Hi Grinity,
Thanks for the post. I feel better just being able to describe this dreadful experience!
In fact, the psychologist did show DS a bell curve with his FSIQ (not very meaningful), VCI and PRI. His explanation was unclear (even to me, and certainly to DS) so this morning I drew a new bell curve for DS with more meaningful words on it. I put the VCI (language, logic, reading) at 99.7, the PRI (math, lego, puzzles) at 83 and lumped the rest together at the 50th percentile (organizing, speed, attention). I also drew a picture of a brain with the left side full of dots (thinking, logic, remembering) and the right side with drawers (organizing, retrieving, processing) and showed that his left side was really strong but his right side needs more exercise. He studied the page for quite a while, as he lay on an exercise ball, and then quietly placed it face down.
He does show signs of ADD (going upstairs and forgetting why he is there, saying �huh� a lot, taking a long time to respond to questions, hard time following multi-step instructions, amazing hyper-focus when he is interested in something). However, I read that ADD and NVLD can have some similar symptoms, so I don�t really know. I guess he has �information processing� problems, and maybe it doesn�t matter too much what we call it (although I understand that medication doesn�t help for NVLD the way it does for ADD.)
We have not done any more detailed academic testing, but the school does standardized tests every year (full scale of 9, normed to provincial wide results) and his, at the beginning of grade 4 were: 9 in reading comprehension, 9 in vocabulary, 8 in mathematical problem resolution, 6 in spelling, 6 in math calculations. He writes sophisticated and creative stories, but has lousy spelling and grammar.
Since mid-grade 3, �fitting in� has become very important to him and he now seems to think that it is �not cool� to be too interested in learning and he has become very disengaged at school. There are some really bright kids in his class, but he seems to relate to the ones who �don�t like school� and act out. I find this worrying, but maybe I just need to be patient and hope that his spark for learning comes back.
