I’m 50 years old and grew up in Houston, Texas (and attended Houston public schools from kindergarten through high school). I recently talked to a friend who is about the same age and grew up in Chicago, and she mentioned that she had skipped second grade.
This got me thinking because I never, ever heard of anyone skipping grades when I was growing up. It just didn’t seem to happen and the occasional references to grade-skipping in television and fiction were incomprehensible. Yet I do occasionally meet people of my generation who will say, “Oh yeah, I skipped a grade.”
My questions: Is “skipping a grade” some kind of regional thing? Is it still done these days anywhere? Both my kids went through a small-town Illinois public school system and I never heard of any grade-skipping there either.
My wife skipped a grade in elementary school (about 30 years ago). I believe it was grade 4. I believe it is very much discouraged in our area now by the school system.
She found it hard as she was moved up in the same school and had trouble making new friends in the class. She was the smallest and the last to develop physically. She would have preferred to have been transferred to a different school where they didn’t know she had skipped a grade.
The kids thought that because she was moved up, she considered herself special and it was tough going for her during that period.
I don’t recommend it just for social development reasons.
It happens in most regions but it is controversial. Nobody actually skipped grades when I was in school but it did come up a couple of times. I had a female friend from far away that skipped two grades. Most parents and students don’t seem to want it. They have to ask themselves what they are racing towards? It wouldn’t be that great to be the lone 16 year old college freshman. Gifted programs or perhaps alternative education like charter school or boarding school would probably be a better choice.
I teach at a middle school in Clark County and have had a couple of students skip a grade. It’s either been 2nd or 3rd grade and they seem well adjusted enough. I don’t know the full procedure for doing it, I imagine the students test out and there are both admin and parental referrals.
I don’t really see the harm in it since the students who do skip are likely to be capable of doing the work.
So perhaps it’s fallen out of fashion due to its negative impact on kids’ socialization skills? That makes sense; as I recall, during the 1960s it was rare for schools to even acknowledge that kids might experience social difficulties. I remember complaining about bullies in elementary school and being brusquely rebuffed by teachers.
Incidentally, I knew you were from Canada when you said “grade 4.” In the USA we call it “fourth grade.”
I skipped half of grade 3 and half of grade 4. Why yes, there is a story behind that.
Starting in first grade, I took reading and math in the higher grade, the rest of my classes in the lower grade. About halfway through my third grade year, it was noticed that I was walking from one end of my elementary school to the other. Probably about 200 feet, but someone in management thought that this could be a problem - not sure why, maybe a fear of muggers.
Anyway, they came to my parents with the idea that I could repeat math and reading in third grade, and maybe even help out the other kids. That idea was quickly vetoed by my parents and instead I was promoted full time to fourth grade. I did not notice any ill effects, probably because I had already been taking two classes a day with those kids for three years. I’m sure I got some crap from some of the kids, but it couldn’t have been any different from what I was getting before.
I dropped an e-mail to my friend who skipped second grade. She said that her impoverished public school couldn’t possibly have afforded a “gifted” program, so skipping a grade was a cheap and easy way of accommodating a bright but bored student.
I’m about the same as you, and I skipped my freshman year in high school. I was always big for my age and hung out with kids a few years older, so it wasn’t any big deal as far as I was concerned. Highs School is mostly electives anyway, so I was taking Sophomore English and PE, but otherwise I was pretty much taking the same courses I would have had I been a Freshman. And it got me out of ever having to take a Chemistry class! Thank God for that! (I’m a Physics guy, and Physicists just think differently than Chemists, it seems to me.)
The one disadvantage was that I wasn’t able to do Calculus until College, but even that wasn’t a problem.
I too skipped half of two grades, moving from 6th to 7th grade at mid year. Socially this is a really bad idea, as Junior High (AKA middle school) kids are probably the worst of all. Also, doing at mid year gave the 7th graders time to form solid cliques before I got there. It was done because I was bored shitless and raising hell.
We had someone in junior high skip a grade - in his case it wasn’t that he was smart, it was just he was two full years older than the next oldest kid - and big. So they had him skip eighth grade. He’d transfered in from somewhere internationally - and functionally when he came in, they stuck him in the wrong grade for his age (but the appropriate grade for the number of years he’d gone to school), then corrected it two years later.
