I can see how it might be hard for teachers to understand 2E if they had no personal experience with it. At times it has been hard for me to understand how my son with motor dyspraxia and dysgraphia can have so much trouble with some things and not others. How can he manage to play Rock Band II on the hard level, but not be able to do other things that require good motor skills very well. And it is really hard to explain why your kid can do something reasonably well one day and the next day, he can't.
It is hard for them to understand because he just sounds so smart. It is hard for me to understand why he and I can listen to a story on the news or a science or history show and if asked to give a summary of what he heard, my son does a much better job of this than I can. It is embarrassing sometimes because I am very aware of the fact that my son sounds a lot smarter than I do. Because of the way he talks, people sometimes ask me what his IQ is. I don't think anyone ever asked my mother about my IQ. The strange thing is that I can do well on things like freerice.com but when it comes to using a higher level vocabulary in my speech I can't do it. I think it is like this for him with his motor issues. The part of his brain that controls speech and vocabulary and making up jokes works so much faster than mine, but the part of his brain that controls motor learning doesn't work so well. His motor memory is deficient, but every other kind of memory seems way high. Even for numbers. A few days ago, when I was paid for something with a credit card, the sales clerk asked for the last 4 digits of my credit card number and before I could look at my card, my son told him the number. He said he just remembered it from another occasion when I had been asked for these numbers--months ago.
He remembers how to spell words, especially since we focused on this last year when he was preparing for a state spelling bee. But if asked to write the words, there is always the chance that he will write a letter backwards. It really slows him down and he gets tired. Last year, he didn't mind spelling 100 words a day for me orally, but it would have been a totally different story if I had asked him to write the words. I found it funny that the educational psychologist that tested him several years ago tested his spelling ability by having him write the words, even though possible dysgraphia was one of the reasons we took him to see the developmental pediatrician. The spelling score was not accurate in my opinion, because my son could have orally spelled at a much higher level, but he quit writing words after his hands got tired. I wondered at the time if the educational psychologist really got 2E.
