Once bought shorts, over my mother's objection, that turned out to be women's shorts. Obvious women's shorts. Wore them. Now pretend the trauma of being thirteen was a function of bedwetting, which seems more respectable.
I really think that kids should be sent to college as soon as they're academically able to take classes there (as early as age 14). I really believe that Jr HS and HS are hell for a majority of kids, but certainly a large minority.
I've my expressed my theory this way: in HS, only 10% of kids are normal. It's a Bell curve with very very thick tails.
I liked the uglu hawaiian shirts, because the made school seem less formal. (catholic school, but somehow we could get away with them because they were button-up and had collars.) They were especially fun with a tie. I only had one. It didn't really fit in, because it was mostly a brownish beige with blue tropical flowers, but luckily it only drew one or two small derogatory remarks before it was accepted. Anyway, the coolest kids never actually wore those shirts in my time, so it wasn't like there was stiff competition.
I feel so bad for Hughes, though. And I can sympathize. I was totally clueless when it came to any sort of fashion. I really liked uniforms because of that.
I would have preferred uniforms while I was in school; being out of fashion all the time was hell on my self-esteem.
Fuck self-expression; my clothes didn't express anything but that my parents thought flattering clothes would lead to me having sex and becoming pregnant and lost in a world of DOOM and didn't have a whole lot of cash for stylish clothing (by which I mean, a department store) anyway.
I kept a low fashion profile in high school, having basically two outfits: blue jeans with a black shirt, and black jeans with a maroon shirt. Both of these were finished off with Doc Martens. This made me kind of boring, but also saved me from some fashion scourges of the 80s, like stirrup pants.
I was never particularly fashionable, in fact I was proud not to be. (Yeah, the mullet was evidence to the contrary, sadly.) So my biggest nightmare was just as the '90s broke, and my wonderfully afashionable flannel shirts and White Sox hats were suddenly all the rage. Which meant that my I-Don't-Care became The-In-Thing and soon I-Still-Think-This-Is-Cool. Damn mavens, take your peccadillos somewhere else!
Wow, I feel so grateful for my high school. I wasn't happy, but I knew at the time all my problems came from me and no one else. We didn't have a status hierarchy. You had friends or didn't have friends, and in either case you didn't bother giving shit to anybody else (except in very rare cases, and I was never a shit giver).
What a great place. Yet it was your typical undistinguished working-class/middle-class high school in suburban New York, nothing progressive about it.
When Columbine happened, I was honestly baffled -- I thought all that shit about blond jocks was just in John Hughes movies. But maybe it's a function of having rich kids around. Looking back, I'm grateful I turned down my mom's offer and decided against going to the local country-day school.
At any rate, I didn't encounter real meanness anytime between 6th grade and the end of college (which cuts against my rich kid theory). But offices -- there you can find some real morons.
Bodysuits are fucking ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as those one-piece jumpsuit type things we had in the 80s (I had one in a great color of sorta magentaish red) that you had to remove all the way in order to pee.
My high school, Catholic, had a fairly relaxed dress code, by Catholic school standards: shirts with sleeves and collars, socks or stockings, solid-color pants (gray only for girls, though in my senior year they went with unisex any solid color, which they retracted the following year because it "fostered too much clothing competition among girls"), and non-sandal shoes. It's possible that the gray pants thing was when I learned that cut, rather than trendiness, is the way to look good without requiring a lot of closet space.
Worst clothing decision: a nice white tuxedo-type shirt with a bow tie and a tweed newsboy cap. It looked adorable in the store, but I never could bring myself to wear it in public.
I really think that kids should be sent to college as soon as they're academically able to take classes there (as early as age 14). I really believe that Jr HS and HS are hell for a majority of kids, but certainly a large minority.
This is what I thought in high school, but after beginning to take college courses at 16 (full-time at 17) and graduating at 20, I'm not too sure this is a good idea. Maybe for people with clear goals in a particular area this works, but had I been older I'm sure I would have gotten much more out of college and I certainly would have been much more prepared to try to figure out what to do next when I graduated.
Plus, I'm not sure a socially awkward fourteen year old would do much better thrust into a college environment comprising eighteen and nineteen year olds (you thought you had problems getting a girlfriend before....); most people aren't socially awkward their whole lives but in most cases there's no shortcut. It just takes growing up to get past it.
At any rate, I didn't encounter real meanness anytime between 6th grade and the end of college (which cuts against my rich kid theory). But offices -- there you can find some real morons.
Those are the people who made high school hell for the rest of us, and are determined to make the whole world high school forever. We had a hatching of those in my dept at work, but when the company split off a sector of its business we exiled them to the new company. Yay! No more burberry plaid! No more fucking coach logo prints! No more "take the train? In these clothes?"
only 10% of kids are normal. It's a Bell curve with very very thick tails.
Can you actually graph that?
Yeah. Draw a bell curve. Turn it upside down. Problem solved.
Maybe for people with clear goals in a particular area this works, but had I been older I'm sure I would have gotten much more out of college and I certainly would have been much more prepared to try to figure out what to do next when I graduated.
Run the high schools like mini-colleges. They're halfway there anyways.
Going to a college young would be an option, not a norm. Kids could still live at home.
If you're going to be miserable anyway, you might as well get a college-level education while you're doing it.
What is everyone's experience with credit conversions, HS --> college? When I was young 4 years of a foreign language got you into a second-year class, and a year or to of HS calculus got you into introductory college calculus. A lot of people are capable of the real thing the first time.
I was initially pissed because the only thing my college would accept to waive Calculus I was the AP Cal exam, which, of course, I hadn't taken (I didn't take any AP exams). Then I took Cal I, and realized that I barely remembered Calculus anyway, since I'd stopped taking math my junior year, and I wasn't so pissed anymore.
I don't think there are any more credit conversions. Sometimes there are placement tests, which one can do well on because of high school learning, but otherwise, it's just AP credit. At least, as far as I know.
26, re: credit conversions. Since my HS kicked ass and my college, not so much, I got out of absolutely every requirement. The only conversion that became relevant was my language AP. I was put in the last linguistics class before students switched over to the literature dept: end of the second year, I think.
I'm really not sure that getting out of all requirements was a good thing for me, in the end. I haven't done a spot of math since the Calc AP, and if the rest of my family weren't stuffed with scientists, it would have been easy for me to regress into total scientific ignorance. Then there's the uncomfortable part about teaching freshman comp without ever having taken a writing class in my life. And no: I didn't use my scheduling freedom to wander around the university curriculum taking classes in all kinds of wild and woolly disciplines.
The Oregon higher education system also used SAT scores in some cases; high enough verbals and you didn't have to take the first course in the writing sequence. Maybe the first two.
I had the AP lit and comp tests, so I didn't take any writing at all, sadly.
I was upset in 5th grade when my parents wouldn't let me have messages shaved into my hair. Unbelievably, that seemed really popular at the time.
Depending on the student, living at home can be a big mistake. High school is an all day every, day activity even if you hate it, but it's quite possible to complete college by spending only a few hours per day/week with other students if all you do is take classes there.
I once bought a pair of boxer shorts that really almost looked like regular gym shorts. Almost wore them to basketball practice (with briefs on underneath, of course, but still). Got a weird feeling in my stomach the last minute and decided not to.
I also think that most people (in the US) actually do think they like high school. (Most also people believe in creationism.) I'm not sure if they're deluding themselves or not, though.
I was so unfashionable as a high school student that I can't remember any particularly traumatic outfit - nothing I wore had any particular chance of passing as normal. (The bulk of my friends were vaguely arty-punk, but I never successfully carried that off, or tried all that hard.)
The big traumatic fashion memory I can come up with, actually, is accidentally coming into school looking good one day -- black skirt, red sweater with those big batwing sleeves that were key for a while in the eighties, and shiny red stockings that matched the sweater. A couple of girls who normally didn't know I existed came over and chatted with me for a bit, which was pleasant, but odd, until I realized that I was suddenly worthy of acknowledgment because my outfit was reasonably well put together. I was so insulted that I don't think I wore anything but LL Bean turtlenecks for a month.
I couldn't stand high school so much that I only attended a semester. I finished out the rest in a year by attending community college classes for HS credit and by doing this "alternative" self-directed program intended mainly for stoners and pregnant girls.
I went to college directly after and had a horrible time. Then again, it wasn't a college I wanted to go to (I was pressured by my parents) and I was seriously depressed the whole time. I was a CS major, and had already been programming professionally, but the CS degree plan didn't have you taking any computer-related courses until the third semester. On top of that, I'm really shy IRL, and so I didn't have any way to meet anyone with similar interests, which I'm sure was 2/3 of my depression.
