m_o_n: your reply brought me to tears. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with my kid. It's a shame that some grown-ups are so narrow-minded that their tolerance for individual differences is so little. I still can't believe she actually said "no one can be THAT good", this is infuriating.
I started to talk with DS last night about this, but he was so upset that I thought I'd better wait. I very much want to let him know that adults make mistakes, adults don't know everything and every type of kids. And he should remember that he is a great kid. I will let his regular teacher know about this, too.
SPG: I totally agree that this is DS's sensitivity to unfairness brought out by an ignorant teacher. It would be great if he could ignore it. But it's hard for an 8-year-old when grown-ups are still authority figures and adult approval is so important to him.
I have always been afraid of communications with teachers. My previous experience wasn't good. Teachers tended to think that this is just another pushy mom trying to gain some advantage for her kid. DS used to talk to teachers himself about the school work being too easy and he wanted more challenge. But he shut up last year after seeing no result coming from all this and the teacher last year happened to be particularly dismissive. But just in the past week or so I started talking with other parents. I just can't believe that DS is the only kid in his grade who has this type of problems. Even though nothing concrete has come out yet, I've already found a few parents who want to see more challenge for their kids. We've started talking about forming a math club.
This year's teacher is actually doing something different (or at least trying to). She does group kids by abilities, and she also gives DS extra work on top of this. The only problem is that she doesn't have time to supervise DS, so DS does all the extra work himself but no one checks to see if he is doing alright. Still, this is so much better than last year.
Inky and chris1234: thanks so much for supporting the idea of seeing a psychologist. I really hoped that it would not be necessary, counseling is expensive.
I also checked with our health insurance and they said that usually this is not covered. I checked out those two books. But I'm a bit concerned about letting DS read them now. At this very moment he doesn't want to be different from other kids, so giving him a book that gives a label to kids like him might make the matter worse. But one of these days I will start the process of making him realize that everyone is different (just in different ways) and he needs to accept who he is and what comes with it.
