That's great, st pauli girl and ultramarina.
We were set up with a brief meeting with the district math consultant, at the suggestion of the principal. When we showed up, it turned into a full-blown TAT meeting (we felt slightly blindsided). The math consultant, who apparently recommended two months of math-fact drills to start off the year in our Title I district, had not been provided with details about our son; he said he meets children like him "all the time", that they are our country's future engineers, and that what they need most is a solid foundation, including knowledge of how to add up numbers in different ways at the second-grade level (a la Everyday Math). We mentioned that the new teacher had said she planned to assess his proper instructional level, and asked for confirmation-- which she began to give, only to have the principal break in and say that the discussion shouldn't be about levels, but about providing a broad, deep foundation. :| We said, for the umpteenth time, that we would be fine with anything that provided him with an appropriate challenge, and which didn't artificially restrict his progression to new math concepts as he was ready.
We met afterwards with the teacher, and got a good feeling. She is either on the same page as us, or is giving us a newer, tastier flavor of the party line designed to keep us quiet.
She said our son has fit in well already in her class, and that she hopes to be able to challenge him (she said he was talking about
i the other day, which forced her to go look up what he was talking about).
She told us, which we hadn't known before, that our son was without pencil and paper not only for most of the first MAP testing session, but also the second one-- so he mostly did the math in his head to achieve a score that should prove conclusively to the school that he should really be in much higher-grade classroom for math, and that he's so far beyond their second-grade curriculum that he has really plumbed the depths already.
She asked permission to have him retake the math MAP in February, which we gave.
DS fairly suddenly began having headaches and extreme light sensitivity, and it turned out that his vision was suddenly, rapidly worsening. One pair of bifocals later, and he's back to reading more than ever.