So I dropped out after the first semester. (I have like 70 credit hours because of all the high school courses, though. Not terribly transferrable, but hey.) Now I'm programming full time and relatively happy, though still quite a bit lonely. But getting out of this shitty small town I'm in might help that some. I'm moving to Austin this summer though, so we'll see how that goes.
I actually think I would have been perfectly fine with high school if the educational quality were higher. As it was, the academics were pure torture. (And my school district was one of the poorer ones in the state of Texas, largely because of the high local illegal immigrant population.) But there was a clique of people, which interestingly enough intersected through the preps and slackers, who were intelligent and cynical and realistic enough to be fun to hang around. I do sort of miss that experience.
And this is pretty recent for me. Five, six years ago.
My middle school had a T&C surf designs t-shirt trend going for a while. The only other thing I remember about that school is that shorts were permitted only on special "shorts" days when the school authorities looked at the weather reports and decided to be nice to us for an upcoming hot day.
My junior high AND high school made everyone always tuck their shirts in. (Sweaters excepted.) Just the guys, actually. That sucked ass.
I managed to get around it many days by wearing a long jacket and keeping it closed. That way the teachers can't see the bottom of my shirt and assume it's tucked in. Only got caught once.
Plus you only get 5 minutes between classes, leaving you with basically no time to go to your locker, making you carry all your books around with you to every class. That sucked too.
I'm single-handedly turning this into a general "reminisces of high school" thread. If anyone objects, we can take it out back.
Oh, and I think EB's partly right about the young people going to college thing. It's really hard to fit in and be accepted in a group of people who are all two to four years older than you, let alone five or six years. And even for people that would hate high school, they can often find a good group of friends in college, if they're old enough. I think it'd be better to let people who are too smart for high school to do low-supervision self-study for a few years until they're college age.
For the record, I have mostly good memories of high school. I had a good group of friends, wasn't picked on, didn't worry too much about fitting in - it helped to be at a school where it wasn't clear what "fitting in" actually meant - generally liked my non-humanities classes. So I could be an outlier.
College, on the other hand, was only good when I got away: a summer abroad and a semester in DC where I realized, too late, that I had been in too much of a hurry just to get to college courses without thinking enough about the context in which I'd be taking them.
Plus, I'm not sure a socially awkward fourteen year old would do much better thrust into a college environment comprising eighteen and nineteen year olds (you thought you had problems getting a girlfriend before....);
Indeed. I didn't do anything like that, but I was double-promoted from second to fourth grade, which didn't work out very well. I was very shy to begin with, and now being the shortest kid in my class every year by virtue of being the youngest didn't help anything, believe me.
Yeah. I'd be interested to hear anyone who had a good experience with skipping a grade or grades. My school in kindergarten wanted to double-promote me, but my parents said no way. It's interesting how size considerations factor in so much - I was already the smallest kid in the class with kids my age, they said. Why did size matter so much? I can't remember.
I was skipped from first to third, and it was awful. I was tall enough to be average height or better in my new grade, but that didn't help; I didn't fit in any better academically in the older class than I had in the younger class, and everyone knew I was the class pariah (I should say, in justice to my classmates, that I wasn't abused particularly, just ostracised. But I was thoroughly ostracised.) While I was spectacularly uncool in high school, I remember it mostly as a blessed relief from the misery that was (post-grade-skipping) grade school; moving up from no friends to having a bunch of people who, while as weird as I was, actually liked me, was wonderful.
If anyone here is contemplating letting a school system double-promote a kid of yours, please mention it so I can try to talk you out of it.
I talked to a girl at Thanksgiving who had skipped, IIRC, eighth grade after having already been very young for her grade. She said that it was great for her, since she had been bored stiff in middle school and since she was very tall for her age.
My Skinny Persian, however, skipped two grades and was, well, not physically imposing as a teenaged boy; he's still a little pissed about it.
Now it can be understood why, if ever you are a principal of a school and you want to introduce some radical changes, you simultaneously propose changes to the school's uniform.
Staff, parents and kids are so worked up about the new uniforms that they ........ well, you can guess the rest.
anyone who had a good experience with skipping a grade or grades
I skipped from kindergarten to 2nd grade, but it happened concurrent with a move to a new city and I was kind of a big kid anyhow. No ill effects until I was a year behind everybody else getting a driver's license. That was inconvenient.
Yeah, I'm in the midst of changing hosting companies. If all goes well, should be up again in a day or so. If not, I'll be the guy on the news at the top of the water tower. I'll wave.
"exactly" similarly fails the prudentiality criterion.
I meant as in "x gets it exactly right". Just a feeble attempt to perpetuate a running joke.
I skipped 2nd grade and it was a very bad thing. I went from being bored to being terrified. And 2nd grade summer school was very bad. They taught arithmetic through competition and no one wanted me on their team. When the nun asked me what is 8x8, a groan went up from my team. When I got the answer right it was like a scene in some sentimental baseball movie where the retarded waterboy is sent in to pinch hit and accidentally scores a home run. "Go, Billy, Go! 'Ray!!!"
Almost everyone disagrees with me, based on anecdotal experience drawn from their own "lives", but there are a lot of outliers here.
Changing colleges to be more receptive to 25 year olds would probably also be necessary. But for a bog proportion of kids, HS is miserable, and a lot of bright kids ending up marking time in HS. You can say "improve the HS's) , but it won't happen, mostly because HS is aimed at the middle of the ability bell curve (which is a normal curve, not the perverted Bell curve of normality). .
I knew someone who skipped and did well. That was based more on the fact that her emotional maturity made her fit in better with older kids.
Someone else I knew skipped 6th grade, I think. She had a bit of a hard time in high school--but there were a whole bunch of weird factors, like the fact that she was very intellectual--and some NE boarding schools are so sorts driven that being intellectual is not okay. She was reasonably athletic, but her family had brittle bones and she'd break them running. Also her father was the dean of the faculty and not very well liked by most kids.
I'd say skipping 6th grade (that is, I would expect, entering a new school after the skipped year) wouldn't be so bad -- you wouldn't come in as a freak, just as one entering student in the crowd. And I don't think there's a thing wrong with what Emerson suggests, if it would entail having a reasonably large percentage of the student body leaving their age cohort and entering college early.
There's no intrinsic problem with having education in mixed age groups; there's a distinct problem in having one kid in a hundred or so marked as a freak. Either a decent percentage of kids should be accelerated, or no one should be.
I skipped a grade and, like Apo, found that the only downside had to do with arbitrary age barriers elsewhere. In summer camp, kids were grouped by age, so I was in a different group than all my school friends. I couldn't legally drive, or drink, (or be drafted or vote or legally have consensual sex, but those never seemed to be an issue) so soon as everyone else.
On the other hand, I spent that much less time in school. So I think it was worth while. I kind of wish I'd spent longer in college, or graduate school, but I never think, gee, I wish I'd had more time in K-12.
One premise of my proposal is that for a significant proportion of HS students, the HS experience is a **bad** thing, both subjectively and objectively. (Thus, for horror stories about kids who skipped grades or went to college early and were miserable, you'd have to have a control group of the same kid staying on track, to see if he'd be miserable too.)
Included in the group which might benefit are not only some very bright students, but also some non-academic students who probably would work harder and do better at a tech school.
Subjective misery aside, there are a lot of kids who piss away their free education and then, when they get serious at age 20, 22, or whatever, find that they can't afford school.
Another way I've organized my plan is just to give every student 12 years of free education. If he drops out at 15 and gets serious at 22, he can cash in his 3 years at any school he's qualified for.
I skipped third grade but never had a problem feeling too young until college. Sure, I was the third smallest kid in 6th grade but I don't remember being picked on back then and by 8th grade I didn't seem any younger than anyone else. In high school I ran cross-country and wasn't the slowest or anything like that (it helped that our team was terrible). Really, I think my problem came from being too young to figure out how to choose a college and what to do with the opportunity when I got there. I suspect this is not unique to people who people who've skipped grades, but I want to be an outlier, damn it!
I was the smallest in my class, including the girls, until I was about 13, so that factor doesn't move me much. I didn't skip any grades, I was just small.
I'm sort of an experimental control, I guess -- unhappy and small without any skipping.
I think it depends on the grade skipped – I skipped second grade and didn't have any problem with it. (It probably helped that we moved that year, so to the kids in my class I was just "the new kid", not "the kid who skipped a grade".) One of my friends in college skipped his senior year of HS and that messed him up good – he was fine for the first couple of years and then had a breakdown where he started to regret missing out on Prom and general HS tomfoolery and decided to make up for it by doing a lot of drugs and drinking to excess (excess by New Orleans standards, which is pretty extreme). While this is only anecdotal evidence, I would think it would be easier to skip a grade earlier rather than later in one's educational career.
