I skipped two grades and graduated at 15. I absolutely hated having to do it and it took me a long time to get over that anger. That’s all I’m going to say about it now.
I read well before Kindergarten. Just like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, I had teachers complain about my mother supposedly having taught me to read “the wrong way.” Actually, she just read stories to us, and I followed along in the book. I don’t remember not being able to read.
Anyway, in first grade everyone was so far ahead, Mom would keep me home from school, thinking maybe the others would catch up. Of course, what I did while at home was read, thus getting farther ahead than ever. So she sent me back to school to slow me down.
After Christmas break when I went back to my first grade classroom, the teacher brusquely told me “You are not in this class any more. Go to Room 5. You are in second grade now,” or words to that effect. In later years I have thought it a little odd that no one, not even my parents, prepared me for that abrupt transition.
As far as results, I missed the arithmetic foundations that the other second-graders had been learning for 3 months, and I am still a little bit arithmetic-challenged, in my opinion. Socially, it was awful. I was still smarter and more bookish than the others in my class, plus having been changed mid-year made me all the more odd, as it hadn’t been done before in our little school. I was never very athletic, being very nearsighted, and being the youngest in the class didn’t help any.
They didn’t find out for 2 more years that I couldn’t see. Whether I took to reading earlier because I was myopic (couldn’t see a baseball, but I could see a book) or whether having my nose in a book all day stunted the development of the eye muscles for distance viewing, as well as my hand-eye coordination, is an open question.
Later on, in junior HS, age became an issue again, as I was out of synch with my classmates on puberty and other social issues.
A few years after I skipped, they skipped a neighbor boy into my 4th grade class out of 3rd grade. We had a really good teacher that year, who had taken extra education in teaching the gifted in preparation for the two of us. I think our parents thought we’d be a good couple, romantically. For a while I did, too, since I had no boyfriends. Many years later I found out that he had at some point after graduation revealed that he was gay, so that was a matchup that was never going to happen anyway.
Now, after all that, here’s the good part. It really sucked being the skinniest and the youngest in high school. But at the 15th HS reunion, it rocked. I was still the skinniest and the youngest, and had some actual accomplishments, in comparison to the busty cheerleaders I had envied, who had now blossomed into shallow matrons who could no longer succeed on just their good looks.
There was one person I had secretly hated and envied all during school. She was absolutely top-notch at every sport, and had long, thick auburn hair. She used to pick on me from time to time, and I envied her robustness and her self-confidence. We met up again at the reunion and talked about our grade-school days. She was shocked that I envied her. “I always envied you,” she said. "I was so embarrassed that you could read so easily, and I couldn’t. " So we wasted all those years we could have been friends, because once that was out of the way we really did get along well as adults.
I skipped 3rd grade, and the only result was that I never properly learned my times tables. I compensated by learning multiple of numbers manually.
It was strange starting 4th grade as a 9 year old, but didn’t really affect me that much.
Before the skip, I was given tests galore. I saw the school psychologist for an IQ test, I was given reading tests, etc. Apparently I had a 11th grade reading level by the end of 2nd grade, and my mom was given a choice of having me attend a gifted school or to skip 3rd grade. I was 5th on the waiting list for the gifted school, so 4th grade it was.
I skipped one half-year in grade school, and then another. In our small school, each teacher taught the same level from year to year, and there was only one classroom full of kids for each year. This meant that everybody normally went through the same teachers and classrooms as their older siblings had done. In my case, I got to skip the two teachers who were regarded as the most overbearing by the kids.
In another respect it didn’t work out so well, because I wasn’t strong in math, and this didn’t help.
I was 17 when I started college. I went away and lived in the dorms, and adjusted quite well.
That was my experience, and I think teachers really need to be more sensitive to it. We moved a lot, and changed schools a lot. In one school I was a whiz at addition and subtraction, but then I switched schools and all of the sudden all the other kids had already pretty much memorized their multiplication tables and were learning division. The teacher’s idea for motivating me to catch up was to make me stand in front of class and let everyone laugh at me while I screwed up multiplication. Fucking cunt. I was never good at math after that, and it definitely changed my life choices.
