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You skipped two grades in one subject with a peer so you weren't by yourself among the older children. I can certainly believe that worked out fine. Maybe even

You skipped two grades in one subject with a peer so you weren't by yourself among the older children. I can certainly believe that worked out fine. Maybe even in the more extreme case of a child skipping several grades altogether by himself, that's the best of a bad set of choices. But we shouldn't be offering only bad choices. At least in/near any decent size city, there should be a large enough population to create classes of a reasonable size of same age students at roughly the same level.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
JoshTriplett 13y ago
The concept of being in one grade across the board is a bit broken to begin with. The system of classes and prerequisites used in college and sometimes in high school makes so much more sense: you can be a few terms ahead in one subject without being ahead across the board. So if you test out of a class, you can skip to the next one, while remaining at the same level in subjects you aren't ahead in.
chao- 13y ago
>You skipped two grades in one subject with a peer so you weren't by yourself among the older children. I can certainly believe that worked out fine. We actually ended up separated in our advanced math, and I was bullied heavily because I had to end up eating lunch with 8th graders while only being in 6th and 7th grade. It was socially sub-optimal and it sure wasn't rainbows and unicorns. However, I was already an outcast amongst my own grade level, so being an outcast amongst older kids wasn't much of a difference. My point is that it was not intellectually hobbling, it did not set me up to feel a Curse of the Gifted in Math, nor did it teach me bad habits as the analogy with the marshmallow test would imply.
carlob 13y ago
> At least in/near any decent size city, there should be a large enough population to create classes of a reasonable size of same age students at roughly the same level. Why? There is great educational value in being in a class which has different levels. If you are smarter: learning to help others, working together with people that are slower than you are, learning that usually intelligence is not one-dimensional and kids that are not very good at math might be great at writing… If you are less smart the benefits are across the board. I remember reading a study about mixing kids from different incomes in the same school as opposed to wealth segregation (you might argue that smarts and wealth are not the same, but they are often highly correlated at least when starting out) and the conclusions were that there was no drawback for the rich kids, but huuuge advantages for the poorer.
rjzzleep 13y ago
i skipped a grade too in school, and i skipped through a year university, also helping higher semester students in classes i never had. the problem ended up being that i lost all my peers to study and eventually lost interest in the university. the result was that all my peers now have a ph.d and i struggled to get back in many years later to now write a master thesis...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

JoshTriplett 13y ago

The concept of being in one grade across the board is a bit broken to begin with. The system of classes and prerequisites used in college and sometimes in high school makes so much more sense: you can be a few terms ahead in one subject without being ahead across the board. So if you test out of a class, you can skip to the next one, while remaining at the same level in subjects you aren't ahead in.

chao- 13y ago

>You skipped two grades in one subject with a peer so you weren't by yourself among the older children. I can certainly believe that worked out fine. We actually ended up separated in our advanced math, and I was bullied heavily because I had to end up eating lunch with 8th graders while only being in 6th and 7th grade. It was socially sub-optimal and it sure wasn't rainbows and unicorns. However, I was already an outcast amongst my own grade level, so being an outcast amongst older kids wasn't much of a difference. My point is that it was not intellectually hobbling, it did not set me up to feel a Curse of the Gifted in Math, nor did it teach me bad habits as the analogy with the marshmallow test would imply.

carlob 13y ago

> At least in/near any decent size city, there should be a large enough population to create classes of a reasonable size of same age students at roughly the same level. Why? There is great educational value in being in a class which has different levels. If you are smarter: learning to help others, working together with people that are slower than you are, learning that usually intelligence is not one-dimensional and kids that are not very good at math might be great at writing… If you are less smart the benefits are across the board. I remember reading a study about mixing kids from different incomes in the same school as opposed to wealth segregation (you might argue that smarts and wealth are not the same, but they are often highly correlated at least when starting out) and the conclusions were that there was no drawback for the rich kids, but huuuge advantages for the poorer.

rjzzleep 13y ago

i skipped a grade too in school, and i skipped through a year university, also helping higher semester students in classes i never had. the problem ended up being that i lost all my peers to study and eventually lost interest in the university. the result was that all my peers now have a ph.d and i struggled to get back in many years later to now write a master thesis...