Child prodigies and skipping grades - practicalities and logistics

[Kevbo]

I was moved from 6th to 7th grade mid-year. I was well ahead in all my classes, and I had the highest scores on the standardized tests. The principal presented it to my parents that I was getting into trouble because of boredom, which is possible, but I think he just wanted me out of his school. I was well advanced in math, because the school was using a self-paced “math lab” open classroom, and I and another kid had sort of a contest going to see who could exhaust the material the fastest. We would actually get in trouble for running to get the next assignment. I was a good reader too, but spelling always has been a bitch for me.

It didn’t turn out too well at first. Junior high kids are the worst as far as bullying. The only kid I knew well in the new school was my next door neighbor who was hanging out with a pretty rough crowd, as in switchblades, brass knuckles and MJ…yes in 7th grade. I didn’t get into any of that stuff, so of course they viewed me as a goody-two-shoes, while the popular kids saw me hanging out with the hoods, so I was shunned by them as well. The jocks were the worst by far, and I never had a smidgen of interest in sports, even though I had played little-league and enjoyed it previously. It didn’t help at all that puberty came late for me. Yes, the boys locker rooms were all open with communal showers, so gym class mostly sucked, except for the swimming and archery units where I excelled due to previous experience,which really pissed off the Jocks when I’d put all my arrows in the bullseye. It seemed like many of the teachers took their cues from the popular kids as far as how they treated students, one even went in for some physical bullying. All in all it made for a pretty strong inferiority complex. Especially with girls.

I finally got a late growth spurt my senior year, (I was 5’10" on my first driver’s license at 16, and 6’5" when I stopped growing at 20 or so) made friends with the school valedictorian, and was finally able to do some extra-curricular stuff as a Senior. A little after I graduated, I was able to get up the nerve to ask out a girl I had a crush on.

College ended up being a great experience for me. I went to a urban extension campus of a state school (University of Colorado at Denver). A lot of the students were working and going to school part time, so ages were all over the place. There were few cliques and really nobody was BMOC. I was in an engineering program, and I don’t think anyone finished in only 4 years…so I lost the year I gained, and left college right at the normal age.

The campus was non-residential, so I lived with my parents. I worked part time at a department store (Montgomery Ward) all through college, so there was no wild partying through college. I think I ended up getting a lot more out of it than most of the engineers I have worked with over the years. They don’t seem to have retained much if they ever got it in the first place. As a result it has been pretty easy to shine technically. All those years of being an outcast really make me hate office politics though, and I have have little interest in, nor talent for management.

[Theobroma]

Well, since you’re asking about logistics, here’s how it worked for me. (Warning: early-grade skip in 1970’s.)

I grew up in Philadelphia, where skipping 2nd grade was pretty common. It didn’t mean you were a “genius” by any means (I moved up with three other kids at the same school at the same time), it meant you were an early reader, that’s all. Second grade was very reading-focused, and if you were already reading at a much higher level, you were going to be really bored and potentially a troublemaker in class.

The way it worked at the time: the teachers decided, presumably based on testing and listening to the kids read, to offer a grade jump to third. A letter was sent home. Then the principal met with the parents to discuss it. If the decision was made to jump ahead, the kid moved to a third-grade class. This was probably around October or so. That’s all it took.

I was always a yakker, so I was socially able to adjust. I was born just before the cutoff, so I was nearly two years younger than most of the other kids from third grade on. I got mocked for being a “know-it-all” and a nerd, not necessarily for being younger. As with some other posters, my real social problems were in middle school, because middle school kids were assholes. I don’t know if being older would have mattered.

I could have graduated high school a year early, but I didn’t want to go to college at 15, so I didn’t bother. Had friends (fellow nerds) in high school. Plenty of friends in college, which I started at 16. I ended up as the youngest pharmacist in the state for a few years.

Bottom line, it got me started on my career a year earlier and I was probably a lot less bored in school. I lived in the dorm in college at 16, and nobody really noticed or cared. Greater age differences might have been more obvious, though. And shy kids might have preferred boredom.

Mando JO had a terrific post in the thread linked in the OP. Summary: bright high school kids today essentially are already in college, if they take the many AP classes on offer at most high schools or an IB program. But they get to hang out with their peers. Sounds like a good arrangement.

[congodwarf]

I was offered the chance to skip from K to 2 but my mother vetoed that without even asking what I wanted. I would have loved it because I was bored to tears in K and 1 and by the time I got to 2 I was bored there too. After a while I stopped pushing myself so I’d stop being bored and I ended up falling behind.
My best friend skipped 8th grade and it was basically a matter of her asking to skip, getting the approval of all her teachers and her vice principal and her mother. So, she skipped. Since she was older anyway, it didn’t make much of a difference (she started school late because of moving from Vietnam to the US).
The community college I just graduated from had a dual enrollment agreement with the high schools in the city, allowing high school students to take college classes. I wish they had that in place when I was in high school because the college was about a mile down the road from my high school and would have been way more interesting than my high school classes.
Another way that kids got around being too smart for their grade was by dropping out. One of my classmates at the CC had dropped out as soon as he was old enough and took the GED right after dropping out. Then he enrolled full time in the CC and took a heavy course load year round so he was about to transfer to state college as a junior - shortly before turning 17. In his case, there was nothing the schools could do. They couldn’t tell him he couldn’t drop out and the CC would take him as long as he had a GED. Dual enrollment wasn’t what he wanted because he wanted out of high school completely. His parents didn’t care where he went to school as long as he was going.