Also, a number of Southern schools have come up with a good solution – they run free public boarding schools for gifted HS students that aren't challenged by their regular schools. I knew a lot of kids at Tulane that went to the Louisiana School of Math, Science, and the Arts (or as it's alumni call it, "S&M") and I think Mississippi has one, too. Too bad that state educational budgets are stretched so thin (especially with NCLB) because I think this is a great idea.
i skipped 9th grade. it coincided with a move. no ill effects. and i even liked my HS experience - finally, we had interesting classes, and non-co-ed gym that involved just going running outside in the woods a lot.
improving high school might be all it really takes, for a lot of kids.
I think it depends on the grade skipped – I skipped second grade and didn't have any problem with it. (It probably helped that we moved that year, so to the kids in my class I was just "the new kid", not "the kid who skipped a grade".)
I'm all irrationally overheated about this (did I mention that my grade school experience was a misery? First grade was fine, but after the skipped grade I was an outcast.) but I'd say that switching schools would probably cover any effects of the skipping, because your classmates wouldn't know. Skipping in the same school? Really unpleasant.
I'm sure this is an unusual experience: I went to a private school from k-5th (public school thereafter) and the school was so small they generally combined grades. So my 1st grade was in a class with both 1st and 2nd graders, 2nd grade with 3rd graders too, 3rd with 4th, etc. They split us into groups based more on ability/motivation than grade level, so skipping third grade meant doing exactly what I'd already been doing, but staying in class for 30 more minutes because 4th graders had 30 more minutes of class. Had I started a year later, I'd have begun in the older grade and, I suspect, never had the chance to skip. I changed schools in 6th grade, so never got marked as "that guy who skipped" in my later years.
Anyway, my original complaint was not so much about skipping, but about being in college too soon. I don't think as a general rule people should have to take time off between high school and college, but I wish I'd been more aware of the possibility. And I have friends who did everything on schedule who feel the same way about their own college experiences, so it's not entirely a matter of skipping.
One of my son's friends skipped his senior HS year. He was on the college track and had enough credits to graduate and be admitted to college.
It was an unmixed blessing for him. On the one hand, he liked college, had fun, and did well. On the other, he was a pariah in HS because he had embarassed one of the popular girls and the whole gang of them made it their duty to make his life a living hell.
His crime was a) refusing to have sex without a condom when propositioned (a good thing to do) and b) letting the story get out (a very bad thing to do.)
Pretty rare, I think -- say, not all that far from 1%, maybe less if my grade school was typical. I'm the only one I knew of in my grade school, and I probably would have known about it in a four year band -- if anyone in my original class, the class I skipped into, the class older than that, or my sister's class, one year older still had skipped, I would have been aware. I knew more people in high school who had skipped, but that was a selected population of smartypants, much like the self-selected population of smartypants here, and still not all that many -- less than ten in a class of 200?
Sorry, LB, I didn't see your comment until after I had posted. I think that changing schools helped a lot and another thing that made the adjustment easier was that I didn't realize it was a big deal. My experience was kind of like eb's -- I had attended a hippie school for a year that completely rejected the traditional age-based grouping of students. Instead, there was a certain set of skills defined that you needed to master in order to progress to the next grade. If it took you 6 months or 16 months to finish, fine. Since people were moving between grades all of the time, there was no stigma attached to staying in one grade for a certain duration of time, like there is with being "held back" in traditional schools or skipping a grade. Also, since you were promoted independently in different subjects, you could be in 3rd grade in reading but 5th grade in math. So, really, my "skipping" a grade was more like finishing first and second grades in one year and then starting a third grade at a traditional school the next year.
I would love to see more schools take this approach. Since your education is self-guided, it really instills a love of learning and an ownership of your education and people are able to mature and learn at whatever rate is natural. Also, the real world isn't age segregated -- I think students mature (in a good way) much more quickly in an environment where they are interacting with children of different ages. The experience did kind of mess me up for a number of years, though, because I had no patience for regular schools. That I attribute to the unstructured environment of the hippie school, however, instead of skipping a grade.
My nieces will be going to one of those unstructured hippy schools -- one is there already. Initial reports are excellent. An MD friend of mine graduated from there and says that the school had the best and the worst students in the city.
That actually sounds a lot like my experience, Becks, only there was no movement between classes with different teachers (so there were a number of levels within a 3rd/4th class, for example, but you wouldn't see anyone leave that class for 5th or 2nd grade during the year).
The experience did kind of mess me up for a number of years, though, because I had no patience for regular schools. That I attribute to the unstructured environment of the hippie school, however, instead of skipping a grade.
I hadn't really thought of it that way, but this was probably true of me, too. I do remember thinking, every now and then, "Well, if things were like at my old school, I'd just go ahead and do the next few assignments now, but since there's no way to accelerate this class I'll go watch tv for a few hours." Such was my commitment to independent study.
Yeah, I really wonder how the unstructured, self-driven approach scales up. Would it work in inner cities? How does it handle uncooperative students? Would students ever become uncooperative if they always started and finished school in that environment? In other words, is it feasible for being the dominant pedagogical philosophy in our public school systems across the country? Or would it fail miserably once it had to face the real world?
Unstructured mixed-age hippie schools = good, apparently (if it's done right) for both gifted and slow students. Mixing students of different abilities and ages gives smart kids a chance to learn by teaching, to develop social skills by helping, and to develop tolerance of kids with different abilities (whereas, in my anecdotal experience, separate "gifted" classes, especially if they're marked by clear race / class difference from the rest of the school population, create insufferable snobbery). Slower kids benefit from helping one another or younger children, which gives them a sense of mastery and competence they're too often denied, and often demonstrate gifts in other areas in which, if the school knows what it's doing, they can help the smart kids (social skills, arts, dance, phys ed, etc).
In theory, I really like this unstructured, self-driven approach, but I wonder how well it would handle severe procrastinators like me. I tend to think that if I'd gone to such a school, I'd probably still be in 9th grade now.
The school in Portland, Oregon, is self-selected and by my guess educates one or two percent of the city's kids. It's a great option but isn't supposed to be a model for widespread use. It used to have a waiting list, but not now.
I skipped first grade and was pretty thoroughly miserable afterwards. I pretty much got taken apart like the kid in About A Boy for most of elementary school and was a total outcast in middle school. In high school things are a lot better. (I also loved CTY.) I might have been pretty unhappy without skipping, but I don't think I'd want a kid of mine to do it.
The age and size thing. I went to a weird private kindergarten that was at the top of a preschool, and then I went to a school that started in the 1st grade. There was some talk of holding me back, because I was so small, but my kindergarten teachers said, "no way, she'd be bored out of her mind if she had to repeat kindergarten."
What is this rejudice against little people. I'm still small, btw.
Wow. We really are a statistically improbable number of grade-skippers.
The unstructured school that I went to worked well for kids of all abilities for the reasons that B described but I'm not sure how well a school like that would scale given public school resources. The grades at this school only had between 6-15 students each so it wasn't too difficult to manage a class full of students each doing their own thing. I imagine it would be really difficult with a student-teacher ratio of 30-1, which I had in the traditional schools I attended.
As far as procrastination, it definitely was a problem, especially since they didn't require you to do a certain amount of each subject per day. If you decided you were just really into reading right now, you could do that and ignore your other subjects, as long as you showed progress in something each week. That was also a plus, though, because it allowed you to really immerse yourself into things that interested you. I think I spent 2 weeks where I did nothing but read about UFOs.
The trend now is to hold back kids before first grade or kindergarden. Kids born in the summer months are often held back. Even smart kids going to fancy elementary schools. Nobody wants their kid to be the youngest one in the class. The theory is that this will give them the best possible chance to get into a good college.
The trend now is to hold back kids before first grade or kindergarden.
I've read about this almost exclusively in reference to boys, some of whom apparently haven't quite developed the necessary attention span at entry age.
91, 92: My sister is about to hold her daughter back. My niece is a little young for her age, small, and inclined to give up and whine. It's the third that my sister is hoping the extra year will address, but I'm a little skeptical.
I mean, how much can a parent really hope to socially engineer a child?
In some Midwest schools, there is also a very questionable practice of holding back academically-ready 8th grade boys who play football just so they'll be bigger when they join the High School team. That annoys me – it costs taxpayers how much per year to educate a student?
94--Apparently the cut-off birthday for sports is mid-summer, while the cut-off birthday for academic advancement varies between September and November. That doesn't really address your point about holding people back in the 8th grade, but perhaps it's involved.
Apostropher, the monkey won't be effective unless needles come out and stab the child as soon as it starts to cuddle up. Don't be fooled by cheap, defective Chinese-made wire monkeys.
The trend now is to hold back kids before first grade or kindergarden.
My neighbors did that with their daughter, who as far as I could tell was neither dumb nor socially maladjusted -- rather the opposite in both respects. Her father told me semi-facetiously that he wanted her to be the biggest, toughest kid in her class.
