Aww, you're much more sympathetic towards him about that than I was and I think you may be right. It was also a big shift in his schedule (from 3 days of school for 5 hours to 5 days of school for 7 hours) and I think it was just hard for him to concentrate for that long on new difficult material, especially when it took a lot of concentration to figure out what was going on. Handwriting is definitely still a bit of an issue too, but he's made some progress on that front. It's hard to find time to make him practice the thing he does all day and doesn't like.
While I was reading about hearing loss in kids, I found all sorts of sobering information. Even having a unilateral hearing loss puts kids at a pretty big risk for behavior problems or failing in school. It definitely has a bigger impact than I had ever realized, although granted most kids in those studies have larger hearing losses than my son had (30 dB is usually on the edge of inclusion criteria). Anyways, I think it was definitely a big piece of the puzzle.
The other thing we added over the break was a 'chew toy' in the form of a chew necklace that looks like a Lego. His teacher is loving this thing and thinks it's helping his fidgets (he ate his name tag last semester and was chewing Lego like crazy at home, so I'd imagine it is helpful).
