Warning: three days worth of response in one way-too-big post.
Reading through this whole thread, I’m nodding so much I look like a bobble-head. Coding score of 6 (age 8) and 7 (age 10). Hours to produce a single sentence. Lala land is DS’s country of origin. And I’ve had many moments of “oh yes” reading about blackcat's DD, and I am still trying to pursue the expressive language “aha” prompted by polarbear a year or two ago.
This year, pretty much all written work has come home, to be finished over many, many hours. Every night, I’m at his shoulder prompting, reminding, trying to keep on task - we’re both exhausted. For DS, at least, I'm pretty clear this is a can’t, not a won’t. Which doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally catch myself demanding, rather too loudly, “would you just focus for a minute and get this DONE?”
But my suspicion is that, like blackcat, executive function is a huge piece. DS is - to my expert diagnosis! - extremely, extremely ADHD-inattentive. Organizing and planning his thoughts to get them on paper is overwhelmingly difficult. Keeping focus when writing is hard at the best of times, and just excruciating if he has no interest in the topic. I do a lot of brainstorming with him if the topic has shut him down, to try and find a hook that brings it back into his areas of interest.
There is something fine motor there too - his hands are definitely too bendy. He says writing hurts, and avoids shoelaces and using a knife as much as possible (buttons are verboten). It’s like the fine motor end of dyspraxia, but none of the gross motor. No hints of dysgraphia, though (writing is messy, but fluid enough and accurate if copying). Grammar and mechanics excellent, teachers always said quality was great - but quantity is almost non-existent. He’s been on a computer at school since grade 3. Keyboarding is essential, but still only helps a tiny bit.
I still try offering to scribe when he’s really stuck, but mostly he says no - the words don’t come any more easily when he delegates the typing. Where I do a lot of writing is in the brainstorming/ planning phase. I take notes while he talks so he doesn’t lose key ideas, and then help him think about how to organize them in a graphic or outline form. Then, when I step back to let him to actually write, he has a map in front of him and just has to turn it into sentences.
Graphic organizers help, but still require a fair bit of one-on-one mentoring, leading him from one piece to the next. Rules help a lot, though. I drew up a “five paragraph essay” schematic that comes out every time he has to write something of that ilk, that pretty much defines what kind of content needs to go in each sentence of each the five paragraphs. Yes, DS, they are repetitive. Yes, you do have to say what you are going to say, then say it, then summarize what you said. But it’s all laid out, sentence by sentence, so it takes the argument out of it. Rules help.
He’s also a super visual thinker: he clearly stores pictures, not words, so there is a translating function that needs to happen. For him, a couple of words brings that whole vision into his mind, but the rest of us only have those couple of words and don’t see the rest of the picture. So we spend a lot of time discussing the kinds of assumptions you can make about your audience’s prior knowledge. Sometimes it helps to define a slightly different audience - a friend or a grandparent, depending on the topic - to make it easier for him to grasp what needs to be explicitly explained in his writing and what he can assume the reader already know. (“But my teacher already KNOWS that - she’s the one who taught us!”)
A teacher last year also had a set of writing models on her wall that went from basic level 1 to sophisticated level 10. Each step explicitly defined what you would add in to move to the next level, and provided samples of how and what it would look like. Again, explicit rules like this seem to help DS a lot. (Interestingly, he generally hates language arts, but loves poetry writing - if he’s allowed to use super-structured formats like haiku and pyramids. I imagine these feel more like a puzzle than writing, trying to figure out what kind of piece he can create to fit in each required spot.)
Looking at the list of functions on the Davidson article, I would say DS rocks #5 (working memory is off the chart) and the rest is non-existent. However, while he is lost in figuring out where/ how to start writing, coming up with ideas is not a problem. He usually has lots to say. His sister gets blocked seemingly because she’s so overwhelmed with ideas she can’t figure out how to choose. Her excellent teacher this year has figured out how to help her find that opening line (sometimes after hours or days of staring at a blank page), and then boom, it all flows. (Teacher quote I want to embroider as a cover for her IEP: “It really looks like resistance, but it’s not.”) For DS, in contrast, getting started hurts, but every subsequent line is also just as excruciatingly painful to draw out as the one before.
“He was trying to be entertaining and not informative…" Oh yes. Since forever, DS has had a need to make what he does “interesting” (not to mention “complex”, his favourite word of yore). It was hard to know what he could and couldn't do, because he just wouldn’t, on principle, produce a recognizable drawing, clay sculpture, or whatever that looked like anyone else’s, or like the teacher’s model, because that would be
boring. Sounds like this might ring some bells?
Extended time doesn’t really help, as he needs the extension in days, not hours, and one-on-one mentoring during it. argh. I strongly suspect we need to bite the bullet and seriously investigate ADHD drugs before next school year; it just feels cruel to leave him struggling like this if there is a way to help. However, since he already eats nothing and sleeps minimally, we’ve been putting off that option as long as possible.
An interesting last note, picking up on polarbear’s comment about tasks that are “pointless”: DD, unlike her brother, has actually been assessed for and is diagnosed with ADHD-inattentive (though she’s nowhere near as affected as he). Focus and attention were massive problems in the classroom when younger. Since discovering and remediating her dyslexia, though, her teachers tell me attention problems have completely vanished. Not that she isn’t still ADHD, but it seems that reading and writing tasks at school have become intrinsically motivating instead of painful, and no longer trigger her attention issues. It has emphasized to me that when some one thing is particularly hard to keep the attention on, it’s worth looking closely at that thing to see what is so deeply de-motivating about it. It’s hard to keep your attention closely focused on something that feels near-impossible.
I have hopes that we might perhaps see some similar - if less dramatic - effects with DS’s writing, if we can find ways of directly supporting/ remediating the expressive language barriers between thought and output. The huge and far more sophisticated writing demands make on him this year have really helped me see that the problem is not just with getting words on paper, but starts way sooner, with just getting ideas into words. Combined with his breaking down over tasks related to making inference and connections, I feel like I finally have something coherent to take to a psych to get my concerns about expressive language taken seriously.
All this is a really long way of sending hugs and commiserations, and agreeing that digging into why may helpful.