I definitely started something here with my double-promotion reference. Unfogged commenters do seem to be a statistically anomalous bunch in that regard. I've never seen statistics on what percentage of people were double-promoted, but I think it was less than 0.5% in my school. Other kids knew about the few of us who had been double-promoted, and I was called "Brain" and "Professor" and such, which wasn't really a good thing. Titles like that don't exactly make one a chick magnet, for one thing. (But then when I went to high school, I joined the chess team, which really turns girls on. Not.)
I was never promoted up a grade (got close but didn't) and I was always the school's icon of geekiness anyway. Just because my grades were so high and I had so much general knowledge. The acne didn't help.
I went to traditional public school for thirteen years. I think I'd have liked to have skipped. I probably could have graduated early from high school, but I stayed for four years and managed to graduate with 54 college credit hours.
In the case of good high schools, I think, the distinction between HS and college is not so clear: students who want to can advance themselves academically pretty easily without the cost and social transitions of actually going to a college.
I still had fucking acne at the age of 40 or so, when I took Accutane for a year. No more acne. Accutane totally kicks ass (it's more problematic if one's female, since it's a teratogen).
The school district where I went to kindergarten wanted to hold me back, because although I could read on a very high level, I had a tendency to finish the letter book assignments early and then figure there was no need to sit in the chair when there was a fort to construct from cardboard blocks.
Parents figured I was acting up because I was bored and told the school district they'd take their chances with moving me to first grade.
The school district in first grade offered, at the conclusion of the year, to skip me to third grade. Parents declined citing reasons like Lizardbreath's (dad had been skipped and hated it.)
Love your story, Cala. Having a smart student so confuses the school district that they can't figure out whether to hold you back a year or double-promote you. Brilliant.
On confused schools: the same school who suggested I be double-promoted called in my parents for a conference because they didn't understand that skills develop separately. I was, like Cala, reading at a very high level, but I wrote ugly-like and with crappy spelling like all the other kids. My teacher was like "she doesn't write well!" and my mother apparently had to explain that just 'cause a kid is smart in one area doesn't mean they are smart in all of them. Before long, though, they had to call them in for other reasons, as I would fall asleep in class. No hyperactive child here, I guess.
In third grade I had the problem of not being able to keep my subtraction columns straight and so failed a number of little math quizzes while being perfectly capable of subtracting in my head.
Someone upthread mentioned segregated "gifted" classes and their accompanying problems; this was definately an issue at my (public) high school. Overall, it was a very diverse school, but out of the 120 or so kids who took AP classes (in a class of ~400), there were precisely 3 black students, and a similar number of hispanics. I wouldn't say that it fostered a sense of superiority among the students in AP classes, but it did completely defeat the purpose of having a diverse school.
That said, my school was quite the geek paradise, so long as you took the upper level classes. Public school ain't all bad.
Matt F, my school was pretty much exactly like yours (except there weren't a lot of Hispanics in Pittsburgh). I wouldn't say it completely defeated the purpose of having an integrated school, but the race and class distinctions were notable.
As for geek paradise, there was an annual picnic called "nerdfest"--may be having a reunion this summer.
I don't think my high school had more than ten non-white students total. Wasn't a terribly rich area, just not terribly diverse.
About the hippy-everyone-in-one-classroom school; it sounds like a great idea, but not for everyone, because it seems to require very independent, motivated social students.
Get a group of 'slower' kids who expect the smart kids to do the work for them and a group of 'brighter' kids who don't have the patience to deal with the slow kids and you have... my sixth grade science class?
I also took accutane, but only for about four months. (It's been very mild since then.) Still, my acne was probably the worst in my class. I would have taken it another month but my hair was falling out (it became curly after the treatment, and has remained so) and I became incredibly moody and irritable and unfocused. But it cleared up my acne.
My high school was also much like Weiner's and Matt F.'s: ~70% Hispanic but very few black or Hispanic kids in the Honors and AP classes. It's a problem, to be sure, but I don't think it defeated the purpose of having a diverse school -- indeed, there wasn't any purpose to this school's diversity at all, it just happened to be that way because of the demographics of the area.
The trend now is to hold back kids before first grade or kindergarden.
This is a good idea, especially for summer birthdays and especially for certain boys. My mom teaches kindergarten (at a decidedly non-fancy school) and she often gets boys who are very young and have a lot of trouble understanding that school is for learning -- they're just there to play. They are often perfectly smart, they just haven't reached the right developmental stage to enter school. Boys who have been held back, on the other hand, are often among her top students.
I don't think it defeated the purpose of having a diverse school -- indeed, there wasn't any purpose to this school's diversity
Well, maybe "purpose" wasn't quite the right word, but diverse schools are generally held up as being closer to ideal than the more segregated schools are. However, when the students aren't interacting with each other except when bumping into each other in the hallways between classes, most of the benefit that could be gained from attending a diverse school seems like it would be lost.
Oh, I agree. This was why I chose to take a regular Government class my senior year instead of doing an online AP course like most of my friends. It was one of the best classes I ever took (although I didn't learn much).
My view of my schooling is that I pegged myself to others all the way along, always being bright but not the brightest. This was fine at good schools, but might not have been so fine if I'd gone to vocational school.
#117: Actually the multi-age cooperative classroom (including in college) requires not super-motivated students, but a teacher who knows what she's doing. It's way different than just presenting the material (the teacher as delivery mechanism model). It requires the teacher to have skills in leadership and facilitation, in managing groups, and in helping students to see learning as a less passive activity than in the conventional classroom. I suspect that this is why it works very well for slower kids: it helps them begin to see themselves as active learners and problem solvers, rather than as just problem students.
Did you have a painter's cap, and Vans, too? Or was that just the kids in my neighborhood?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 12:21 PM
Once bought shorts, over my mother's objection, that turned out to be women's shorts. Obvious women's shorts. Wore them. Now pretend the trauma of being thirteen was a function of bedwetting, which seems more respectable.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 12:26 PM
I really think that kids should be sent to college as soon as they're academically able to take classes there (as early as age 14). I really believe that Jr HS and HS are hell for a majority of kids, but certainly a large minority.
I've my expressed my theory this way: in HS, only 10% of kids are normal. It's a Bell curve with very very thick tails.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 12:27 PM
Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 12:28 PM
only 10% of kids are normal. It's a Bell curve with very very thick tails.
Can you actually graph that?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 12:29 PM
I liked the uglu hawaiian shirts, because the made school seem less formal. (catholic school, but somehow we could get away with them because they were button-up and had collars.) They were especially fun with a tie. I only had one. It didn't really fit in, because it was mostly a brownish beige with blue tropical flowers, but luckily it only drew one or two small derogatory remarks before it was accepted. Anyway, the coolest kids never actually wore those shirts in my time, so it wasn't like there was stiff competition.
I feel so bad for Hughes, though. And I can sympathize. I was totally clueless when it came to any sort of fashion. I really liked uniforms because of that.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 12:37 PM
Oi. Just ignore the grammar/spelling errors above, k?
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 12:38 PM
I would have preferred uniforms while I was in school; being out of fashion all the time was hell on my self-esteem.
Fuck self-expression; my clothes didn't express anything but that my parents thought flattering clothes would lead to me having sex and becoming pregnant and lost in a world of DOOM and didn't have a whole lot of cash for stylish clothing (by which I mean, a department store) anyway.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 12:45 PM
I'm a big-idea guy, I don't do the graphing. Some guy in India does the graphing for me.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 12:54 PM
Wow, those years sucked.
That gives me an idea: every time I think "my life sucks," I should recall high school, which was like "my life sucks" cubed.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 1:06 PM
I kept a low fashion profile in high school, having basically two outfits: blue jeans with a black shirt, and black jeans with a maroon shirt. Both of these were finished off with Doc Martens. This made me kind of boring, but also saved me from some fashion scourges of the 80s, like stirrup pants.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 1:41 PM
I had the same experience, FL, except with Umbros soccer shorts. Man. Fucking Umbros. What a stupid fad.
Hypercolor t-shirts, on the other hand, were objectively awesome.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 1:44 PM
Knockoff Umbros never cut it. And the hypercolor shirts never seemed to work for very long.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 1:53 PM
best: the poncho-burlappy-thing fad of '88.
Posted by matty | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 2:01 PM
I was never particularly fashionable, in fact I was proud not to be. (Yeah, the mullet was evidence to the contrary, sadly.) So my biggest nightmare was just as the '90s broke, and my wonderfully afashionable flannel shirts and White Sox hats were suddenly all the rage. Which meant that my I-Don't-Care became The-In-Thing and soon I-Still-Think-This-Is-Cool. Damn mavens, take your peccadillos somewhere else!
