Math instructions fail right out of the box when they say "show your work." It doesn't exist. There isn't "work" to show. It isn't that it happens so fast; it is that it comes together so differently between lots of connections in the brain. So, a gifted kid is forced to lie by answering something that says "show your work."
So "show your work" needs to be redefined, perhaps as "explain it for someone who doesn't have your skill." There are lots of ways of repackaging it: "if you had a tiny robot who could only move one number at a time, how would you instruct it to solve this problem" anything like that. It also helps to model explanations yourself. In a grocery store, I talk out loud converting to price per unit or price per ounce. I've also used the eating an elephant one bite at a time example. There are some mental math tricks that make large problems easy to solve and patterns that simplify things. If you start with something crazy large and show tricks, that may also get him to look at things as puzzles and not "problems." Like what is 9998 times 103?
DS7 has PG level math skills and mixed farsightedness (one eye is more extreme than the other.) He struggles with handwriting, but is praised for his explanations of what he does in math.
