OK, great advice as usual here. Thank you!
As far as the teacher's background, he is a second career teacher. He was an engineer for a few years (maybe 5-8) and then decided he wanted to teach. He has been teaching for about 10 years and maintains a consulting firm on the side. The school that he teaches at is a county public magnet school. The students have to test into the school, so I'm sure they are getting some top students.
I wasn't actually thinking of putting DS into a college class. That would be nuts. I myself was a bit confused (that's why I came here!) when the teacher suggested that DS should be working at the college level - when DS is just starting algebra in the fall.
I'm just going to keep doing what we're doing and see how the first lego league goes. I was able to get him into an older group on a trial basis, since the group leader doesn't know him.
I just worry that I'm not doing enough for DS. Like, that really gnaws away at me. In my mind it's like having a very gifted dancer in my house, and I'm only letting her dance in her pack n play. And the worry is fueled by my huge weakness in his areas of strength. I don't have a sense of what the typical sequence is in a lot of these subjects. The extent of my STEM education includes all of the AP classes offered in those subjects many years ago (minus the programming classes). DH is helpful, though he tells me that he wasn't truly challenged until he was working on his Ph.D. - when he was 18. So DH has the experience, but I do the legwork in terms of finding the appropriate resources for DS.
