"She assured me that he is being challenged in her classroom, though, and I should not assume that what I see coming home as homework is the same thing that they are doing in the classroom. She said that her lessons in the classroom are much more challenging (doesn't really make sense to me, but...ok). "
LOL. This is almost verbatim what DS6s math teacher said to us. He is in 1st at a regular school where they ability group and differentiate instruction (they rearrange classes for math), accelerate (complete the exact same curriculum but in 20% less time, and offer enrichment (enrichment is "gifted" problem packets from up to one grade ahead during the extra time).
In our school the kids are in this way kept from working to their ability, without unduly alarming the parents (ability grouping, differentiation, acceleration and enrichment are all such lovely sounding words that the parents seem almost uniformly thrilled to have their kids in the enrichment group). So by about 4th grade they are all on the same page, literally. It's a brilliantly executed system.
DS says he works as slowly as possible on his "gifted" problems because if he finishes one set he just gets another nearly identical one. It's a different type of challenge than we assume when we hear the word "challenge".
So what to do. We met with the teacher, and heard the nice phrase above about the lesson part being challenging. But in talking to DS he is not reporting it being the least bit enriching. A nice parent volunteer mentions to me that in fact he sometimes wanders aimlessly during work time, not something the teacher mentioned. The teacher does send home undone problem sets, which we don't return, and she does not mention it. So it seems we've come to a kind of understanding, one of a lack of expectation on both sides. To my mind, letting him daydream as much as possible is a good thing, because the alternative is demanding perfection at overly dull material. I am afraid of what we would get if we complained. Perhaps he could skip the first grade gifted problem sets and move to the second grade. And what would that solve? If he was multiple grades ahead and interested in math it would be different, I would go and battle. But he is sloppy, mildly obstinate, doesn't really want a single extra problem.
We are doing partial homeschool anyways, which gives us time. It also gives DS time to play with Lego and other building toys, which I consider good math foundation work.
At home, we are attempting to show DS a more interesting side of math. As he's been thinking that math consisted mainly of counting. We're doing Beast Academy 3rd grade which has a comic book style, really nice friendly format, but still we find the instruction parts long and repetitive, and he finds some of the problems intimidatingly visual-spatial. We wish there were more word problem type problems. But it's a good starting point for us. I think there's hope for DS to like math, yesterday for example he said he needed to know how to calculate how long it would take to walk over a rainbow.
So longer term our plan I guess is to get him to evenly master objectives from at least a couple of grades up and then see if having him be more obviously different helps to make it obvious he needs real differentiation.
