You sound a little like my twice-exceptional son and we are still trying to find what he really has. He scores very high on achievement tests but because of a mild disability that causes difficulty with fine motor integration which I think is because of a visual processing issue, he would never do jigsaw puzzles and he hated drawing in front of other people because he was not good at it. He has no athletic ability even though he comes from a family with lots of athletic people and his dad played football in the army. I think to do well on the performance section of an IQ test his fine motor skills would have to be better than they are, yet his disability doesn't affect him academically. I am still trying to find out how the lack of jigsaw puzzle ability is supposed to affect someone academically and later on in life. He is slower at things like handwriting and writing out math problems and he can't draw well because of the motor dysgraphia, but he types well. I don't see how it affects him intellectually, but it does lower his performance IQ score.
He would practice jigsaw puzzles if he could see that it could help him in some way but he feels like it would be a waste of time--he would much rather learn something than do jigsaw puzzles. I think he is better off practicing piano or learning guitar. Our whole family is trying to figure out how this difficulty will cause problems in later life and we just can't see how it it affect him. He did well or better than the other kids in a homeschool circuitry class because he was interested in this.
I find it ironic that they call it a "performance" IQ when performing is something my son loves to do and he is good at it or he would not have been given a lead role. So I don't really see how IQ is useful for twice exceptional kids if they are smart enough to work around the disability.
My son was diagnosed with motor dyspraxia a year ago but he is not clumsy, his sequencing ability is very good, and his balance is good so I can't really tell teachers he has this when they can look it up online and see that most of it doesn't fit.
So my son and I know how it feels to wonder "what is this" and in trying to figure it out, we sometimes see things that are kind of scary, not because he has all the symptoms of the disorders we are looking at, but because he has as many of the symptoms as the thing he was diagnosed with. He has anxiety whenever he has to go to the doctor. It feels like nothing makes any sense.
Wow....I know this sounds rather dark, but would this mean that we could be dealing with an orphan disorder? But, seriously, I hope that we find out what it is, and I hope your son will do well. I've got high hopes that, A, some teacher will identify that we are both gifted, and B, what is going on. I will pray for your son, too (my family and I are strong Christians, so we'll probably not forget...).
