You can find lots more anecdotes, including mine, here.
That’s it, all right. I hadn’t realized that it went back quite so far. My anecdotal evidence is that there was no ill effect for my friends who went into the 2 year program vs. those of us who went into the 3 year one, and by high school there was no distinction made for who went where.
Another anecdote, if I may?..
Skipped first grade. I was already behind my peers socially , so it was a bit of a disaster to be honest, although I was at the top of my class for the rest of school. I was picked on mercilessly from the time I skipped first grade until my classmates turned to better entertainments, like drinking and sex (and so did I). I’d learned how to read, write and do math while still a toddler so first grade wasn’t necessary, I guess. I had some friends in the first grade, then after the switch, basically none until I was 16 and about to graduate.
Now, though, I’m fine. You’d never know I was once a little freak of nature.
Were you among students of roughly equal intelligence in high school. My parents didn’t let me go to the 2 year program (I was young anyway) and I had no ill effects I can determine. However my high school was very large, there were lots of smart kids, and in those days they believed in tracking, so I was seldom bored.
I never minded not skipping - especially because if I had, I would have probably been drafted. :eek:
My wife and I were speculating (with some basis) this morning about the possibility that our kid might know everything he’s supposed to know by the end of Kindergarten before Kindergarten. That got us thinking about things like skipping grades.
Thanks for the data and anecdotes so far, everyone. From the research, it appears that assuming the kid really does fit the criteria, acceleration is a good thing.
Since this morning I’ve come to think what I’d really want to do is just start him out in Kindergarten a year early, but looking around on the Net I get the idea that schools are even more reluctant to do this for legal reasons.
ETA: Regarding socialization, my wife reminded me that in fact, our kid generally plays with kids who are a little older than him anyway, so maybe that’s a good sign.
-Kris
Skipped kindergarten, was still top of my class, not an issue.
My sister did the same and had a harder time of it.
I think it’s harder for boys…they get more crap for being little.
The problem is that children do not mature at a consistent rate. I honestly don’t remember learning much of anything between 4th and 8th grades. By 4th grade I could read whatever they put in front of me, and it was simple enough that retention was easy. However, it’s a whole cognitive leap to being ready for the abstract thought of high school work–while I think I could easily have done 8th grade work in the 4th grade, there’s no way I could have done 9th grade work in the 5th grade, or 10th grade work in the 6th grade.
Senior in high school here. I could have skipped 7th grade, and my parents were seriously considering it, but I shot it down. I knew then I could have handled it academically, and I still feel that way, but it wouldn’t have worked for me. I’m in a small school (45-60 in a graduating class) and knowing what I know about the kids in my class and the class that graduated last year, I know that high school would have been miserable for me had I skipped. I"m not saying it would have screwed me up for life, but it would have been harder.
Apparently accelerating forward grades makes one prone to an inability to read for content.
Example:
This query, rather than generating cites to research, has mainly spurred anecdotal evidence and personal opinions. One may conclude that skipping past early grades either hampered these students reading skills -or- made them extremely self-focused, resulting in all responses being about the student him- or herself. There were a few appropriate responses, but these were outliers so I’ve excluded them from my conclusion.
I suspect it would have been a disaster for me. I was already the youngest in my class (late Jan birthday with Jan 31 the cutoff date) and, in retrospect, fairly immature anyway. I was not an academic star anyway. That didn’t happen till college and I am sure I was better off not having skipped.
hmmm, mike from UCD is that you? or Jim from O’Connor for that matter?
Or perhaps those who could read and write before entering school and who skipped a grade or two and tested as reading at a graduate school level in eighth grade feel they may have something to add to the literature.
I suspect egghead geeks have pretty much always been somewhat misunderstood. Perhaps the social awkwardness comes not so much from being younger than their peers during the school years but from being able to think in ways that simply can not be understood by those with lesser intellectual ability no matter what their age.
