This post, from “If I knew at age 8 what I know now…”
…got me to wondering:
Grade-skippers, glad or sad?
Non-grade-skippers, wish you’d skipped one? If so, which one?
I skipped two grades … well, sort of. In the last month of my fifth grade year I was moved into sixth grade, and then the next September I started seventh, so I skipped most of sixth. I also took one of the 12th grade requirements in night school during 11th grade, and went to summer school after 11th grade to take the other two. Sorry if that’s confusing, anyway bottom line is I graduated from high school two years early.
Do I regret it? Hell no. I regret the fact that my schools had so little to offer me, but that being the case, I’m certain it was right to get me out of them earlier.
I was given the chance of skipping 6th and 7th grades, and decided against it. I have never regretted it. I was already younger than my class to begin with (having started school in New York, where I entered 1st grade at age 5, and moved to Florida, where my classmates had not started 1st grade until age 6), small for my age, and very bookish and nerdy. I could easily keep up with the schoolwork two grades ahead, but I needed those extra two years so that I could develop some better social skills. My experience in college would probably have been miserable if I had started at age 15 instead of age 17.
I am from the UK and I skipped what would be 5th grade in the US. I never regretted it.
However, my son skipped 2nd grade and I’m not sure it was correct, but the circumstances were somewhat different. We moved from the UK to the US and by age he should have gone into 2nd grade. When we checked the syllabuses, we found that he had already done pretty much all of the material (but we won’t hijack into why the US system was a year behind the UK), so we put him in 3rd grade. Given the culture change, the fact that he is shy, and already one of the youngest in his year because of when his birthday falls, it might have been better putting him in 2nd grade to help him adjust more easily. By now, though, it makes little difference. Although he is the youngest boy in his high school, he is doing fine both academically and socially.
I never skipped a grade, but I had a friend who did so. One of the girls in my fifth grade class was a year younger than everyone else, and I think that it wasn’t a good idea for her to be with our age group because there was a noticable difference in maturity level. I guess that as the kids get older it’s not as noticable anymore, but with younger kids it is.
Well, children mature at different rates. And I would hope that maturity level would be one of the things a school would take into account when deciding whether or not to let a particular child skip.
I skipped nursery school, since I insisted I wanted to read a book instead of take the mandatory nap. The teacher refused to believe that I could actually read until my Mom set her straight. That led to a jump into kindergarden a year earlier than most, and from then on, I was younger than all my classmates.
Not a problem, except around puberty. I was the only male in the soprano section of the mixed choir.
I skipped two grades. Yes, I did have a hard time fitting in with the older kids, but I think I would have had a hard time socially regardless. Being more intellectual than most kids my age, I wasn’t really interested in the same things they were, so even if I had stayed behind, I think I would have been an outsider.
I don’t regret skipping grades. I hated the confining environment of K-12 school (I used to ask my mother to homeschool me) and it ended not a moment too soon. Now that I’m in college, everything has evened out since there is a wider range of ages and intellects within any given class.
I was bounced forward and back a few times, and also attended half a dozen schools. It made for more interesting experiences and a wider circle of friends.
My last high school was a bit dull, so I skipped my senior year and went directly to university, which I tremendously enjoyed.
I have an August birthday, so I was already fairly young for my grade. Then I skipped 8th and 9th grade, which is a bit later than a lot of people skip grades. It meant I was a 13 year old among 15 and 16 year olds - possible the worst situation, socially, to be in, exacerbated by my hitting puberty fairly late. So socially it was a little awkward (although I never really had trouble making friends; oddly, most of my friends tended to be seniors and juniors, so even older).
However, it was all part of the greater plan to get to the Math and Science high school of my state (which was 11th and 12th grade only) before I ran out of math and science classes to take. So for that year I accepted it without trouble. When I got to the Math and Science high school, I proceeded to have the best two years of my life. I don’t regret skipping grades one bit.
I’ve skipped two and third grades (my senior year of high school, and a year of college, and I’m cutting a third off of my Master’s program), and I don’t regret it. The worst part of being a 20 year-old masters student is not being able to go to bars with your friends, but not everything revolves around drinking.
My dad’s really happy that I’ve saved him around 40 thousand dollars (skipping a year of college and semester of grad school), and I’m excited to be done with school earlier. I feel like I’ve gotten it out of the way, or something.
So, no regrets from this end. 
