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This is very interesting to me because I had the opposite experience - my parents had me start school early. I went to a private grade school that allowed me to
by srunni 13y ago
This is very interesting to me because I had the opposite experience - my parents had me start school early. I went to a private grade school that allowed me to start kindergarten while still 4, a few weeks before my 5th birthday (I was born in mid-September).
I don't think it was an issue at all academically - I was able to skip another grade, starting 2nd grade at 5. However, the school and my parents decided to stop it at that point, which was probably a good idea. However, I ended up starting middle school at 9, high school at 12, and college at 16, which made things difficult socially. Although things worked out, being any younger would probably have been detrimental to the experience.
- dnautics 13y agoSimilar experience. My parents enrolled me in a private kindergarten for a day so that they could re-enroll me in the public kindergarten on the grounds that I'd already been in kindergarten, so couldn't go to preschool. I turned out (academically) pretty good. In middle school, I was taking math classes with high schoolers (my public middle school and high school were merged), so that can maybe attest a little bit to the benefits of mixed-grades, in my case..
- kevinmchugh 13y agoYou're saying you excelled academically despite always being the youngest? That's the point of the linked article.
- srunni 13y agoMy age was less of an issue at the grade school level, where students of multiple grade levels were in the same classroom (because it was a small school). However, things were not so easy socially once I moved to a public middle school, where everyone else in the classroom was of around the same age. The article refers to both social and academic benefits to being younger - my experience was the opposite for the former. Things were a lot easier when my classmates didn't know I was younger than them.