Posted by Mo MacArbie | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 2:11 PM
You know what other fad sucked? Bodysuits. Jesus christ, why did we ever wear those? With the crotch snaps? Eeuuuuggghh.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 2:27 PM
Wow, I feel so grateful for my high school. I wasn't happy, but I knew at the time all my problems came from me and no one else. We didn't have a status hierarchy. You had friends or didn't have friends, and in either case you didn't bother giving shit to anybody else (except in very rare cases, and I was never a shit giver).
What a great place. Yet it was your typical undistinguished working-class/middle-class high school in suburban New York, nothing progressive about it.
When Columbine happened, I was honestly baffled -- I thought all that shit about blond jocks was just in John Hughes movies. But maybe it's a function of having rich kids around. Looking back, I'm grateful I turned down my mom's offer and decided against going to the local country-day school.
At any rate, I didn't encounter real meanness anytime between 6th grade and the end of college (which cuts against my rich kid theory). But offices -- there you can find some real morons.
Posted by Kyle | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 2:29 PM
Bodysuits are fucking ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as those one-piece jumpsuit type things we had in the 80s (I had one in a great color of sorta magentaish red) that you had to remove all the way in order to pee.
My high school, Catholic, had a fairly relaxed dress code, by Catholic school standards: shirts with sleeves and collars, socks or stockings, solid-color pants (gray only for girls, though in my senior year they went with unisex any solid color, which they retracted the following year because it "fostered too much clothing competition among girls"), and non-sandal shoes. It's possible that the gray pants thing was when I learned that cut, rather than trendiness, is the way to look good without requiring a lot of closet space.
Worst clothing decision: a nice white tuxedo-type shirt with a bow tie and a tweed newsboy cap. It looked adorable in the store, but I never could bring myself to wear it in public.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 3:58 PM
I really think that kids should be sent to college as soon as they're academically able to take classes there (as early as age 14). I really believe that Jr HS and HS are hell for a majority of kids, but certainly a large minority.
This is what I thought in high school, but after beginning to take college courses at 16 (full-time at 17) and graduating at 20, I'm not too sure this is a good idea. Maybe for people with clear goals in a particular area this works, but had I been older I'm sure I would have gotten much more out of college and I certainly would have been much more prepared to try to figure out what to do next when I graduated.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 5:10 PM
Plus, I'm not sure a socially awkward fourteen year old would do much better thrust into a college environment comprising eighteen and nineteen year olds (you thought you had problems getting a girlfriend before....); most people aren't socially awkward their whole lives but in most cases there's no shortcut. It just takes growing up to get past it.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 5:19 PM
At any rate, I didn't encounter real meanness anytime between 6th grade and the end of college (which cuts against my rich kid theory). But offices -- there you can find some real morons.
Those are the people who made high school hell for the rest of us, and are determined to make the whole world high school forever. We had a hatching of those in my dept at work, but when the company split off a sector of its business we exiled them to the new company. Yay! No more burberry plaid! No more fucking coach logo prints! No more "take the train? In these clothes?"
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 5:20 PM
only 10% of kids are normal. It's a Bell curve with very very thick tails.
Can you actually graph that?
Yeah. Draw a bell curve. Turn it upside down. Problem solved.
Maybe for people with clear goals in a particular area this works, but had I been older I'm sure I would have gotten much more out of college and I certainly would have been much more prepared to try to figure out what to do next when I graduated.
Run the high schools like mini-colleges. They're halfway there anyways.
ash
['They can merge with the JC's.']
Posted by ash | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 5:22 PM
Yeah. Draw a bell curve. Turn it upside down. Problem solved.
That wouldn't work.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 5:24 PM
where has the Apostropher gone?
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 5:39 PM
That wouldn't work.
You mean it wouldn't be accurate? Sensible? Sane? No shit.
ash
['But they'd be some damn thick tails.']
Posted by ash | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 5:43 PM
Going to a college young would be an option, not a norm. Kids could still live at home.
If you're going to be miserable anyway, you might as well get a college-level education while you're doing it.
What is everyone's experience with credit conversions, HS --> college? When I was young 4 years of a foreign language got you into a second-year class, and a year or to of HS calculus got you into introductory college calculus. A lot of people are capable of the real thing the first time.
Of course there's a wide variance in HS's.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 6:01 PM
I was initially pissed because the only thing my college would accept to waive Calculus I was the AP Cal exam, which, of course, I hadn't taken (I didn't take any AP exams). Then I took Cal I, and realized that I barely remembered Calculus anyway, since I'd stopped taking math my junior year, and I wasn't so pissed anymore.
I don't think there are any more credit conversions. Sometimes there are placement tests, which one can do well on because of high school learning, but otherwise, it's just AP credit. At least, as far as I know.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 6:05 PM
where has the Apostropher gone?
I'm the sole healthy body in the Plague House. Too busy tending to vomit to play. It was a dull, smelly New Years.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 6:06 PM
26, re: credit conversions. Since my HS kicked ass and my college, not so much, I got out of absolutely every requirement. The only conversion that became relevant was my language AP. I was put in the last linguistics class before students switched over to the literature dept: end of the second year, I think.
I'm really not sure that getting out of all requirements was a good thing for me, in the end. I haven't done a spot of math since the Calc AP, and if the rest of my family weren't stuffed with scientists, it would have been easy for me to regress into total scientific ignorance. Then there's the uncomfortable part about teaching freshman comp without ever having taken a writing class in my life. And no: I didn't use my scheduling freedom to wander around the university curriculum taking classes in all kinds of wild and woolly disciplines.
On-topic: it was pink Guess jeans for me.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 6:18 PM
it's just AP credit. At least, as far as I know.
The Oregon higher education system also used SAT scores in some cases; high enough verbals and you didn't have to take the first course in the writing sequence. Maybe the first two.
I had the AP lit and comp tests, so I didn't take any writing at all, sadly.
I was upset in 5th grade when my parents wouldn't let me have messages shaved into my hair. Unbelievably, that seemed really popular at the time.
Posted by TJ | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 7:27 PM
Depending on the student, living at home can be a big mistake. High school is an all day every, day activity even if you hate it, but it's quite possible to complete college by spending only a few hours per day/week with other students if all you do is take classes there.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 7:28 PM
I once bought a pair of boxer shorts that really almost looked like regular gym shorts. Almost wore them to basketball practice (with briefs on underneath, of course, but still). Got a weird feeling in my stomach the last minute and decided not to.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 7:34 PM
I also think that most people (in the US) actually do think they like high school. (Most also people believe in creationism.) I'm not sure if they're deluding themselves or not, though.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 7:38 PM
I was so unfashionable as a high school student that I can't remember any particularly traumatic outfit - nothing I wore had any particular chance of passing as normal. (The bulk of my friends were vaguely arty-punk, but I never successfully carried that off, or tried all that hard.)
The big traumatic fashion memory I can come up with, actually, is accidentally coming into school looking good one day -- black skirt, red sweater with those big batwing sleeves that were key for a while in the eighties, and shiny red stockings that matched the sweater. A couple of girls who normally didn't know I existed came over and chatted with me for a bit, which was pleasant, but odd, until I realized that I was suddenly worthy of acknowledgment because my outfit was reasonably well put together. I was so insulted that I don't think I wore anything but LL Bean turtlenecks for a month.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 7:49 PM
I couldn't stand high school so much that I only attended a semester. I finished out the rest in a year by attending community college classes for HS credit and by doing this "alternative" self-directed program intended mainly for stoners and pregnant girls.
I went to college directly after and had a horrible time. Then again, it wasn't a college I wanted to go to (I was pressured by my parents) and I was seriously depressed the whole time. I was a CS major, and had already been programming professionally, but the CS degree plan didn't have you taking any computer-related courses until the third semester. On top of that, I'm really shy IRL, and so I didn't have any way to meet anyone with similar interests, which I'm sure was 2/3 of my depression.
So I dropped out after the first semester. (I have like 70 credit hours because of all the high school courses, though. Not terribly transferrable, but hey.) Now I'm programming full time and relatively happy, though still quite a bit lonely. But getting out of this shitty small town I'm in might help that some. I'm moving to Austin this summer though, so we'll see how that goes.
I actually think I would have been perfectly fine with high school if the educational quality were higher. As it was, the academics were pure torture. (And my school district was one of the poorer ones in the state of Texas, largely because of the high local illegal immigrant population.) But there was a clique of people, which interestingly enough intersected through the preps and slackers, who were intelligent and cynical and realistic enough to be fun to hang around. I do sort of miss that experience.
And this is pretty recent for me. Five, six years ago.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 7:54 PM
My middle school had a T&C surf designs t-shirt trend going for a while. The only other thing I remember about that school is that shorts were permitted only on special "shorts" days when the school authorities looked at the weather reports and decided to be nice to us for an upcoming hot day.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 7:56 PM
My junior high AND high school made everyone always tuck their shirts in. (Sweaters excepted.) Just the guys, actually. That sucked ass.
