Wow - how frustrating for you and your child! I second the busy work theory.

If it is a brick wall at school, have you found ways to enrich at home? My son has started playing with Scratch, a kid-friendly programming tool developed by MIT. It allows for some fun exploration of initial programming concepts with quite a few options to expand on the software with the child's on images, etc.

~Lisa
http://www.lisaabeyta.wordpress.com/