My son recently went back to a developmental pediatrician about his handwriting. The doctor told us if there are any reversals after the age of seven it is dysgraphia.
My son is nine. Orally he can spell thousands of words correctly from the spelling bee booklet he is using to prepare for our state's Pee Wee Spelling Bee. I found a lot of these words online on an 8th grade spelling list. He will type these words correctly without a problem. But sometimes when he writes, especially when he takes notes, he will reverse letters or numbers and then he can't believe he did it. He says his hands don't do what he wants them to do sometimes. When he was tested at age seven his visual-motor integration was a few years lower than his actual age but his visual perceptual was a few years higher than his actual age and at that time he had tracking issues which were helped by vision therapy. We were told to try Handwriting without Tears. He did and when the doctor had him write a few sentences for her later that year, he seemed to have improved. I also looked at the handwriting of another gifted boy his age and it didn't seem that different so we thought his handwriting was good enough. My son could write legibly if he wrote slowly but his had would tire easily (but he also has hypotonia) and that was more of a problem. For that reason the doctor told me to teach him to type and this worked really well for him so I didn't have him practice handwriting as much.
Like you said, there were times I thought it was like his hand was not connected to his brain. The strange thing was that he would not reverse letters all the time and I thought if I took him back to the doctor he would just take his time and there wouldn't appear to be any big handwriting problems.
I took him back to the doctor when I realized there was enough of a problem that it embarrassed him to write anything in front of other kids and I worried that this also might be a problem when he has to take tests in the future. He had enough of a problem coloring in the bubbles quickly and without going outside the lines on the practice test for the Explore that I knew I needed a diagnosis to get accommodations for this kind of thing--too late for this year though.
His dysgraphia definitely caused problems with doing math. We also had to copy problems from workbooks on to another piece of paper and he could only do one or two long division or multi-digit multiplication problems per page and math was such an unpleasant experience for him because of the handwriting difficulties that he said he hated it. I had to have him do just one multiplication and one division problem instead of a whole page but I would pick the hardest one I could find on the page. Otherwise it would take him too long to do math and it was just too stressful for both of us. He learned to do mental math wherever he could and he played math games online. He figures out the answers to math problems in ways that are different from the way I was taught, but I think he needs to be allowed to do this, to find a way to compensate for this disability. I was so happy when we started using aleks.com for math. It doesn't care how he got the answers, just that he enters the right answer. He only has to get three correct and it lets him move on to the next concept. He always learned new concepts quickly and easily and this allowed him to move at a pace he was comfortable with without being held back by the dysgraphia.
People just assume that gifted kids can write. Even Davidson wanted us to submit something that he had written in his own handwriting to go along with his portfolio that I had already submitted even though I am almost positive I mentioned his handwriting difficulties. I knew this would be too difficult so I didn't even have him try. It was not worth it for us.
We even decided not to do the Explore test this year, even though I already paid for it, partly because of the dysgraphia.
The spelling bee requires a written test to qualify for the oral test. He will have to write 30 of the words and if there are erasures on any word, that word is counted as incorrect. So even though he spent many hours learning thousands of words, his dysgraphia might cause him to not qualify for the oral part of the spelling bee which I am sure he would do well in.
We are still waiting to see an OT, so I don't know anything about that yet.
I remember the doctor said something about therapy helping create "new neural pathways." That sounds hopeful and interesting.
