peanutsmom, I wanted to throw in a few more thoughts, as there is a lot about your son that rings familiar, including major VS and an uneven (in our case, just plain weird) profile.

DS12 was a seriously different kid from - literally - the day he was born. Neither I nor anyone else, however, ever ascribed those differences to giftedness. Just an unbelievably high-needs child, with an insatiable need for stimulation, weird developmental stops and leaps, (and of course, lots of bad parenting which was clearly what was making him so high needs :P ). It wasn't until he was tested after grade 2 and I started researching giftedness that I found, for the first time in his crazy intense life, descriptions of baby and child behaviour that I could relate to in any way, shape or form. But definitely nothing in this child would ever prompt anyone to think "prodigy"!

aeh beautifully described the mismatch of the extremely visual-spatial child in the modern classroom. It calls very little on their strengths. My kid is probably a bit of an extreme example, in that he loves conceptual math, quantum physics and programming, but has major challenges in processing speed, attention, executive function, and writing, is not microscopically extrinsically motivated, and is quite uninterested in language arts and social sciences. Basically, his weaknesses are all the stuff teachers love, value, and do easily. His strengths are in areas he's not likely to see before university. Like chay, I believe this child could thrive in post-secondary, but I am honestly not certain if we will get him through middle and high school. With rare exceptions, teachers certainly do not see this child as gifted: they see the struggle to complete a grade-level worksheet, but (in our radically anti-acceleration school system) not the way he excels if you give him math at the right level.

I too thought gifted = high achieving, that school should be easy. I had to learn to let that go in a big hurry for my kids. School success is about how well a particular kid fits into a particular educational environment. If it values and challenges their strengths, and helps them constructively work on their weaknesses, they can excel. If it refuses to allow them to use their strengths, and put all its demands - but little support - only on their weaknesses... well, not so much. We can see DS's ability in many environments, now that we have learned how to find good matches - but elementary school will never be one of them. It's getting both better and worse. Worse, in that while DS's learning issues were not apparent in grade 2 (he could still compensate and accomplish what was being asked of him - albeit with average grades), by last year's demanding grade 6 gifted class, they became a huge problem. But better in that the less he can compensate for and hide his disabilities, the more we're starting to get some ideas what they might actually be.

DS is a math monster, but aside from his love of patterns and symmetry, and innate understanding of basic mathematical relationships and concepts, there was nothing that was really stand out about him. Until I finally broke down a couple of years ago and started teaching him AoPS math at home (because at school he was learning not just to hate math, but also to think he was really bad at it). The best way I can described what happened since is to say that it became clear to me that his brain thinks in math, not English. But before AoPS and a fabulous math camp, he didn't have a language. After, he did. And suddenly he's full of mathematical ideas, theorems and proofs, and suddenly, well, he doesn't sound quite so typical anymore. But he needed a language to allow him to make sense of and articulate the crazy thoughts floating around in his head. That same language has enabled him to pursue physics and programming in very different ways than before, too.

Don't know if these random thoughts help, but that's a bit of our journey so far.