I managed to get around it many days by wearing a long jacket and keeping it closed. That way the teachers can't see the bottom of my shirt and assume it's tucked in. Only got caught once.
Plus you only get 5 minutes between classes, leaving you with basically no time to go to your locker, making you carry all your books around with you to every class. That sucked too.
I'm single-handedly turning this into a general "reminisces of high school" thread. If anyone objects, we can take it out back.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 8:02 PM
Apo, I hate to add to your misery, but do you know your blog is MIA? Hope everyone gets better soon, and we await your return anxiously.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 8:05 PM
Oh, and I think EB's partly right about the young people going to college thing. It's really hard to fit in and be accepted in a group of people who are all two to four years older than you, let alone five or six years. And even for people that would hate high school, they can often find a good group of friends in college, if they're old enough. I think it'd be better to let people who are too smart for high school to do low-supervision self-study for a few years until they're college age.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 8:07 PM
"I think EB's partly right"
mostly or completely right, actually. Though I hesitate to commit to "completely" on prudential grounds.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 8:09 PM
the word is "exactly".
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 8:24 PM
"exactly" similarly fails the prudentiality criterion.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 8:32 PM
For the record, I have mostly good memories of high school. I had a good group of friends, wasn't picked on, didn't worry too much about fitting in - it helped to be at a school where it wasn't clear what "fitting in" actually meant - generally liked my non-humanities classes. So I could be an outlier.
College, on the other hand, was only good when I got away: a summer abroad and a semester in DC where I realized, too late, that I had been in too much of a hurry just to get to college courses without thinking enough about the context in which I'd be taking them.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 8:33 PM
Plus, I'm not sure a socially awkward fourteen year old would do much better thrust into a college environment comprising eighteen and nineteen year olds (you thought you had problems getting a girlfriend before....);
Indeed. I didn't do anything like that, but I was double-promoted from second to fourth grade, which didn't work out very well. I was very shy to begin with, and now being the shortest kid in my class every year by virtue of being the youngest didn't help anything, believe me.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 8:35 PM
double-promoted
Yeah. I'd be interested to hear anyone who had a good experience with skipping a grade or grades. My school in kindergarten wanted to double-promote me, but my parents said no way. It's interesting how size considerations factor in so much - I was already the smallest kid in the class with kids my age, they said. Why did size matter so much? I can't remember.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 10:04 PM
I was skipped from first to third, and it was awful. I was tall enough to be average height or better in my new grade, but that didn't help; I didn't fit in any better academically in the older class than I had in the younger class, and everyone knew I was the class pariah (I should say, in justice to my classmates, that I wasn't abused particularly, just ostracised. But I was thoroughly ostracised.) While I was spectacularly uncool in high school, I remember it mostly as a blessed relief from the misery that was (post-grade-skipping) grade school; moving up from no friends to having a bunch of people who, while as weird as I was, actually liked me, was wonderful.
If anyone here is contemplating letting a school system double-promote a kid of yours, please mention it so I can try to talk you out of it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 10:21 PM
I talked to a girl at Thanksgiving who had skipped, IIRC, eighth grade after having already been very young for her grade. She said that it was great for her, since she had been bored stiff in middle school and since she was very tall for her age.
My Skinny Persian, however, skipped two grades and was, well, not physically imposing as a teenaged boy; he's still a little pissed about it.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 10:24 PM
47 comments so far!
Now it can be understood why, if ever you are a principal of a school and you want to introduce some radical changes, you simultaneously propose changes to the school's uniform.
Staff, parents and kids are so worked up about the new uniforms that they ........ well, you can guess the rest.
Posted by Geraldo | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 12:45 AM
anyone who had a good experience with skipping a grade or grades
I skipped from kindergarten to 2nd grade, but it happened concurrent with a move to a new city and I was kind of a big kid anyhow. No ill effects until I was a year behind everybody else getting a driver's license. That was inconvenient.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 2:00 AM
MIA
Yeah, I'm in the midst of changing hosting companies. If all goes well, should be up again in a day or so. If not, I'll be the guy on the news at the top of the water tower. I'll wave.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 2:05 AM
Apostropher is an outlier, and an unseemly one too.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 3:57 AM
"exactly" similarly fails the prudentiality criterion.
I meant as in "x gets it exactly right". Just a feeble attempt to perpetuate a running joke.
I skipped 2nd grade and it was a very bad thing. I went from being bored to being terrified. And 2nd grade summer school was very bad. They taught arithmetic through competition and no one wanted me on their team. When the nun asked me what is 8x8, a groan went up from my team. When I got the answer right it was like a scene in some sentimental baseball movie where the retarded waterboy is sent in to pinch hit and accidentally scores a home run. "Go, Billy, Go! 'Ray!!!"
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 6:58 AM
A baseball movie with a retarded waterboy?
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 7:28 AM
if there isn't one, there ought to have been.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 7:52 AM
Almost everyone disagrees with me, based on anecdotal experience drawn from their own "lives", but there are a lot of outliers here.
Changing colleges to be more receptive to 25 year olds would probably also be necessary. But for a bog proportion of kids, HS is miserable, and a lot of bright kids ending up marking time in HS. You can say "improve the HS's) , but it won't happen, mostly because HS is aimed at the middle of the ability bell curve (which is a normal curve, not the perverted Bell curve of normality). .
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 9:31 AM
for a bog proportion of kids, HS is miserable
Yeah. They're swamped.
Posted by TJ | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 9:35 AM
They're still considered minors even if they're in college, Emerson.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 9:36 AM
15, big.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 9:39 AM
Not in the metric system.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 9:41 AM
I knew someone who skipped and did well. That was based more on the fact that her emotional maturity made her fit in better with older kids.
Someone else I knew skipped 6th grade, I think. She had a bit of a hard time in high school--but there were a whole bunch of weird factors, like the fact that she was very intellectual--and some NE boarding schools are so sorts driven that being intellectual is not okay. She was reasonably athletic, but her family had brittle bones and she'd break them running. Also her father was the dean of the faculty and not very well liked by most kids.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 11:09 AM
[redacted]
Posted by [redacted] | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 11:22 AM
I'd say skipping 6th grade (that is, I would expect, entering a new school after the skipped year) wouldn't be so bad -- you wouldn't come in as a freak, just as one entering student in the crowd. And I don't think there's a thing wrong with what Emerson suggests, if it would entail having a reasonably large percentage of the student body leaving their age cohort and entering college early.
There's no intrinsic problem with having education in mixed age groups; there's a distinct problem in having one kid in a hundred or so marked as a freak. Either a decent percentage of kids should be accelerated, or no one should be.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 11:24 AM
I skipped a grade and, like Apo, found that the only downside had to do with arbitrary age barriers elsewhere. In summer camp, kids were grouped by age, so I was in a different group than all my school friends. I couldn't legally drive, or drink, (or be drafted or vote or legally have consensual sex, but those never seemed to be an issue) so soon as everyone else.
On the other hand, I spent that much less time in school. So I think it was worth while. I kind of wish I'd spent longer in college, or graduate school, but I never think, gee, I wish I'd had more time in K-12.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 11:31 AM
One premise of my proposal is that for a significant proportion of HS students, the HS experience is a **bad** thing, both subjectively and objectively. (Thus, for horror stories about kids who skipped grades or went to college early and were miserable, you'd have to have a control group of the same kid staying on track, to see if he'd be miserable too.)
Included in the group which might benefit are not only some very bright students, but also some non-academic students who probably would work harder and do better at a tech school.
Subjective misery aside, there are a lot of kids who piss away their free education and then, when they get serious at age 20, 22, or whatever, find that they can't afford school.
Another way I've organized my plan is just to give every student 12 years of free education. If he drops out at 15 and gets serious at 22, he can cash in his 3 years at any school he's qualified for.
Or she.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 11:37 AM
I skipped third grade but never had a problem feeling too young until college. Sure, I was the third smallest kid in 6th grade but I don't remember being picked on back then and by 8th grade I didn't seem any younger than anyone else. In high school I ran cross-country and wasn't the slowest or anything like that (it helped that our team was terrible). Really, I think my problem came from being too young to figure out how to choose a college and what to do with the opportunity when I got there. I suspect this is not unique to people who people who've skipped grades, but I want to be an outlier, damn it!
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 11:54 AM
I was the smallest in my class, including the girls, until I was about 13, so that factor doesn't move me much. I didn't skip any grades, I was just small.
