My younger son isn't doing so well with his academic career.  At least so far.  Luckily, it's just kindergarten.  But according to his teacher, he's at the very bottom of his class in both numbers and letters. 

He's 5.  And can only count to 13.  Can't spell his name and hasn't quite gotten the whole alphabet down.  The teacher explained this to us in our parent-teacher conference.

I asked, "Well, is it possible that he's...well...you know..just..dumb?" 

Once I regained consciousness, my wife suggested I not take that path.  So we've been working on helping him get up to speed more.  In a couple of days, he's up to counting to 30 and can spell his name.  But it's been more of a struggle. 

His older brother was reading at 3 on his own.  We didn't teach him or anything, he just sort of "picked it up".  So it's proving to be a real challenge in trying to bring the little guy up to par on these matters.  I actually don't think he's dumb.  If I had to guess, I'd say he was just developing at a slightly slower pace than the other kids.  I had similar issues when I was a kid, I was a slow learner and didn't get really caught up until 5th grade. 

At least it was caught early.  We have good teachers in our school district and they were able to bring his letter and number issues up to us matter of factly without any attempt to arm-chair diagnose or even jumping to any conclusions at all other than to provide us with some materials that might help us help him at home.  She said later in the year we can see how he's progressing and try to figure out what the best course is at that point.