I love hearing everyone's point of view. This is tremendously helpful!
Sweetie what a great idea, to have a little surprise activity on a little note to open in the car. Collinsmum, your son is so sweet :-)

I will try to find the textbooks on the teacher's websites, and print screen shots of sample pages for him. He's never been worried about academics before, ever. But he's never had a class that I'd consider rigorous, either.

How would we define rigorous, in a middle school honors math class? how would it be different from the accelerated 7 class? It's Algebra I versus. doublespeed 7/8 math. Can anyone offer guesses or experiences? The teacher isn't worried about Accelerated 7, but she is about Algebra. Why?