though he mastered

other day i was reading in this forum somebody put their kid in 7th grade when he is 7!
Once you 'settle' your whole life you will doing same thing over and over again... do not get me wrong even the best scientists in the world too (just an example) do the same thing in the whole life, working on one topic...

my point is why to put a child 2-3 grades higher and push (push and push) him/her in to more challenging stuff.. when rest of the life all you do is what you have done previous day

i am not commenting on particularly person or thread( sorry if I ...) and I am just expressing one view....my point is reading/ writing or doing math is just one small part of life..one uses may be 5 % or less of what he/she learnt....

just think about it and comment

Because your child cries every day afterschool because of the mind-numbing boredom?

That would just be number 1 on my list.

Cat

Keeping a child in school at a grade level that he's already mastered:
(1) may prevent the child from ever learn how to face difficult intellectual challenges, i.e., learn how to use his brain
(2) may be excruciatingly boring (like prison?)
(3) may kill the desire to learn

In other words, holding back a child who is capable may be worse than a complete waste of time, it's a waste of a mind. Why should all those hours and that beautiful brain be simply wasted?

The need for challenge is about preventing [potential life-long] underachievement. To quote one of my favorite passages from the GDC website:

(bold mine; http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/About_GDC/whytest.htm )

It is not necessarily true that once grown up, a person will do the same thing over and over again without intellectual stimulation. Or that a person uses only a small percentage of what they learned. That depends entirely on the career in question!!! There are quite a few intellectual careers. When I was a lawyer, nearly every day presented some amount of intellectual challenge, often a very significant amount. (And harking back to an older thread of yours, keep in mind that some of the more intellectually challenging careers pay very well.)

I feel it is my job as a parent to see to it that my children develop their brains to their fullest potential, at least until they're adults and can make their own decisions. I may not achieve my goal, but that's my goal, I'm going to try. That's my two cents

And now your turn - why should a child, who is more capable than others, be limited to learning only what "average" kids are capable of learning at a given point in time?

I have a boring, repetitive job. That's why they pay me. If it was fun and challenging and stimulating I'd have to pay them.

My tax dollars are paying for my children's education. When the school starts paying me to send them, I'll no longer complaint about inappropriate placement.

Agree with snowgirl. Not every job is boring and repetitive. I am a independent project manager, and while there are occasional boring days, generally my job has lots of variety and challenge (some days I'd like a little less challenge, though ). One reason I have this job is because I would jump out the window if I had a boring, repetitive job. My kid feels the same way about school. Her mind runs at a high idle (like mine, I think), and nothing makes her crazier than having nothing to do or having to spend time repeating stuff she already knows.

"My brain hurts when I am not learning anything."

I'm a scientist, and I wouldn't say that this statement is true for me or other scientists I know. Yes, I have to repeat experiments again and again to ensure that results are valid. But this isn't the same as doing the same exact thing forever (or even for five years).

Some people choose to work on the same disease or general question for a very long time. But:

1) it's their choice

2) they don't do the exact same thing on the same topic the whole time.


In the case of my kids, no one pushed them. Grade skips were natural things. If my daughter had been forced to go to kindergarten, she would have gone mad with boredom and the too-easy work would have damaged her. She got extra acceleration in reading/spelling/science because, again, even the +1 subjects were too easy for her.

School should be about a proper learning environment, not about doing the same thing everyone else does.

Val

Because grades are an arbitrary construct designed by a system for ease of processing paperwork? They have nothing to do with what children are capable of and when.

Having skipped grades and believing in them, I now have a daughter, whose birthday is late and is therefore one of the youngest in the class. I am working on accelerating her math but see that there are other ways, the grade level works. They start chess and Spanish in K, so she is catching up since she started in the school in grade 1.

She can do her weekly book reports on books she chooses, so she doesn't have to do it on grade level. I have found ways to boost her science with extra curricular.

What I do find, is that she is learning social skills. She does gravitate to kids in grade 2 at recess sometimes but there are all kinds of social things she seems to be learning with her classmates. Little social cues and relationship things that you sort of take for granted but happen at this age when you go to school with kids day in and day out.

So yes, the math has to be accelerated, otherwise she would be bonkers. And I can provide her with other things like science, piano and mandarin outside of school, which helps but school is not just about rote learning.

Yes, she does relate to older kids but it isn't the same and what she learns with her peers. I am probably not explaining well but it is a bunch of little things/

I skipped with a few peers and I like skipping grades with peers. I am not so fond of skipping grades without peers. There I find I lean towards pullouts.

