I've got a room mate who was put ahead a grade in middle?late-elementary school and missed the whole foundation of algebra. They did so because he got straight A's so obviously he's smart enough; he could just skip that. (They promised to give him a text book so he could learn on his own that summer, but never got around to giving it to him.)
Of course, he started struggling in school the next year. Now math is one of his worst subjects. They completely screwed him over because they were distracted by his grades.
Skipping a grade means giving up a full year of education. If that proposition doesn't give you pause, you probably don't have enough respect for the value of education. Even if you you get absolutely nothing out of that year aside from the soft skills you develop by sitting in a class with other kids and listening to lectures and grinding through homework (even stupid and boring homework), it's still vastly more valuable than the fleeting ego boost you get in exchange when you sacrifice it in order to skip a grade. Parents, please, this is one marshmallow test[1] you and your kids really don't want to fail.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment
During elementary school, a friend and I got a hold of a Math review book meant for college-age folks who didn't really grok Math in High School. We enjoyed competing with each other in learning math, but it resulted in us going into 6th grade knowing everything we would be learning for the next three years. In Math alone. We were falling asleep in class, waking up at the end, and getting perfect-score-plus-bonus on every daily quiz.
We made the choice (not our parents, mind you) to try and skip a grade in Math alone. The school fought against us in this, and we eventually broke through, skipping two grades in math. Because our middle and high schools were next door to each other, we could walk across the street to take more advanced classes. The only downside was that I ran out of Math classes to take after my Sophomore year.
This isn't a brag. Far from it. All that this did was bring us into the level of math we were already prepared for, and which some private schools or wealthier schools already teach at that age-level, without skipping grades. I am grateful for the opportunity to not sit on my hands for two additional years, and to not be artificially disadvantaged by a system that moves too slow for the current standards of college preparation.
I have bumped up against the "Curse of the Gifted" in several places in life. I suspect I am hitting one right now in some aspects of how I produce software. But skipping two grades in lower-level Math was not one of them. In fact, it is now standard at my middle and high school, among the top students, to simply skip ahead at least one year in math. You end up with either more free time, more time for arts/personal pursuits, or more time to load up on AP sciences.
It is not a failed marshmallow test. It is a sign the curriculum is inadequate for the student's needs.
Maybe even in the more extreme case of a child skipping several grades altogether by himself, that's the best of a bad set of choices. But we shouldn't be offering only bad choices. At least in/near any decent size city, there should be a large enough population to create classes of a reasonable size of same age students at roughly the same level.
We actually ended up separated in our advanced math, and I was bullied heavily because I had to end up eating lunch with 8th graders while only being in 6th and 7th grade. It was socially sub-optimal and it sure wasn't rainbows and unicorns. However, I was already an outcast amongst my own grade level, so being an outcast amongst older kids wasn't much of a difference.
My point is that it was not intellectually hobbling, it did not set me up to feel a Curse of the Gifted in Math, nor did it teach me bad habits as the analogy with the marshmallow test would imply.
Why? There is great educational value in being in a class which has different levels.
If you are smarter: learning to help others, working together with people that are slower than you are, learning that usually intelligence is not one-dimensional and kids that are not very good at math might be great at writing…
If you are less smart the benefits are across the board. I remember reading a study about mixing kids from different incomes in the same school as opposed to wealth segregation (you might argue that smarts and wealth are not the same, but they are often highly correlated at least when starting out) and the conclusions were that there was no drawback for the rich kids, but huuuge advantages for the poorer.
the problem ended up being that i lost all my peers to study and eventually lost interest in the university. the result was that all my peers now have a ph.d and i struggled to get back in many years later to now write a master thesis...
I have absolutely no respect for the current educational system.
The grades kids usually skip are teaching 90% review every year, and skipping one just lets you get out of that worthless grind sooner. I've known multiple adults who skipped grades as kids, and all have said it was a good thing.
What can mess things up is throwing a kid into a group of older kids if they aren't socially prepared for it.
Stupid and boring homework is worthless. There's no point in defending it. Kids who have no assigned homework ever (in primary and secondary school [1]) can still grow up with a work ethic, a top college degree, and a great job. Heck, I know adults that were "unschooled" [2] as kids and who got exactly the jobs they wanted when they were ready.
