I graduated from High School in 1963, and there were over 3,000 kids in my school. I don’t recall anyone having skipped a grade, though there were some who were kept back a semester or two. (One kid was kept back so many times, I think he still hasn’t graduated.) But once I got into college, and was exposed to kids from all over, I did encounter some 16-year-olds, though they didn’t really seem any brighter than anyone else.
I started elementary school in Florida. I scored extremely high on the CTBS and ITBS tests, so from second grade to fourth grade I spent half the day in the grade above. Academically it was fine, but socially not so much. I didn’t make many friends in the class that I went “up” to, because I was this kid from the grade below. And obviously I wasn’t part of the cliques. The kids my age were cool, and I got along with them… but I didn’t spend as much time with them as I’d hoped to.
I got scolded by a teacher because I used to raise my hand to tell her that I needed to go to third grade. She said, “You don’t have to announce that you’re leaving.” Well excuse me, bitch, I would think as the classroom teacher you would want to acknowledge me walking out of your class. I had a complex about that from that point on. (Was I trying to get attention? Maybe, but you’d think a teacher would have a better approach than that.)
There was something called “The Learning Center” that the TAG kids in my grade went to - I did not go my first year in the school district because I came mid-year, but they never allowed me to go… until fourth grade, when I was told I could go!
We, of course, moved early that year!
In my new school I was immediately enrolled in TAG classes, and no more half-day in the grade above. I was glad because frankly, I was sick of being an exception all the time. I still graduated HS on time, with good grades, and I was well-adjusted socially.
As a parent and a teacher, I’m strongly against allowing kids to skip grades. First, kids rarely have advanced skills across the board. Second, there is the issue of socialization. TAG courses and pull-outs, along with differentiated instruction, are much better ways to address the learning needs of high-achieving kids.
I skipped two grades. I skipped 6th, had two weeks of 7th and then was transferred to another school where I was placed in the 8th grade. That was a nightmare. I did fine academically in all of my classes except for math, but somehow I’d missed pre-algebra and gone straight into algebra and I couldn’t get it at all. Gym class also sucked, because I was two years younger than everyone else, so I couldn’t compete at all in any of the games, I was always the last person to finish the mile, etc. I was also the only girl in the locker room who wasn’t wearing a bra. Needless to say, I got picked on and teased all the time and was always getting in fights. My parents decided to homeschool me when the bus driver said I couldn’t ride her bus anymore because I was at the center of too many fights. My parents never did anything for me for homeschooling - no books, no lessons, nada - so essentially I just had a year off. The next year I went into high school as a freshman, so I was only one year behind my peers, which still sucked. Having been moved around so much was not the primary reason I dropped out after my sophomore year (Dad wasn’t bringing any money home so I had to work) but it certainly influenced my decision. I didn’t have any friends in school from the 5th grade until after I’d been in college for a year, and my socialization skills are still pretty poor.
I went to school with a girl who skipped a grade and was in my grade, so she was a year younger. She was also the town rich girl (her father was heavy into construction, I think he was a contractor) so she was somewhat notorious. I had some classes with her and she had no trouble keeping up, as far as I could tell.
This thread is gonna garner more anecdotes than anything else. I’m gonna move it to IMHO, where you can still get hard facts, yet everyone can share experiences.
samclem GQ moderator
My mother was quite the educational counter-revolutionary when we were kids. My sisters were a year apart, and she put them in separate schools to let them build their own social circles. When the teachers wanted to “turn” me from left-handed she raised a stink, and when they wanted me to skip a grade, she raised an even bigger stink.
I went to school with a number of kids who had skipped grades, and a sizable portion of them had behavioral or social problems. I never figured out whether it was because they were smarter than other kids, or simply lacked maturity.
In New York City in the mid-60s it was standard. Kids going into the SP (special progress) program from 6th to 7th grades had a choice of finishing junior high in two years or three. The split was about half and half, with 3 2 year classes and 3 3 year classes. The 3 year classes got the same science, but had Earth Science in 9th grade.
My parents decided I should take the 3 year program, since I was young for my class. That turned out to be lucky, since I got to stay in college until the draft was over. I knew lots of kids in the two year program, and there didn’t seem to be any ill effect, though they went through junior high with others in the program.
Skipping in elementary school happened also, but nothing as regular.
Today it seems the opposite. The school my kids went to had a pre-first for kids who were a bit immature in kindergarten, and lots of parents didn’t send kids who would be the youngest in their class to kindergarten for another year. Pre-first worked very well for some kids we knew.
This all happened in a little town in Southern Ontario, in the early 1960s. My mother taught me to read before I went to kindergarten. My birthday is in October, so I started school when I was 4 going on 5, instead of waiting a year. By grade 2, they were sending me for psychological evaluation. The next year, I started going to the school across town, to take grades 3, 4 and 5 in two years. Then I went back to my old school for grades 6 through 8.
