Sounds hopeful, Iucounu. Liking the teacher is hugely important, I think.
Progress here: we had a good meeting with DS7's new maths and science teacher. (The "high powered maths lady" (mentor?) doesn't seem to be materialising, so far, but as we never had a clear idea of what that would involve anyway, no worries; I'm going to take their attempt at that as another sign of flexibility, and not worry if every such attempt doesn't come off.) She seems to have sensible ideas, although she was clearly only just starting to get to know DS. She was worried about gaps :-( and apparently DS is currently doing an exam paper that they normally give to 13yos, on a syllabus he finished at the end of the last school year but one. He describes it as "easy" but then also says he got stuck on a problem involving a pie chart - argh, it shouldn't be possible for anything of that nature to trip him up! Still, I can't imagine he's going to do badly enough on that to undo the resolve to give him appropriate things to do, and if he has forgotten certain things and they want him to revisit them, it's probably sensible - I just hope they will watch for the difference between "this kid never understood these concepts" (definitely false at this level) and "this kid made arithmetic slips" (bound to be true, requires no action) and "this kid has forgotten a concept here" (could be true, though I doubt it would be anything major, revisiting would be reasonable). I think they will. This teacher also seems happy to select appropriate problems for him to do in class (and seems to be doing fine so far) so I don't have to do this any more. We're doing a bit of calculus at home from time to time, and they know that at school, but there doesn't seem to be any reason for it to interact with what they do there. They're keen to get him more involved in working with others in the class, and it'll be interesting to see how that goes. Could be good; so far, the activity he reports was a game based around place value, where he really doesn't need any reinforcement, but apparently it was fun and I'm not actually against his doing things just for fun in maths classes occasionally. Fingers crossed he's going to be entered into his first timed maths competition this term - there seems to be some resistance somewhere in the system to him doing that, and I'm not clear on where it's coming from and whether it's an actual objection or just "we don't normally do this" inertia, but it sounds as though it may work. It would actually be quite good for him to encounter the concept of other people being better at maths than he is yet :-) and working with a time limit would be an interesting challenge for him, I think.
Other aspects of school also seem to be going pretty well - his anxiety has abated now that he's actually started, and he seems to be getting into the routine and being interested across the board. I'm hoping for a good year.