I think there is a huge difference between skipping a lower grade and busting your hump to graduate high school a year earlier: hurrying through high school doesn’t effect your socialization nearly as much.
As a teacher, many of the kids I see that are substantially younger than their peers struggle with it. Very often, what they do is either withdraw completely or they start hanging out with kids even older than their peers–where the age difference is accepted and allowed–I can’t tell you how many of these kids end up the “honorary kid sibling” of a much older crowd. This can be ok, but if the much older crowd is a little wild, it can be concerning. 18 year olds don’t always think through the fact that they are getting a 13 year old drunk or high.
I don’t think skipping grades often accomplishes what it is supposed to: a kid who is bored in 1st grade is likely to be bored in 2nd grade as well. Gifted kids need different stuff, not the same stuff faster.
My parents were told I should be skipped (I think because I was making trouble in the classroom, not because I seemed exceptionally smart), and my mom especially was really against the idea. They ended up instead taking me out of that particular school and enrolling me on a gifted school (not private school, run by the school board). My mom was worried because the new school was far away, and I’d have to take the city bus there by myself at the age of 9. But this was a safe little town and that was never a problem.
Looking back I’m really glad they made that decision. I was bored out of my mind in the first school and just bumping me up wouldn’t have really addressed that. I was already a bit young due to my late-year birthday, and was introverted and not very socially adept. Come high school I was already self-conscious of how my friends could drive, drink, date, etc, before I could - even six months in age difference can seem extreme to a high schooler.
Also, by the time I got to university I realized how little difference it makes. So you finish university at 19 or 20 instead of 21 or 22 - it no longer makes much of a difference, IMHO. Once you are in the workforce or in grad school or something it fades into a background detail, but when you are young it really matters to you. It seems like some (but certainly not all) kids lose a bit of their childhood by being rushed along like that.
Yeah, a year of middle school. Turned out great–I found my best friend in the upper class, and the academic work was pretty much the same one way or another.
I graduated a semester early. I took summer school to get all the credits I needed.
This I strongly agree with. I think skipping a grade is often a short term cop out solution without real long term benefits in terms of providing challenge.
I skipped the first grade. As a result, I was a year younger than everyone else and promptly became the designated target for bullying. It didn’t help that I was head and shoulders smarter than everyone else in the class, either.
I have mixed feelings about that. In my case, decades ago, there was little alternative. My parents would have (I found out much later) liked to put me in a private school that would in their opinion have been better suited to my abilities. I don’t know what the financial issues would have been, although I think they could have managed it, since they owned our home free of any mortgage. My father years later griped that I was refused admission because he was a mere factory worker and not a professional.
There was no such thing as a gifted & talented enrichment program then. Would I have been better off bored out of my mind, learning nothing, remaining in first grade, but with my age-group peers? Obviously my parents didn’t think so. Would my social adaptation have been better? Maybe, maybe not. I would still have been the skinny geeky kid who couldn’t hit a softball.
I was moved to second grade halfway through my first-grade year in 1991. I didn’t particulary care.
Were you challenged academically in the 2nd grade class? More importantly, would it be the choice you’d make for your own kid? Just because it was the best choice then doesn’t mean it’s the best choice ever.
Had I a very gifted kid, I would try to do a lot of home enrichment–not in the subjects they were already learning in school, but in topics that they never get to in school–books that schools don’t read, philosophy, logic, computer programing, botany, whatever. If they were interested in topics I couldn’t teach, I’d try to find people or resources that could. I might, if it were possible, have my kid moved up in certain select topics–take math class with a higher grade, say. But reading? Any kid gifted enough to talk about skipping grades is reading 4-5 years above grade level, so what’s the difference between 4th grade and 5th grade?