Ren

Count me as another person with a job (academic) which is practically never boring. Indeed, my choice of job has been somewhat limited by my total inability to tolerate boredom. I have post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in boring half day training courses (which I have to do on average once every 5 years)! I sometimes think that if I hadn't had to endure so much boredom at school, I might be less emotionally scarred by it, be more able to tolerate some boredom as an adult, and have a wider choice of career open to me! I'm not complaining for myself, it's worked out OK, but I absolutely will not make my DS go through what I went through at school.

Why do you assume that WE are pushing THEM? The pushing is getting the school to let the kid learn something besides how to coast. The pushing is the kid coming home crying from boredom because everything in class is stuff he learned when he was three, wanting something new to learn. I haven't seen anyone in these forums who is doing anything but being pulled by their children.

Leave the mindless tedium jobs for the kids who don't want to learn and do new things. Our kids will never settle for that.

...because mine isn't being pushed pushed pushed. It's the right level of work that is interesting and fun for him. I wouldn't want to be stuck for 6 hours a day reading the same book over and over and over, and being stuck doing busywork when you've already mastered all of the material can feel just like that.

I do sympathize if anyone truly feels like they lead a boring life as adults. The world is filled with exciting challenges if you seek them out. Even if you have to work in a monotonous job, find a hobby, study a language, or read a book! Nobody makes us take a robotic path, and that is why IMO we shouldn't make our children take one, either.

Maybe it's what the kid wanted to do and what the parents thought was best as well. Maybe some kids like talking about things that older kids are learning about. Then where would they fit in better? In a classroom of students with common interests and talent, or in a classroom based on their Chinese Zodiac sign?
There is the quiestion of what to do when they graduate but are still too young to work. Travel? Video games? Can't drive to the mall. Oh well, everyone's life is complicated. That's life.

I think the case of a college or even HS graduate being too young to work would be very unusual. Even a 12 year old could make stuff and sell it on ebay. Or teach siblings. Or mow lawns. Or be a mother's helper. It might not be stimulating, but that brings me back to the point I tried to make earlier in the thread - there's a big difference between being forced to do work that is pointless and boring when you are supposed to be receiving a service, and doing something boring but valued by someone else.

Yeah Jane, I really liked that point you made about the school system being hired to be there to provide a service to us. I even clipped it and texted my husband at work yesterday.

There is a saying, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results." I'd say for a gifted, self-motivated child, the defintion of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, already knowing the results will never change.

I have dual careers, farming(raising cattle specifically) and software engineer with database design. Farming is the least boring because there is so much to learn about genetics. In computers, if you're good, you tend to get pigeon-holed into one job where you become the guru. Being a guru helps other people learn, but at a certain level of knowledge I have to branch out into another area or I'll go insane. So, I know several programming languages on multiple platforms, supporting multiple applications for multiple systems.
In school, I was a genuine pain in the neck. I had to accept I would be doing the same thing everyone else did, but I added my own touch. That didn't go over well for many teachers!

I would have had to have been radically accelerated in school if I was placed accurately. Maybe that path would have led to me studying cattle genetics in a lab instead of in the field. Or maybe someday I'll combine my computer skills with the data available from our breed association and find what combination of genetics has the highest chance of producing certain characteristics.

The bottom line is you have to make the best decision you can for your own child. There are no guarantees how any decision will turn out. But the most important thing is for the child to know you truly love them.

...One of many...My DS10, with tears streaming down his face, "My brain is a wilting flower" ... As a parent, how can you NOT do something?

When we told our DS that he might be able to skip first grade, he thought it was a great idea from the get-go. Now that he's in 2nd at age 6, he fits in perfectly, but is still a bit underchallenged. In fact, he occasionally tells us he thinks he'll skip 3rd grade too...

I don't want my DS6 to never to learn from failure --perseverance -- if he doesn't know immediately how to do something. Most other kids get the opportunity to learn that. We have not pushed our DS; we have tried to find the right fit for him so he can learn at his readiness level. We would love for our DS to learn alongside agemates who are at his intellectual level, but that will not happen unless we move, and may not happen even if we do move. So, for us, for now, acceleration is the best we can do for our DS.

LOL our boys are about the same age. Mine is skipped into 3rd at 7. He often says very flippantly "Well 2nd grade was harder but 3rd is super easy, let's check out 4th!" As if it were really that easy for us to get him into 2nd in the first place last year!

Funny! I think a smorgasbord approach to school would be awesome! Oh wait - they had this once, back in the day of the one-room school house.

DS6 skipped K, was in first last year, and is in 2nd with math acceleration this year, but says what he'd really like to do is skip every other year of school! The principal thinks that's hilarious, but it really shows him that WE are not pushing and that DS just likes to be challenged and move more quickly.