> My biggest fear at the moment is for his excitement at learning being crushed when he starts school.

That happened to my little brother. He was reading a lot of books before he started school, but somehow un-learned it while being there. "I can't read that because we haven't learned about the letter K, yet" was something you could hear him say.

Maybe try explaining to him that school and other institutions tend to optimize for the average person, so unless his goal is being average, he'll need to take responsibility.

I had the exact same problem you are describing. Unfortunately, I never found a good answer on "how to do it right".

In the end, third party apps mostly fixed the problem for me. Hyperswitch (https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch) for switching between windows instead of apps and uBar (https://brawersoftware.com/products/ubar) for minimizing and maximizing apps by clicking their icon in the task bar.

I hope this helps.