I feel as though I've read a thread about this kind of issue in the past, but I can't find it now - pointers welcome.
Executive summary: I'm looking for tips, gotchas and BTDTs for how to make a situation work in which DS6 will have to do his own maths in a classroom of people doing other stuff on a regular basis.
Background: DS6 is about (in Sept) to enter his third year of school. He has finished the school's usual maths curriculum. There are no sensible "bus him to the next school" options (even if they'd work for him pace-wise and socially).
His class will be small (14) so it's reasonable to expect his teacher to notice whether he's on task and redirect him if not, but it isn't reasonable to expect her to teach him much maths one-to-one, even if she'd be comfortable with the material. I don't know her yet, but she might not ever have seen some of the maths he needs to learn. DH and I can do whatever teaching is needed out of school, but we need a plan for in school.
We discussed "where next?" with his last-year teacher at the end of term, and agreed that the most important thing for this year is that he practises working on hard problems, with learning new material as a secondary aim.
Hard problems is the trickier thing to make work. I'm hoping he may be able to use Alcumus in class. Finding problems for him to do is easy; my concern is what happens when he gets stuck. Of course, if he can get fairly independent about this, that's excellent, but I worry that he may just stare into space, and if that happens regularly then this strand will get dumped, whereas it's really what he needs intellectually. Alcumus has the possibility to give up and get a worked solution, which is something.
New material: he's at the stage of filling in gaps in GCSE-level syllabuses, so we have (again after discussion with last year's teacher) bought a couple of textbooks, with the idea that he could have one to use in class reasonably independently. I'm less worried about this, although there are still practical points that'll need discussion with his teacher, like how it gets decided which questions he should do and when he can go on to another topic.
I'd like to have some thought-through ideas to take into the meeting we'll obviously need to have with his new teacher, and especially to anticipate any problems... comments?