I'm sort of an experimental control, I guess -- unhappy and small without any skipping.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 12:02 PM
I think it depends on the grade skipped – I skipped second grade and didn't have any problem with it. (It probably helped that we moved that year, so to the kids in my class I was just "the new kid", not "the kid who skipped a grade".) One of my friends in college skipped his senior year of HS and that messed him up good – he was fine for the first couple of years and then had a breakdown where he started to regret missing out on Prom and general HS tomfoolery and decided to make up for it by doing a lot of drugs and drinking to excess (excess by New Orleans standards, which is pretty extreme). While this is only anecdotal evidence, I would think it would be easier to skip a grade earlier rather than later in one's educational career.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 12:06 PM
Also, a number of Southern schools have come up with a good solution – they run free public boarding schools for gifted HS students that aren't challenged by their regular schools. I knew a lot of kids at Tulane that went to the Louisiana School of Math, Science, and the Arts (or as it's alumni call it, "S&M") and I think Mississippi has one, too. Too bad that state educational budgets are stretched so thin (especially with NCLB) because I think this is a great idea.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 12:11 PM
"number of Southern states"
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 12:14 PM
68: I went to the NC School of S&M, but got expelled in just under a semester.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 12:28 PM
i skipped 9th grade. it coincided with a move. no ill effects. and i even liked my HS experience - finally, we had interesting classes, and non-co-ed gym that involved just going running outside in the woods a lot.
improving high school might be all it really takes, for a lot of kids.
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 12:29 PM
I think it depends on the grade skipped – I skipped second grade and didn't have any problem with it. (It probably helped that we moved that year, so to the kids in my class I was just "the new kid", not "the kid who skipped a grade".)
I'm all irrationally overheated about this (did I mention that my grade school experience was a misery? First grade was fine, but after the skipped grade I was an outcast.) but I'd say that switching schools would probably cover any effects of the skipping, because your classmates wouldn't know. Skipping in the same school? Really unpleasant.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 12:29 PM
What all these anecdotes seem to be proving is that people who skip grades end up commenting at Unfogged.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 12:31 PM
Skipping in the same school? Really unpleasant.
I'm sure this is an unusual experience: I went to a private school from k-5th (public school thereafter) and the school was so small they generally combined grades. So my 1st grade was in a class with both 1st and 2nd graders, 2nd grade with 3rd graders too, 3rd with 4th, etc. They split us into groups based more on ability/motivation than grade level, so skipping third grade meant doing exactly what I'd already been doing, but staying in class for 30 more minutes because 4th graders had 30 more minutes of class. Had I started a year later, I'd have begun in the older grade and, I suspect, never had the chance to skip. I changed schools in 6th grade, so never got marked as "that guy who skipped" in my later years.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 12:41 PM
people who skip grades end up commenting at Unfogged
How rare is it, to skip a grade?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 12:45 PM
Anyway, my original complaint was not so much about skipping, but about being in college too soon. I don't think as a general rule people should have to take time off between high school and college, but I wish I'd been more aware of the possibility. And I have friends who did everything on schedule who feel the same way about their own college experiences, so it's not entirely a matter of skipping.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 12:51 PM
One of my son's friends skipped his senior HS year. He was on the college track and had enough credits to graduate and be admitted to college.
It was an unmixed blessing for him. On the one hand, he liked college, had fun, and did well. On the other, he was a pariah in HS because he had embarassed one of the popular girls and the whole gang of them made it their duty to make his life a living hell.
His crime was a) refusing to have sex without a condom when propositioned (a good thing to do) and b) letting the story get out (a very bad thing to do.)
A woman scorned indeed.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 12:52 PM
Pretty rare, I think -- say, not all that far from 1%, maybe less if my grade school was typical. I'm the only one I knew of in my grade school, and I probably would have known about it in a four year band -- if anyone in my original class, the class I skipped into, the class older than that, or my sister's class, one year older still had skipped, I would have been aware. I knew more people in high school who had skipped, but that was a selected population of smartypants, much like the self-selected population of smartypants here, and still not all that many -- less than ten in a class of 200?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 12:55 PM
Sorry, LB, I didn't see your comment until after I had posted. I think that changing schools helped a lot and another thing that made the adjustment easier was that I didn't realize it was a big deal. My experience was kind of like eb's -- I had attended a hippie school for a year that completely rejected the traditional age-based grouping of students. Instead, there was a certain set of skills defined that you needed to master in order to progress to the next grade. If it took you 6 months or 16 months to finish, fine. Since people were moving between grades all of the time, there was no stigma attached to staying in one grade for a certain duration of time, like there is with being "held back" in traditional schools or skipping a grade. Also, since you were promoted independently in different subjects, you could be in 3rd grade in reading but 5th grade in math. So, really, my "skipping" a grade was more like finishing first and second grades in one year and then starting a third grade at a traditional school the next year.
I would love to see more schools take this approach. Since your education is self-guided, it really instills a love of learning and an ownership of your education and people are able to mature and learn at whatever rate is natural. Also, the real world isn't age segregated -- I think students mature (in a good way) much more quickly in an environment where they are interacting with children of different ages. The experience did kind of mess me up for a number of years, though, because I had no patience for regular schools. That I attribute to the unstructured environment of the hippie school, however, instead of skipping a grade.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 12:57 PM
My nieces will be going to one of those unstructured hippy schools -- one is there already. Initial reports are excellent. An MD friend of mine graduated from there and says that the school had the best and the worst students in the city.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 1:02 PM
Now that sounds like a great idea for bright kids, although maybe a little rough for the less academically inclined.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 1:05 PM
That actually sounds a lot like my experience, Becks, only there was no movement between classes with different teachers (so there were a number of levels within a 3rd/4th class, for example, but you wouldn't see anyone leave that class for 5th or 2nd grade during the year).
The experience did kind of mess me up for a number of years, though, because I had no patience for regular schools. That I attribute to the unstructured environment of the hippie school, however, instead of skipping a grade.
I hadn't really thought of it that way, but this was probably true of me, too. I do remember thinking, every now and then, "Well, if things were like at my old school, I'd just go ahead and do the next few assignments now, but since there's no way to accelerate this class I'll go watch tv for a few hours." Such was my commitment to independent study.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 1:13 PM
Yeah, I really wonder how the unstructured, self-driven approach scales up. Would it work in inner cities? How does it handle uncooperative students? Would students ever become uncooperative if they always started and finished school in that environment? In other words, is it feasible for being the dominant pedagogical philosophy in our public school systems across the country? Or would it fail miserably once it had to face the real world?
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 1:49 PM
Unstructured mixed-age hippie schools = good, apparently (if it's done right) for both gifted and slow students. Mixing students of different abilities and ages gives smart kids a chance to learn by teaching, to develop social skills by helping, and to develop tolerance of kids with different abilities (whereas, in my anecdotal experience, separate "gifted" classes, especially if they're marked by clear race / class difference from the rest of the school population, create insufferable snobbery). Slower kids benefit from helping one another or younger children, which gives them a sense of mastery and competence they're too often denied, and often demonstrate gifts in other areas in which, if the school knows what it's doing, they can help the smart kids (social skills, arts, dance, phys ed, etc).
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 1:54 PM
In theory, I really like this unstructured, self-driven approach, but I wonder how well it would handle severe procrastinators like me. I tend to think that if I'd gone to such a school, I'd probably still be in 9th grade now.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 1:54 PM
The school in Portland, Oregon, is self-selected and by my guess educates one or two percent of the city's kids. It's a great option but isn't supposed to be a model for widespread use. It used to have a waiting list, but not now.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 2:10 PM
I skipped first grade and was pretty thoroughly miserable afterwards. I pretty much got taken apart like the kid in About A Boy for most of elementary school and was a total outcast in middle school. In high school things are a lot better. (I also loved CTY.) I might have been pretty unhappy without skipping, but I don't think I'd want a kid of mine to do it.
Posted by Ttam R. | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 2:58 PM
The age and size thing. I went to a weird private kindergarten that was at the top of a preschool, and then I went to a school that started in the 1st grade. There was some talk of holding me back, because I was so small, but my kindergarten teachers said, "no way, she'd be bored out of her mind if she had to repeat kindergarten."
What is this rejudice against little people. I'm still small, btw.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 3:04 PM
Wow. We really are a statistically improbable number of grade-skippers.
The unstructured school that I went to worked well for kids of all abilities for the reasons that B described but I'm not sure how well a school like that would scale given public school resources. The grades at this school only had between 6-15 students each so it wasn't too difficult to manage a class full of students each doing their own thing. I imagine it would be really difficult with a student-teacher ratio of 30-1, which I had in the traditional schools I attended.
As far as procrastination, it definitely was a problem, especially since they didn't require you to do a certain amount of each subject per day. If you decided you were just really into reading right now, you could do that and ignore your other subjects, as long as you showed progress in something each week. That was also a plus, though, because it allowed you to really immerse yourself into things that interested you. I think I spent 2 weeks where I did nothing but read about UFOs.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 3:15 PM
They wanted to skip me, but my mom refused. Does that count?
