The next issue is does he find regular class soul sucking or tolerable?
That is my concern. He has actually been doing surprisingly well behaviorally this year, but his teacher did mention (in reply to my completely unrelated email about a spelling word that I posted in the bad homework thread) that he sometimes has trouble focusing and paying attention. The fact that she brought this up in a completely unrelated discussion concerns me a little. Oddly enough, I fear that the gifted program actually make the regular classwork seem more boring since he now has something to compare it to, kwim? And the way the teacher mentioned this "focus" problem also implied to me that she is not recognizing that the material is not challenging enough. However, I can see how it could be missed because he doesn't ace every assignment due to not reading the questions or trying to rush through it to get done first, both of which we are working on and making progress. He just brought home a math test with a 100% that he was proud of. I had a hard time getting him to understand that I was proud of his performance not because he got 100%, but because it was obvious from the test that he had actually carefully read the questions and put forth the necessary effort in explaining his answers, which he tends to resist. LOL, he sometimes "showed his work" by illustrating the word problems (literally drawing a map of the girl's trip to the zoo and the park, complete with animals and swings!) but the teacher seemed satisfied. Anyways, for my kid who is what I call a lazy perfectionist (usually thinks he should know the answer without ever paying attention to the lesson or reading the instructions) this is a huge step forward for him. So thus far 3rd grade has been good for him, but I worry that boring, underchallenging work in the regular classroom might ultimately undermine this. But then again, he's doing pretty well overall, not getting in trouble, so maybe I should just leave well enough alone. I mean, he does need to learn how to deal with boring assignments too, right?
