And now...a conversation with a Maui elementary school principal.
Me: Hello?
Mrs. Principal: Hello, Mrs. PRock, sorry for not getting back to you sooner, I've been out of the office for a few days.
Me: No worries.
That's me assimilating back into island culture. Thanks for noticing
Mrs. Principal: I understand you have some concerns with SonofPRock not being challenged enough in Math and you're interested in some ways we can challenge him more.
Me: Exactly. I was told at the beginning of the year that he would be given an assessment test for Math and be placed accordingly.
Mrs. Principal: Well before we expect Mrs. Q's Teacher to change her curriculum snarky much? 
I'd like to have him take this test to see where he is. You see, he's being given the same monthly assessment all the students are taking. I don't really know what the tests are used for WHAT?! 
but he hasn't scored all that high. I'm not sure if it tests for everything he's supposed to know for the whole year though.
At this point, though I think I was doing a very good job maintaining my cool, I'm pretty sure I looked something like this:
I was on disbelief overload.
Me: Well, ok then. That sounds like a good place to start. In the meantime if you and Mrs. Q's teacher can let me know if there's anything we can do at home or anything we can offer in the way of support. We both work but we really want to be part of the solution to keep him engaged. Right now he seems to not really care because he's so bored. I just don't think he should be completeling his homework correctly in 5 minutes a day.
Mrs. Principal: (hurriedly) OK, well we'll start with this testing.
Me: OK, thanks for the call. I look forward to hearing from you after Q takes the test.
This is the downside of laid back culture that largely goes undiscussed. It's the tendency to avoid anything that might be unpleasant, challenging, painful or otherwise hard in favor of skating by. It makes me ill.
The good news is we're going for an orientation of sorts at the private school up the road in a couple of weeks. I'm going to enroll Q in the Summer session there and I hope he's accepted to start next year. The school is 6th-12th and has a stellar reputation. I'm also hoping for some serious financial aid but if we don't get it, I know I can earn the tuition money with a part-time job until this job goes full-time.
I really don't know any other way to survive living here except to adopt a policy of sickeningly over-the-top optimism. 
It was true love. I have strange ideas that every child deserves awesome experineces with the cool parts of mathematics. It doesn't need to be made something laborious.
What's a Unity Church?
-TM