I see a lot of potential harm in skipping a grade, and not a lot of benefit for most kids. (If there were a real and obvious reason for wanting to graduate early, I could see it–like a kid that was on track to be an Olympic athlete or something, and the earlier they graduated the better).
My first day of school was at the nursery level. There was early conflict, as I wanted to read a book when nap time came. The teacher wouldn’t let me, saying I was lying – I was too young to know how to read. Crying and violence resulted.
When my mother – a teacher in another school – came to pick me up, my teacher told her about my outrageous fit & fib. She was set straight, as I had been taught how to read long before that. Because of this incident, I was deemed unfit for nursery school and bumped up to kindergarden.
So I was about a year ahead of my classmates from then on. It wasn’t a problem (I was usually ahead of them academically anyway), but at puberty, my body hadn’t caught up with my mind. I was the only boy soprano in the 8th grade choir, as evidenced by the picture.
So I don’t recommend skipping a grade, for social reasons.
When I was growing up in Wisconsin, I attended a couple schools where grades were mixed. If you were in 2nd grade but could do the 3rd graders’ work, you just did.
Do they not do that anymore?
Sort of. I finished high school early and graduated at the end of 11th grade. The only effect was that I was not of drinking age when I went to college, but since my college was in a dry town and in a state with a drinking age of 21, it didn’t really matter.
Well, here’s the thing. Our home already was very enriched. Although both had been prevented by their families from attending college, they valued education highly. When I was not at school, I read. Everything. At home we had classical fiction, geography, science, and I read it all. We were regulars at the local library. There was not a whole lot more they could have done to enrich the home environment. One of my favorites was an astronomy book. I also from time to time read the dictionary.
This was the 50s. The school system at the time could not even begin to think about a child taking some classes in one grade and some in another. Everything was supposed to be homogenized. And in first grade, learning to read and to count was everything. In addition to those we had music, art, and phys ed., but that was it. So when I went to first grade, well over half the time, maybe 75% or more, was spent doing something I had known how to do for years. Would it have been good for me to sit there, bored and anxious, waiting for everyone else to laboriously sound out “See Jane run. Run, Jane, run.”?
As far as my own kids, they both read pre-K too. By then I was on the local school board and you wanna bet your life there was a G & T program. And in the 70s, at least in our town, the schools were much more accepting of the fact that not all children mature and learn at the same rate. A kindergarten teacher told me, before my oldest was in school, that she was perfectly fine with the fact that on the first day of school a certain number of her students had not the slightest idea what the alphabet is, and that some could already read well. “We take them where they are,” she said. She also said that she was there to teach the basics: how to learn, how to behave in a classroom, how to get along with others, and so on. “The rest,” she said, “we will get to when they are ready to learn it.” Smart teacher.
I am not at all attacking your parent’s choices. I agree it may well have been the best option given the time period. But didn’t you sit in second grade just as bored? They were reading slightly more advanced stuff, but couldn’t you also read that easily? This is an honest question. I was never skipped a grade, but I was sent ahead for some subjects, and I was always quickly as bored there as I had been in the other class–I just quit thinking of school as a place where you learn things.
Thanks, I didn’t think you were attacking, just that you might have been unaware of how lockstep education was at the time.
At least in second grade they were learning other things in addition to reading. I do not recall being as bored. First of all, I was struggling to learn this math stuff they were doing. The weird thing was, I knew how to count and to make change. I learned the latter so that I could be allowed to play Monopoly with my older sister. But second grade math was different. You had to put the numbers into columns, and manipulate them in ways unfamiliar to me. So I guess one advantage was that I learned a little humility.
The reading groups were IIRC separated out into top, middle and low skill groups. Of course, they were called the Bluebirds, the Robins and something else, but everybody knew what the names meant. Also there was rudimentary American history, some geography, and they had better books. And we learned how to write as opposed to print, which was interesting and challenging.
Despite all the weirdness, I did love school.