that last part can backfire, though. I know someone whose stepson was redshirted for football purposes. problem was they didn’t realize how big he was going to get and he ended up almost being too big to play.
Is there a point at which size per se becomes a problem in football? Assuming, of course, that we’re not talking about getting fat or loss of mobility. I would have thought that, for a lineman, other things being equal, the bigger the better?
Most of a kid’s friends are going to be drawn from their classmates, who are all going to be in the same school year. If you were born close to a cutoff date, there are likely to be some kids who are almost a year older or younger than you, but in the same class, and kids very close to your age, who are in different classes. But the school year is more important than the age.
Around here, it’s common, at least in middle schools (roughly ages 11-14 or so), for different years to be located at different places in the school. You might, for instance, have the 6th grade classes on the first floor, 7th grade on the second floor, and 8th grade on the third floor, which makes it easier for everyone to get to their lockers and classes on time. There will probably still be shared rooms for the “specials” like gym and art, but the big 4 (English, social studies, math, and science) will be grouped together, with maybe a couple of teachers for each subject in each grade. This also means that typically, each teacher teaches the same material each year and in each period, and so doesn’t need to come up with multiple different sets of lesson plans.
Once you get to high school (ages 14-18, grades 9-12), there’s a lot more flexibility in what grade each class is taught to (English 2 will be mostly 10th graders, but with a few 9th or 11th, and anyone could be taking, say, horticulture or home ec), and classes tend to be organized with similar subjects together (all of the math teachers in one area of the school, all of the English teachers in another area, etc.).
EDIT: Riemann, the problem isn’t being too big to be able to play, but too big to be allowed. It’s not a factor in high school, but on middle school teams, you’ve got a mix of kids who have gone through their growth spurts and those who haven’t, so in the interest of both safety and fairness, kids above certain weight limits are restricted in what they’re allowed to do on the field.
Generally in a public school with a sizeable student body, each grade level has its own team of teachers. And they are trained as teachers for that level of teaching, not for a particular subject.
So, for example, there will be five fourth grade teachers, each with his or her own classroom with desks for 20-30 students.
Each teacher will be a homeroom teacher. The fourth grade class of 100-150 will be randomly (or alphabetically) assigned to a home room. You report to homeroom first thing in the morning for attendance and administrative duties.
Then throughout the day, each home room teacher becomes, in turn, a math teacher, a science teacher, a language arts teacher, a social studies teacher, etc. The fourh grade class will be reshuffled according to their individual aptitude for each subject.
So one homeroom teacher might become the advanced math teacher then the regular science teacher then the basic language teacher, etc.
That’s how it worked when I was in school anyway.
Yes. Learning that a child is four or six doesn’t tell you much about what they are doing - but hearing that they are in kindergarten (or not yet in kindergarten) does. Likewise (at the other end of the scale), learning that a kid is 17 or 19 doesn’t tell you that much, but learning that they are a senior (12th grader) means that they are getting ready to leave school.
In the lowest levels of kids’ football (i.e., when the kids are in grade school and middle school), I believe that there are, indeed, some schools / leagues that have a size / weight limit to players, simply because there can be such a huge discrepancy in kids’ size, and there can be a legitimate concern about what happens when your 175-pound sixth grader hits my 95-pound sixth grader.
By high school, I imagine it’s less of an issue (if it comes up at all), though I could see a situation in which a big kid didn’t have a chance to play up until then, because he’d simply been too big.
Thanks, Chronos also addressed this - I misconstrued the original comment, I didn’t realize it was referring to whether kids are allowed to play if they are too big.
When I think back at my own childhood, I tend to identify school grades, rather than actual age. If you ask me what I was doing at age 11, I’d have to convert that to “sixth grade,” then I remember my teacher and school mates and the things we did in class. I’d remember Mrs. Kapitzky and how I won all the spelling bees, and how she taught us “paper sculpture”, which I then taught my mom. But just “11 years old” independent of school is meaningless.
This continues throughout our education. A “college freshman” says more to me than the person’s actual age.
it’s far more common in Japan to refer to the year in school then to the age. Japan and Taiwan have six years for elementary school three years for junior high school and three years of high school. They never refer to students as seventh graders and eighth graders etc. It’s always elementary school first year, junior high second year, high school first year, etc.
I remember one Japanese movie there was an adult talking to a child and the adult asked the child what year in school he was. I think it was third year in elementary school. It was actually changed in the translation. The English subtitles had the woman ask the boy his age, and he said eight.
In my experience, the youngest grades tend to either have one teacher who handles them throughout the day, with possibly some other teachers coming in and trading off. It’s not until around 5th grade that you start actually moving among a small group of teachers all in that grade–usually among about three teachers. It’s not until 7th grade that you get into switching classes for every subject and every period.
And, then, yes, it’s not usually not until high school that the grades actually sometimes mix in individual classes, and when the majority of teachers teach more than one grade.