I had the uncomfortable place in fifth grade of having missed the year (we moved a lot, and I went to school some very small number of days that year) and my parents had a conference where two of my teachers wanted to move me up (my previous school districts had been much more advanced than the one I ended up graduating from) while the school administrators wanted to hold me back since I hadn’t met the attendance requirement. I was left where I was - which was a good thing - I was young for my grade as it was (another attribute of moving - I started kindergarten at four as was normal for where I started and my birthdate and all my classmates waited until at least five) - and will concur that it is not easy being younger (and in my case, late to puberty) than anyone else
I didn’t skip a grade, exactly; they yanked me out of Grade 1 one day in the middle of Story Period and plunked me down into the middle of Grade 2. I never even got to hear the end of the story. Mom told me much later that this was because I could read before I went to kindergarten (at age 5); apparently most of the time I skipped was devoted to teaching reading.
I never realised until recently how much of an influence this was on me growing up: I was always smaller and physically weaker than my classmates.
Not good for the social development. I never had a date in senior public or early high school. By the time I grew to rhe same size as other students in approximately grade 11 or so, the habit of considering myself small, weak, and powerless–and hence unworthy–was so ingrained in me that I never took the initiative in social things. So I never had a date in later high school either.
Even now, I’m still fighting that ingrained assumption of powerlessness.
Considering that the only meaningful measure of putting children in one grade or another is their age and not their ability, knowledge, or intelligence, I think it’s a bad idea to have a child skip a grade.
Then again, I’m not a big fan of grouping children by age to begin with.
I never skipped a grade, but I started early - first grade at the age of five, instead of sixth. It haunted me all through school. I could keep up academically just fine, but socially, my life was a wreck from 4th grade through 9th grade, mostly because I couldn’t relate to my peers at all.
I think this is the case for why it is less and less common: there didn’t use to be any alternative for bright kids, or any recognition that gifted kids don’t just need the same stuff, faster, they need different stuff. Now that is understood, which is why we make high school classes that are tougher than college classes for the best and the brightest instead of just graduating them early–it is possible for anyone to skip a grade in high school and graduate early if they plan ahead, take a few classes in summer school, and don’t spend much time in electives or take as many advanced classes (since you are doubling up), Very, very rarely do kids opt to do this (except African (not African American) kids. Trying to graduate early is much more common among those kids. No clue as to why). Parents and kids both don’t seem to think there is a lot of urgency to finishing as long as a kid has plenty of challenges along the way.
This is when I really regret the loss of a certain thread from the Winter of Our Missed Content. It made me cry because for the first time in my life I had found people who really understood what life was like for me growing up.
I skipped the second grade in 1973-74. In the second half of my first-grade year, I was sent across the hall to the second-grade class for reading and math. The next year I went straight to third grade.
I’m sure that skipping was a large part of the reason for my social maladjustment. I’m sure that my personality and my mother’s influence (she’s never been well adjusted either) had something to do with it, but skipping sure didn’t help. I was always the class whipping kid, the weirdo. I didn’t shake it until I went to college (and even got some there: “What do you mean, you’re only 17, and won’t be 18 until next May?”).
I’m so glad to have gotten to a point where it doesn’t really matter anymore, except for the fact that I’m still considered “the smart one” among my friends (and yes, I do have some now!). So much of my first 17 years were spent trying to fit in, and not succeeding.
When I was in second my mother wanted me held back because I was so much smaller than the rest of my classmates. The nuns did some testing, then wanted to move me up a grade. They compromised and left me where I was, but by 3rd grade I was in the 8th grade reading and english classes. In 4th grade I was moved into the 5th grade science class. And I was picked on, but not because of that, just because I was so blasted tiny. By the time I was in 7th grade I was still wearing my child’s size 4 school uniform for the 4th year in a row. I dreamed of being a 6X.
I skipped 7th grade when my parents moved and I switched school systems. I was already in an accelerated math course, so the only course that matters was no problem - and I never really figured out what I missed in the way of english and history. Nothing, it seems.
I guess I missed some biology - but we had to take that again in ninth anyway.
I skipped first grade and twelfth grade, and went to college when I was 16. My brother skipped three grades (I’m not certain which three) and was a college freshman at age 15. I know quite a few other people who skipped grades in the 1950s and 1960s. Some (like me) look back and wonder whether it was that great an idea. Academic maturity and social maturity are not the same thing.