Learning isn't something that should be restricted to school, hard or soft skills. You can develop way more soft skills interacting with others than you can being forced to sit still and not talk for hours at a time. What skill does the latter teach, exactly? I don't know why the constraints of school are celebrated when they should be condemned.
Can't agree more. -- someone who's happily skipped two grades at school (not in the US, mind you) and sometimes wishes he had skipped all twelve.
Fewer years of "writing/literature" could have weakened my writing skills, but I think that was primarily from my non-application due the incestuous lit-crit regurgitate-the-themes-the-teacher-says educational approach, and more of this certainly wouldn't have helped. I applied myself just fine when I was in technical classes in college and therefore had something real to write about.
Socially, I actually did better when being placed with the older kids. There was less Idiocracy-style jockeying for social position, or at least I just wasn't involved.
In science/math, most school years involved spending half of the year "reviewing" the previous year's material. My recollection of elementary arithmetic class is that you learn multiplication tables up to 6 one year, up to 10 the next, and up to 12 the next. For someone who gets it, will remember it, and just wants to move on, I'd say being held in these doldrums is more harmful than simply letting them go closer to their own pace.
Narratives are central to human identity. Particularly for young people who haven't yet developed the ability to reason in the abstract. If you want to create people who can follow, who can lead, who oppose tyranny, who oppose corruption, who believe in the ability to change the world, and who understand why they believe what they believe - narrative is the most powerful at your disposal.
Literature may be the only important subject at school. It teaches us about the use of the language we use in our every day interaction, and pushes the study of narratives about life. You guys who got bad literature teaching really missed out. You will have compensated for it somewhat through film and independent reading.
I value education, just not schooling, despite the attempts to equate the two.
>Parents, please, this is one marshmallow test you and your kids really don't want to fail.
Except that pushing yourself harder and earlier is analogous to waiting for the two marshmallows, not eating the one.
He started school a year ahead by being skipping Kindergarten. He progressively began testing out of math courses, and eventually took BC Calculus when he was in 9th grade. He then decided to skip tenth grade, but since he was already so far ahead in math, he really just had to test out of three courses -- English, Chemistry, and World History. He ended up graduating valedictorian, and he finished his undergrad in two years. He's now completing his masters in physics at Cambridge. He will likely do his Phd there as well.
Interestingly, he couldn't speak as a young child. But his father was able to teach him math, which he soaked up like a sponge. Most notably, his father instilled in him the importance of what my friend calls "the grind." He was taught that he couldn't be truly successful in mathematics unless he practiced hard, and this discipline has served him well to this day.
I think it hurt me socially a bit during high school, but I closed that gap very comfortably in college as well, so I really don't see any downside and think there was massive upside to completing my schooling 1 year early, essentially giving me one additional year of freedom as an adult.
In many ways, that's like getting an extra year of "life" (and specifically at age 21). What would you put as the fair value for that? For me, it's enormous.
My son goes to a Montessori school that has two different grades in each class, so you hear not just the stuff for your grade, but also for the next (or previous) one. I think that's a perfect environment for skipping grades, because you get to condense two years into one.
(A rough hack around not being able to skip a grade (if the institution is inflexible) is to supplement the school's curriculum with textbooks from other countries. China and Russia both have textbooks with harder problem sets for the same topics, which are great prep material if you've joined, say, a math team. What makes me sad is, that's their regular material for the same age group, not some super-advanced track.)
And gods forbid, the day comes when the kid who's held back by not skipping a grade goes to college and finds that their new peers had gotten more advanced material in their other schools while they themselves whiled away their years being inadequately challenged. And they're now hopelessly behind, or at least have to paddle that much harder just to keep up. There is no purpose to holding a kid back against their will. If my parents stopped me from skipping a grade, it would only have been punishment for doing nothing wrong. And I would have fought them tooth and nail.
I wanted to skip my senior year in high school as well, but my parents wouldn't let me. I have to say that I'm glad they didn't. I actually enjoyed that year a lot. One of my favorite classes was a humanities course that was rather unique. We had a team of teachers and would study the music, art, literature, and history from a period in time and gradually marched our way forward. It was great! Also, in college, the only humanities course that I took was science fiction, so if I hadn't taken that course, I would have missed out on a lot!
