special needs children try to catch them up to standards hard to reach for typical children. Every Wednesday afternoon, I help students with homework. Second graders parse parts of speech. Third graders write rough drafts, edit, and revise stories. A bright third grader guesses at multiple-choice math questions. This child mispronounces radius, diameter, and circumference, has no clue of what they mean, and muddles through improper fractions when denominators and numerators are still riddles. My heart breaks to hear “I wish I could cheat” and “I’m so stupid.” Such unreasonable standards crush atypical learners and their teachers. A life of therapies burden busy schedules. Delayed children need Mason’s ideas about the preschool years even more than their peers. “A great deal has been said lately about the danger of overpressure, of requiring too much mental work from a child of tender years. The danger exists; but lies, not in giving the child too much, but in giving him the wrong thing to do, the sort of work for which the present …