:dubious:
Slightly different story from the OP, but related…
My parents moved from the city to the country when I was five. I was technically (barely) old enough for first grade, had already gone through kindergarden, and was very bright - but the school administration wanted to make me repeat kindergarden because I was “too small”. They thought I’d get beaten up a lot by the bigger kids. My parents refuesd, and I started first grade.
I was definitely the smallest kid in my class (but also one of the brightest) right up into high school. Yes, I got into a couple of scrapes becasue of my size (or maybe it was a combination of my size and attitude), but I got along all right. And in high school I discovered that if you joined the wrestling team you got to compete against other kids who were the same weight as you. Worked out just fine.
I did have some smart peers. A group of about 40 of us met at a magnet school in grades 4-6 and went through all the advanced and AP classes in Jr and Sr. High together. Our high school had about 1200 kids, so it was big enough that nobody stood out much.
On the other hand, I was reading A Brief History of Time in high school physics class, and could still follow the class discussion well enough to point out the teacher’s mistakes. I was so bored in 3rd grade that the teacher let me and another kid play chess all day long during class until they moved me to a different school.
I shouldn’t make it sound like it was all bad, but I learned in second grade that if I wanted a challenge, it was up to me and the library. Teachers and classrooms were just a formality unrelated to real learning.
This made me curious - how do people who skip pick up the stuff taught in the grade they skipped over? In the 2 year SP case I mentioned, the curriculum for those classes was designed to accelerate 3 years into 2, which solves the problem. But it is not clear even someone with the maturity to skip will have magically learned all the content of the next grade.
My school handled the problem fairly well. In 3rd grade reading we had these little graded stories. They gave me the hardest one at the beginning of the term - since I could handle it easily, I got to read on my own, and was never bored. In 9th grade math I rediscovered lots of interesting equations on my own. But not everyone is advanced in all areas. I was definitely not ready to skip a grade of Spanish. How to handle the case where someone is ready to skip 3 of 5 subjects?
The reason I asked, by the way, was that in most of my classes a combination of a smart bunch of students and good teachers meant I was seldom bored. In AP history, for example, our teacher, after a month of testing us, figured out we could get all the material from the book ourselves, and instead of retelling us stuff we already knew led very interesting classroom discussions.
It was difficult for me because I was one of the smaller kids. When I moved up I was a midget. I was not interested in the same things. I noticed girls lumpy shirts a year later than most of them. I was a very good athlete so the sports were not too bad. But socially I was way behind.
Ex teacher here…
The issue is that being really smart has little if no correlation with emotional maturity. Take a 1st grader that can go into 3rd grade that is emotionally a 1st grader and you have the potential of disaster.
That being said…letting them languish in 1st grade is as bad. Doing so means they learn complacency and laziness. Smartness does not mean work ethic. Smart kids can be just as lazy or even lazier than everyone else. They need prodding and sometimes a swift kick.
What is needed are classes and/or schools for our bright kids. However, this goes over like a lead balloon and you hear things like:
“These kids don’t need help…they will be fine”
“Why should tax dollars be spent on kids that are smart…wouldn’t it be better spent teaching dumb kids how to draw the letter A”?
“If the smart kids have their own class…it will make the normal kids feel bad” {Yea…try saying that back at them using Basketball instead and they look at you like you are retarded}
“Smart kids should be used to help teach the lesser smart kids”
I hate these…especially the last one. Like it is acceptable to use kids in that way. I had to deal with these anti-smart kid attitudes all the time while teaching.
I skipped 6th and 12th. I don’t think skipping 6th had any effect on me, academically or socially. As for skipping 12th, it’s hard to separate the effects of that, in and of itself, from the effects of going off to college 3000 miles away from my parents. That, in retrospect, was a bad idea at the age of 16. Had I stayed at home and gone to the local university I suspect I would have been fine.
Or they might be happy to know they have one less year to put up with.
I would have much rather skipped grades and gotten out sooner than the various “gifted program” crap that was, I suppose, meant to be intellectually stimulating but came across as more busy work.