In hindsight, it was the worst possible thing they could have done. I was thrown in with kids who were one, and some two years older than me. I came from a school where they were teaching an entirely different curriculum from the one I returned to. I had no idea what was going on, and nobody would explain it to me. The kids demonstrated that they thought that I thought I was special. They called me “genius” and “computer” and beat me up for being smarter than them. Not only was creating this program for me (and only me) a bad idea, there was no followup. Just take me out of one environment, plop me in another one, and bring me back ahead of everybody I knew, and leave me there to flounder. Great planning.
I started high school when I was 13. I got beat up more for that. None of the girls would talk to me, and I never had a date all through school. As for learning what they were teaching, by then I was totally lost. Whole chapters…hell, whole volumes of the education everybody else received in elementary school were missing from my education. I was supposed to be some kind of gifted student, and all it got me was beat up, ridiculed and relegated to the bottom of the social ladder. Then somebody decided I was gay. That’s when it all fell apart. After three years of that, plus abuse at home, I left school and home part way into grade 12 and never went back. I couldn’t do it for one more day. If I seem kinda cranky sometimes, now you know why.
On the other hand, my wife was gifted, and they sent her to a gifted school, where she thrived. She went on to two different universities and earned two degrees with honors. Her schooling was in Florida in the 1980s and '90s. That’s a stark example of how different it can be, depending on where you are and who is in charge.
I skipped second class; I would have been 6 and the year 1961. My parents thought I was bored in first class so shot me straight up to third class at the end of the year; the thought that my behaviour might have been due to, oh, their impending divorce never seemed to have occurred to them … it was a disaster for me. I was already young for my class, now I was 18 months younger than almost all my classmates. I spent the last 8 years of my school career in an all-boy private school as the smallest and least mature boy in the class, by a long way. Connect the dots, folks …
I don’t know if it is a regional thing or not, and anyway, my experience comes from around 1960, in a very small town.
My birthday is in early September, and when I started 1st grade, I was already the youngest person in class. When I got to 4th grade, they had a very serious parent-teacher conference about skipping me a grade, from 4th to 6th.
But, due to my age, since I was already “almost skipping a grade” they did not do so, and I wound up graduating at age 17.
So, yes, such at least DID happen where I grew up, but there was a lot of evaluation going on and it was not taken lightly.
I skipped second grade, because after a 9-week term, it was obvious that I was bored. There weren’t really any long-lasting social effects, because I had been in Kindergarten and 1st grade in another district, so no one knew me anyway. I turned out OK.
Once I was safely into adulthood, my mother told me that when I was in about Grade 2 or 3, the school called and said they’d like to accelerate me a grade. (That was the term used for skipping a grade in our school district: “accelerate.” You’d say things like, “Johnny accelerated a grade.”) But Mom refused to let them; she was worried that some of the things others have posted here would happen. So I stayed with my age group.
One classmate I recall did get accelerated at about the same time, and the problems began. He wasn’t accepted by his new classmates, nor was he accepted by us any more. I don’t know what ever happened to him, but I imagine it wasn’t easy.
I also recall one guy at high school who skipped a grade, from the one behind me up to my grade. He seemed to handle it without any real difficulties. But we were all older, we were used to mixing ages in school clubs and activities, and at ages 16 and 17, we were far more tolerant than when we when we were 7 and 8 years old. So maybe that explains something.
I taught myself to read at age four, and one of my favorite toys in kindergarten was a multiplication table, so I skipped first grade (small-town Oregon, late '70s). In my opinion, it was a horrible mistake. The schoolwork still wasn’t challenging, but now I had the additional problems of being the youngest in the class and not knowing the games that everyone else had learned in first grade. I developed an emotional block toward writing that eventually led me to not graduate from high school–I went all four years, but rarely passed English. Afterward, I got a GED. My SAT scores were 760 & 740, but I didn’t go to college.
The schools tried to accommodate my PE needs, but it wasn’t enough. In elementary school, I was separated into a three-person remedial class to try to learn things like dribbling a ball. In 8th grade, I was put in the 7th grade PE class but still couldn’t keep up.
Of course, none of us can say whether our experiences would have been worse if we hadn’t skipped.
My daughters are both gifted, so I worry about them. My second-grader reads at a sixth-grade level. She’s read all of Harry Potter; she sneaks reading when she’s supposed to be doing other schoolwork. She’s behind in Math, because she doesn’t focus on it.
My kindergartner is learning to read. She begs us to print out more of the arithmetic drill sheets that her sister has so much trouble with, and says that they’re too easy. Last night, I found something to challenge her: sheets that give the answer, but one of the other numbers is missing, like __ + 5 = 8. In other words, algebra.
Well, I didn’t really start this thread by asking for anecdotes; I was just trying to figure out why some people of my generation witnessed rampant grade-skipping and some didn’t. But the many anecotes seem to suggest that this practice may have been common in the 1960s or earlier but has mostly been replaced by “gifted” classes or programs. I also have the impression that grade-skipping was a quick-and-dirty way for impoverished and/or parsimonious school systems to handle a gifted child (as opposed to creating some kind of separate, hence expensive, program for them).
