While my son's scores on the WISC-IV are nowhere near as high as your son's, the pattern of highs and lows is very similar - high VCI, lower PRI, very low PSI. My son has significant fine motor deficits and some visual processing problems that are not picked up with an ordinary eye exam - left-sided visual neglect, scotopic sensitivity, problems with tracking and convergence, poor figure-ground discrimination, and so on. He also has formal diagnoses of Asperger's Syndrome and Disorder of Written Expression.
My son just has problems with tracking and convergence but I am not quite sure that he has been well diagnosed from the visual point of view. Indeed, I am quite sure that visual problems play a major part in his dyslexia, but the specialists (seeing therapist and speech)do not really hear me on that ... I am not a specialist
I do not know how it works in the US, but in France, specialists (and especially the doctors and professors) have the knowledge and you are just nothing for them (a bit caricatural but not very far from reality). So the game is to find the best ones and hope to be heard just a little bit. The few times I worked with people from North America I had the feeling to be heard even by well-known people in my working area.
Kindergarten was miserable; he was constantly depressed and frustrated because everything was either too easy or too hard. This rapidly progressed to outright refusal or avoidance behavior when asked to do anything involving a writing task or really any visual or motor task that he didn't think he'd be able to do, or anything that he'd mastered so long ago that he felt it was insulting. He had a choice of trying to do the work and having evidence stare him in the face that he was incapable, or refusing and getting consequences for being disobedient, but not being ashamed of not being able to complete the written work acceptably (which he clearly saw was not difficult for others). He would rather have been seen as disobedient than as stupid. Refusing to work allowed him to preserve some shred of his self esteem, but at a huge cost. The consequences of being in this kind of a school situation were a big part of our decision to homeschool.
I have the feeling that nothing is easy for my son at school. Kindergarten was not that bad for him, nevertheless, it was during this year that we truly realized that things were taking a bad turn and also that the teacher told us about giftedness (without her, maybe we would have still been in the ignorance, because we would not have considered that hypothesis). Also, during this year he often told us that he knew everything ... we just did not here him and said things like :"if that is easy, why don't you work ?" (actually we told him in French
)
MAy be he's behaving as you say concerning desobedience.
Based on my experiences with my own child, "work" that is appropriate to the PSI level or that requires a lot of motor output or handwriting, but is not at or at least near the challenge point for the VCI and PRI level is a recipe for disaster.
Well, I guess we are into that ...