I was pretty bored until I went to private high school, which we can just call Geek Paradise Prep.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 3:22 PM
The trend now is to hold back kids before first grade or kindergarden. Kids born in the summer months are often held back. Even smart kids going to fancy elementary schools. Nobody wants their kid to be the youngest one in the class. The theory is that this will give them the best possible chance to get into a good college.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 3:33 PM
The trend now is to hold back kids before first grade or kindergarden.
I've read about this almost exclusively in reference to boys, some of whom apparently haven't quite developed the necessary attention span at entry age.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 3:36 PM
91, 92: My sister is about to hold her daughter back. My niece is a little young for her age, small, and inclined to give up and whine. It's the third that my sister is hoping the extra year will address, but I'm a little skeptical.
I mean, how much can a parent really hope to socially engineer a child?
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 3:46 PM
In some Midwest schools, there is also a very questionable practice of holding back academically-ready 8th grade boys who play football just so they'll be bigger when they join the High School team. That annoys me – it costs taxpayers how much per year to educate a student?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 3:53 PM
how much can a parent really hope to socially engineer a child?
I was about to give up on it, but ever since I put the wire monkey in Noah's cage, things have really been progressing apace.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 3:58 PM
My niece is a little young for her age
I'm so tall my feet touch the ground.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 4:00 PM
94--Apparently the cut-off birthday for sports is mid-summer, while the cut-off birthday for academic advancement varies between September and November. That doesn't really address your point about holding people back in the 8th grade, but perhaps it's involved.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 4:02 PM
96-- her grade, her grade.
Fuck.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 4:03 PM
wire monkey
Not cloth? How barbaric. Babies need the plushest monkey contact we can give them.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 4:04 PM
Apostropher, the monkey won't be effective unless needles come out and stab the child as soon as it starts to cuddle up. Don't be fooled by cheap, defective Chinese-made wire monkeys.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 4:13 PM
The trend now is to hold back kids before first grade or kindergarden.
My neighbors did that with their daughter, who as far as I could tell was neither dumb nor socially maladjusted -- rather the opposite in both respects. Her father told me semi-facetiously that he wanted her to be the biggest, toughest kid in her class.
I definitely started something here with my double-promotion reference. Unfogged commenters do seem to be a statistically anomalous bunch in that regard. I've never seen statistics on what percentage of people were double-promoted, but I think it was less than 0.5% in my school. Other kids knew about the few of us who had been double-promoted, and I was called "Brain" and "Professor" and such, which wasn't really a good thing. Titles like that don't exactly make one a chick magnet, for one thing. (But then when I went to high school, I joined the chess team, which really turns girls on. Not.)
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 4:14 PM
I was never promoted up a grade (got close but didn't) and I was always the school's icon of geekiness anyway. Just because my grades were so high and I had so much general knowledge. The acne didn't help.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 4:30 PM
I went to traditional public school for thirteen years. I think I'd have liked to have skipped. I probably could have graduated early from high school, but I stayed for four years and managed to graduate with 54 college credit hours.
In the case of good high schools, I think, the distinction between HS and college is not so clear: students who want to can advance themselves academically pretty easily without the cost and social transitions of actually going to a college.
Posted by L. | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 4:32 PM
Hey, L. Speaking of college - what's your plan? Are you going back to Tulane?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 4:35 PM
Yes, I'm going back to Tulane.
Posted by L. | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 4:37 PM
Good luck!
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 4:40 PM
The acne didn't help.
I still had fucking acne at the age of 40 or so, when I took Accutane for a year. No more acne. Accutane totally kicks ass (it's more problematic if one's female, since it's a teratogen).
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 4:53 PM
The school district where I went to kindergarten wanted to hold me back, because although I could read on a very high level, I had a tendency to finish the letter book assignments early and then figure there was no need to sit in the chair when there was a fort to construct from cardboard blocks.
Parents figured I was acting up because I was bored and told the school district they'd take their chances with moving me to first grade.
The school district in first grade offered, at the conclusion of the year, to skip me to third grade. Parents declined citing reasons like Lizardbreath's (dad had been skipped and hated it.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 4:53 PM
Thanks, Becks!
Posted by L. | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 5:05 PM
Love your story, Cala. Having a smart student so confuses the school district that they can't figure out whether to hold you back a year or double-promote you. Brilliant.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 5:26 PM
A special ed text I saw long ago listed thee types: deaf, blind, retarded, mentally ill, criminal, ESL, and gifted.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 5:46 PM
On confused schools: the same school who suggested I be double-promoted called in my parents for a conference because they didn't understand that skills develop separately. I was, like Cala, reading at a very high level, but I wrote ugly-like and with crappy spelling like all the other kids. My teacher was like "she doesn't write well!" and my mother apparently had to explain that just 'cause a kid is smart in one area doesn't mean they are smart in all of them. Before long, though, they had to call them in for other reasons, as I would fall asleep in class. No hyperactive child here, I guess.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 6:09 PM
In third grade I had the problem of not being able to keep my subtraction columns straight and so failed a number of little math quizzes while being perfectly capable of subtracting in my head.
Started doing homework on graph paper.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 6:31 PM
deaf, blind, retarded, mentally ill, criminal, ESL, and gifted
It's like they can look right into my soul!
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 6:43 PM
Someone upthread mentioned segregated "gifted" classes and their accompanying problems; this was definately an issue at my (public) high school. Overall, it was a very diverse school, but out of the 120 or so kids who took AP classes (in a class of ~400), there were precisely 3 black students, and a similar number of hispanics. I wouldn't say that it fostered a sense of superiority among the students in AP classes, but it did completely defeat the purpose of having a diverse school.
That said, my school was quite the geek paradise, so long as you took the upper level classes. Public school ain't all bad.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 6:52 PM
Matt F, my school was pretty much exactly like yours (except there weren't a lot of Hispanics in Pittsburgh). I wouldn't say it completely defeated the purpose of having an integrated school, but the race and class distinctions were notable.
As for geek paradise, there was an annual picnic called "nerdfest"--may be having a reunion this summer.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 7:10 PM
I don't think my high school had more than ten non-white students total. Wasn't a terribly rich area, just not terribly diverse.
About the hippy-everyone-in-one-classroom school; it sounds like a great idea, but not for everyone, because it seems to require very independent, motivated social students.
Get a group of 'slower' kids who expect the smart kids to do the work for them and a group of 'brighter' kids who don't have the patience to deal with the slow kids and you have... my sixth grade science class?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 7:28 PM
I also took accutane, but only for about four months. (It's been very mild since then.) Still, my acne was probably the worst in my class. I would have taken it another month but my hair was falling out (it became curly after the treatment, and has remained so) and I became incredibly moody and irritable and unfocused. But it cleared up my acne.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 8:12 PM
My high school was also much like Weiner's and Matt F.'s: ~70% Hispanic but very few black or Hispanic kids in the Honors and AP classes. It's a problem, to be sure, but I don't think it defeated the purpose of having a diverse school -- indeed, there wasn't any purpose to this school's diversity at all, it just happened to be that way because of the demographics of the area.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 8:43 PM
The trend now is to hold back kids before first grade or kindergarden.
This is a good idea, especially for summer birthdays and especially for certain boys. My mom teaches kindergarten (at a decidedly non-fancy school) and she often gets boys who are very young and have a lot of trouble understanding that school is for learning -- they're just there to play. They are often perfectly smart, they just haven't reached the right developmental stage to enter school. Boys who have been held back, on the other hand, are often among her top students.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 8:48 PM
I don't think it defeated the purpose of having a diverse school -- indeed, there wasn't any purpose to this school's diversity
Well, maybe "purpose" wasn't quite the right word, but diverse schools are generally held up as being closer to ideal than the more segregated schools are. However, when the students aren't interacting with each other except when bumping into each other in the hallways between classes, most of the benefit that could be gained from attending a diverse school seems like it would be lost.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 9:05 PM
Oh, I agree. This was why I chose to take a regular Government class my senior year instead of doing an online AP course like most of my friends. It was one of the best classes I ever took (although I didn't learn much).
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 01- 3-06 9:15 PM
My view of my schooling is that I pegged myself to others all the way along, always being bright but not the brightest. This was fine at good schools, but might not have been so fine if I'd gone to vocational school.
Posted by ming | Link to this comment | 01- 4-06 1:14 PM
#117: Actually the multi-age cooperative classroom (including in college) requires not super-motivated students, but a teacher who knows what she's doing. It's way different than just presenting the material (the teacher as delivery mechanism model). It requires the teacher to have skills in leadership and facilitation, in managing groups, and in helping students to see learning as a less passive activity than in the conventional classroom. I suspect that this is why it works very well for slower kids: it helps them begin to see themselves as active learners and problem solvers, rather than as just problem students.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01- 4-06 1:43 PM