I have to say I am slightly skeptical of the folks who have reported that they suffered no deleterious social effects at all from skipping. That reminds me of the occasional online discussions of “only-child syndrome” – the fiercest debunkers of that syndrome are the only children themselves (“I’m an only child, and I turned out GREAT! I’m brilliant and charming and wonderful and … Hey, where are you going? I’m not through telling you about me! Get back here!”).
That’s how it worked where I was. There was a G/T program, but we didn’t really do much besides learn weird things like architecture and the human brain and God knows what else, and play Knowledge Master.
Halfway through grade five I was put into grade six (British Columbia 1980-81). Not such a good idea from the standpoint of my emotional maturity. I was picked on in grade five for being a geek and “too smart” - and it only got worse for me in grade six. I was in an “enriched” program at the time, too, whereby I got to skip French class and hang out with the smarter kids. (The first class we got to dig into a box of household appliances and pull them apart to see how they worked. I was last in line and got stuck with the toaster. For some unknown reason, I pulled the cord off that toaster and went straight to the nearest socket, pulling apart the two wires, plugging it in and touching the live ends together. A big flash and a bang and you should have seen the freaked out look on Mr. Reddekopp’s face. Heh hee.)
After completing grade seven in public school, I was enrolled in a private boarding school in grade seven again (because they were academically two years ahead of our public school system.) Even more beatings, this time because I was shy, socially inept and my parents were “poor” (relative to theirs). Fun times.
Then I got pulled from private school and dropped back into public school halfway through grade eight, again with my previous peers. More fights and taunting the now “too-good-for-us-private-school-boy”.
The story goes on… but let’s just say I’m glad my school days are over. In retrospect, skipping a grade for me was not the best move.
-NobleBaron
Another anecdotal account:
I skipped 3rd grade, which would have been in the early 90’s. This seems to be much more recently than other peoples experiences. I did take many tests, I kind of remember them. I was supposed to go to a “gifted school”, but it was too full that year, and I was on a waiting list that never got to me, so I was a 9 year old 4th grader.
There were lots and lots of problems caused by my skipping a grade, but I don’t think that this thread would be the right place to talk about them.
Does anybody think that an “Ask the guy who skipped a grade” thread would be a good idea, or at all interesting? I wouldn’t mind starting one.
I skipped 3rd and 9th grades, and ended up in College at 15… It was NOT a good experience… I wasn’t even old enough to drive, and everyone else seemed to be out drinking… There I was in College, and my parents had to drive me every day!
I totally bombed… and floundered around for a few years…
It wasn’t until I was in my 20’s that I ended up actually going to college, and getting 3 degrees… I think I would have preferred being a normal college student instead my first time though…
Fast forward 30 years, I’m back in College - Community College - here in Toronto, and now I think I’m the OLDEST student on campus… Who let all these KIDS go to College?
I skipped first grade. This would have been 1974. I was bored b/c I already knew what they were teaching. I was way ahead at that age. I was already young for my class (October birthday), so I started second grade at age 5.
My parents evidently saw that this was not a good thing social-wise, so after my second grade year, they moved me into a private school which was further ahead and more challenging than the public school I had been going to. The smart thing they did was to enroll me there going into second grade. So, skip 1st but go to 2nd twice. Even so, I started college at 17.
I don’t think I suffered socially. I was pretty good at sports and not the type to be picked on. However, if I had been kept on that accelerated track, things might have been much for the worse.
Spain, in the 70s and 80s. I’m a '68 vintage.
My parents didn’t let me skip ahead because “the kid needs to be properly socialized.” While the spirit of the decission is admirable, it was made useless by forbidding me to take part in after-school games at the park… 
One of my K-12 classmates was one year ahead; one in college, two years. They had to keep higher grades than other students, in order to stay ahead. For the rest of us, and with grades on a 0-10 scale, pass was at 5. One year ahead moved your pass to 6; two years to 7, etc. They were perfectly integrated; with the one in college, her parents were wary of letting her come to the few parties our college had but we promised we’d take care of her and they knew we weren’t the “get shit-faced or it’s not fun” kind, so it was all right.
We always took all our classes together (except for a few where you could choose between two options), no running between classrooms. Your classmates were your classmates for every subject. While meeting someone who’d skipped was rare, someone (specially end-of-year births) who’d repeated a year was perfectly normal and no big deal. There was no Special Ed, either for those behind or those ahead. Now it’s illegal to skip courses, it’s very difficult to make a kid repeat (the teachers are supposed to prove it’s going to be beneficial to him, not “just” that he doesn’t have the educational level :smack:), repeating a year has been defined as “being a failure”, Special Ed has been introduced for those who are behind, and the parents of those who might have been allowed to skip 40 years ago are asking for Special Ed for their bored-out-of-their-minds kids.