I skipped seventh grade, and I’ve never regretted it for a second. I didn’t leave any friends behind, because both of them stayed in touch. And I had the opportunity to create an actual social life from scratch with a new group of classmates who didn’t yet know that I was a total nerd.
Also, my dad was the one seventh-grade math teacher at my junior high school. God, would that have been a nightmare. (As confirmed by my little sister, who had to survive a year of his class.)
I went to kindergarten at a traditional school, but my elementary school was different. It was a progressive school and instead of having grades, there were four ‘colonies’. Colony 1 was K-1, Colony 2 was grades 2-3, Colony 3 was grades 3-4, Colony 4 was grades 5-6. The lines blurred a lot, kids were graduated into the higher colonies when they proved ability to do harder work.
I skipped most of Colony 1 because I could read at a much higher grade level. So I was placed with older kids, and I don’t think I got my math basics down as well as I could have. To this day, I still suck at math and I blame my premature advancement.
I think I would have been happier had I not skipped. I believe would have achieved more as well. But it is what it is and I’m happy with who I have become.
I skipped grade six, which wasn’t much of a big deal. I’d always been in split classes, and had pretty much been doing the higher grade’s work anyways. So in actuality, it was just a case of moving on to the geographically appropriate side of the classroom.
However, I often worry that there’s a really simple word out there that I was supposed to learn in grade six but never did, or some alternate method of division or something.
I skipped seventh and wish I’d skipped 8th as well. I went to grade school in Mexico and they’re more than a wee bit ahead of many US schools. Total waste of a year, academically. Coming from a prim and proper Catholic school environment, it was quite a shock dealing with Jr. High hormone hi-jinks, too. Don’t know if it was a good or bad thing that I was younger than the rest at that point, though.
I’m not sure if I really count because all I skipped was kindergarten. There was really no reason for me to take K because my parents taught me so much beforehand - I was reading Dr. Seuss books at the age of two. My birthday is in August so I had just turned five when I started first grade, and I was in the gifted program.
So I was basically 2 years younger than the rest of my class, I graduated at 16. I don’t regret it at all. I would have been treated like crap by any group of kids I was put into. 
The difference with me, I think, is that I started that way - it wasn’t like I was just suddenly moved from one peer group to another, my peers were just ALWAYS a year or two older than me. And hell, half the time I had was at a higher maturity level than the rest of them.
The only things that really annoyed me were that my high school has mandatory drivers’ ed. in 10th grade - when I was 14. That was pointless. And I ended up riding the bus to school every freaking day until I graduated. That was a pain in the ass.
I’m now a 19-year-old college junior, and I’ll graduate when I’m 20. Like The Wrong Girl said, it’s tough not to be able to drink with your friends, but life ain’t all about alcohol. I really don’t regret it for a minute, because I was way ahead of the class I ended up in anyways, plus I have fantastic and wonderful friends that I would probably never have associated with had I not been that year ahead.
Skipped second grade, and never looked back. I was a pretty articulate and very sociable kid, so I did okay with the third-graders.
Might be easier for girls than boys. Being shorter than all the other kids doesn’t matter so much for girls…and the “late bloomer effect” wasn’t so bad for me. A short, skinny pre-pubescent boy in high school might have more trouble adjusting than a short, skinny girl, for obvious reasons. (Not that I was ever skinny, you understand…)
I suppose I might have had more problems with acting out in class from boredom if I hadn’t skipped. I do agree with those posters who suggest that social adjustment is certainly an important consideration. Being 2 years younger than your classmates as a teen can be a problem, but in my own case it just wasn’t.
We moved to a different state when I was in the middle of first grade, and I was placed in second grade in the new town. It was a lot of work at first, because the class was working on things I hadn’t been exposed to. Also, I was a year younger than the rest of them, which led to some teasing. But I did catch up, and ended up at the top of the class. So it was stressful at first, but a big source of satisfaction that I could accomplish it.
In the long run, I don’t know if it was good, bad, or made no difference.
I wish I had skipped a grade during elementary school. 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade… whichever. I remember those early years as being extremely boring. I always finished my work before everyone else and had usually read all the books in the class several times. For some reason, I was under the impression that school was supposed to be mind numbingly dull.
I finally slacked off in middle and high school because of boredom and apathy. I really regret that now.
If I had it to do over again, I would have applied myself much sooner.