At least for me, skipping grades isn't about an "ego boost" it's about time. It's the same thing with AP courses--some people say that they aren't equal to college courses, but if you take them, pass, and the school accepts them, then it saves you an incredible amount of time.
In my case, I just studied at regular speed at school, and at home my older brother kept me up on what he learned about the topics that interested me (math & science). During regular school classes I enjoyed the ability to re-think about the stuff I already knew, and the extra time I didn't need to devote to them was time I did spend thinking and experimenting with other subjects like philosophy, writing, or computers and videogame development (I designed, drew, encoded and compressed the maps for our first two commercial games all by hand during class - but this was back in the 8 bit days).
I think the chance to experiment and pursue my interests without pressure or obligation was incredibly valuable.
The reasons skipping that grade was good: I avoided a poor teacher, whom I would not have gotten along well with. Part of the reason for me skipping a grade was that the disparity in reading levels was actually detrimental to the class, because of the diversion of the teacher's resources. Second reason is that I have an early birthday, so I was never tooo far behind my peers in the next grade, and in fact I felt much more comfortable in that situation and made friends better.
Just for an alternate perspective!
I suppose it can have an impact on socialization, but it still seems like a good trade if you gain a year of your life. I made the trade once the normal way and twice more by starting college early. Stuff was hard, but I can't imagine boring myself to death for three extra years in a town isolated from civilization would have been better.
But I was one of the oldest in my grade (so I was still sorta in the right age band), and it was the second grade (so our social structures weren't all that well-developed).
Education doesn't stop with schooling.
So, for calculus, I just got a good book and dug in. So, yes, first I did the chapters on analytic geometry, i.e., the conic sections -- hyperbolas, parabolas, ellipses -- and then one with calculus. For my next year, my brother was out of the good, private college, so I transferred in as a sophomore and hopeful math major. So, I started with their sophomore calculus. Did fine. Wrote my honors paper in math and got 800 on my GRE Math knowledge test.
But, right, I 'skipped' freshman calculus, never took it! Didn't get credit for it, either.
In grad school, there was an advanced course in linear algebra. I'd never had a course in linear algebra but still told the faculty that I didn't need that course. They said, with a patronizing smile, "Take it anyway.".
Okay. I blew away all the other students with by wide margins the highest scores on homework, tests, and midterm and final exams. Prof wrote, "Best performance in the class. Knows this material cold.". Yup. I told them so! Heck, I'd wanted to study optimal control theory, not waste time with linear algebra. How'd I do that? That is, essentially 'skip' a first, and, really, an advanced, second course in linear algebra? Easy? I already knew the material from independent study of a stack of books, including some of the best, especially Halmos, 'Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces'. But in total it was a big stack. How? Why? A long list of various projects in school and in my career in physics, signal processing, applied math, numerical analysis, multivariate statistics, and more along with some careful independent study.
Lesson: Independent study can work fine. Then can 'skip' about whatever you want, at least in math.
Really, guys, what the heck do you think a research prof or any researcher does? Actually know all that stuff just from sitting in classes in school? Heck no! Instead they learn, from texts, papers, seminars, etc. Actually, if need to know something and can get a good text, then usually can get good understanding of just what need from that text for less than 10% of the effort that would be required if had to learn the text well enough to get an A on all of it. Net, independent study is crucial.
I was gifted. I ran through years, absent-mindedly attending courses, handwaving tests and scoring incredible marks. The best thing that happened to me is getting into prépa[0]. They make you hit the wall on purpose. The jump from the previous years is purposely high. The only way to get through it is to snap yourself out of your gift/boredom/ego vicious circle and start to learn to discipline yourself. Only by surrendering your gift and unlearning what you know can you build a solid foundation and make your talent truly shine.
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classe_pr%C3%A9paratoire_aux_gr...
Although this may be just deflecting the blame, I do think that the educational system in the US by and large poorly serves gifted children. The underlying notion seems to be that gifted children are already ahead of the game and so don't deserve any special attention. Another piece of the puzzle is grading-as-certification rather than grading-as-progress report or some other scheme. Straight As can mask a lot of problems.