Other people's academic redshirting was what started our big problem with the K teacher this year! My DS started K at 5 with an April birthday and was a normal (though HG), wiggly 5 year old boy. His teacher within 2 days wanted to know if we were sure he was ready for K and wanted him evaluated for fine-motor disabilities. I assured her that he is just 5 and that he'll come along. She insisted that he go see an OT. Sure enough- he's "normal" for fine motor. It just happens that he is the ONLY boy in her entire class (and for the last 5 years she said) who started K not either already or almost 6.
My son's Kindergarten experience was similar. He was 5 with a May birthday and one of the youngest in the class. Academic red shirting is very popular here and most of the boys in my son's class were a year older than my son. None of the other kids were reading or doing math at the beginning of the Kindergarten year. It didn't matter that my son was reading at a 5th grade level and able to do some multiplication and division and had made up his own way of doing subtraction with negative numbers. All the teacher cared about was that he couldn't color in the lines. He wanted to learn and they wanted him to color. He told me that school was not very educational.
I was told that I needed to homeschool my son. I can't put my son back in public school because they still list crayons on their 6th grade supplies list at the beginning of the school year and my sons friends tell me that they still make kids color in 6th grade and it better be in the lines.
