I’m writing in response to this:
Finally, he scored as expected, 700 in math, 590 verbal, in line with all previous testing. But in school he continues to struggle with any written/verbal responses. He says the words go away or he forgets what he's saying in the middle of the sentence. His working memory is dual 19 level, so I just can't figure out what's going on. The school says he's not trying, he insists he is. He is so stressed about every subject but math because there is so much work to do and he can't even get the first word down in the time it takes other students to complete the assignment. I'm at a loss and at this point I'm usually angry with him because I just don't get it. How can you consistently score 96-98th%ile on verbal measures and be unable to produce written work while being fully able to verbally complain about said written work for hours on end? So frustrating. He's getting poor grades in English, science, and social studies for incomplete assignments. He gets A's, often 100's on tests. Last year he was distinguished honor roll all 3 trimesters, now he says he doesn't care about his grades because the work is too hard and he's given up.
My son is gifted and has a learning disability “written expression disorder” and auditory processing disorder (specifically the kind where it’s hard to process what you hear when there’s a lot of background noise). He also has a deficit in writing fluency. He does have some working memory issues, probably related to APD.
My son is younger, but he had similar issues: often says he doesn’t know what to write, does better in class on math than other subjects, takes tons more time than peers to write. He has gifted level scores on verbal. He reads at a very advanced level, speaks intelligently and articulately, is great at public speaking and presentations. Prior to diagnosis, school would say he’s being stubborn or had executive functioning issues (task initiation). His handwriting was slow to develop and I worked on it with him at home over several years, so the school would say his handwriting is beautiful, but not take into account it needed a lot of time and support to be functional. For him it’s less of a motor strength issue, more of a motor memory issue.
He has a 504 with accommodations now, for writing the biggest difference is graphic organizers. His teacher would make graphic organizers that went along with the curriculum. For example, he needed to do extended responses to each chapter in a book his class was reading. He had a sheet that broke down the extended response in a visual way: line 1 general answer to question, line 2 quote from passage that supports answer, etc. learning models for writing is very helpful he learned the hamburger model for paragraph writing and steps in the writing process. He prefers to use a Google docs for anything longer than a sentence because it allows him to shuffle things around and use spelling/grammar check. It’s all about making writing more visual.
He still says it’s very hard to write with background noise, particularly any voices or music lyrics. As you can imagine this is what school is like everyday. I think that’s related to APD, we’re still figuring it out.
I’m not trying to diagnose your son… but wanted to share that my son had similar feelings about and performance in writing. Grades and testing were always fine. But he was frustrated with writing. I had a strong feeling about that gap between what he was reading and what he was writing was out of the ordinary. I had to do private testing and really push the school to address him.
