As for adolescent talk, I've actually heard dumber excuses from a teaching professional, who bewilderingly worried about DD's mental state if her classmates grew breasts before her.
OK, I just laughed out loud at this! WOW! When this teacher talked to me this morning about "adolescent talk" - she said, "you know some of them might know a little bit about the birds and bees".
I agree that the worries over kids developing breasts or having knowledge of the birds and bees aren't reasons to think through the age difference, but there are things that I would think through re the age split, based both on what other parents I know have experienced with this particular set of age combinations as well as what I have seen in my own children's classes and based on what we're living through with a 6th grader who was a 5th grade girl last year. Please know, none of this would stop me from placing my 2nd grader in a 5th grade math class for one period a day - I would just want to be aware of it going in. I think the potential issues that could arise would be much more likely to occur in a topic-driven discussion based class like social studies, for example, where kids were spending less time listening to having a lesson explained followed by working on math problems. (OTOH, this is EM, so um, all bets are off - it might all be project-based and all about teams working together lol... ooops... I'm diverging....) Anyway, back to the topic, a class of 5th graders is going to have some kids who are going through puberty or who are on the verge. Puberty isn't all about growing breasts - it's a lot about changes in hormones, changes in what kids are thinking about and find fun to talk about etc. So there can be a lot of *emotion* that comes into the classroom.
Re the teacher's concern about writing demands and EM, in our school district EM required a *ton* of explain your work as well as "do this problem three different ways and explain all of them". While I would have no concerns about sending my child to an upper-grade classroom to be appropriately challenged in math, I'm not entirely sure it's worth the time with an EM math or similar curriculum, and especially if your ds will be at this same school again next year and still unable to attend a higher-than-5th grade level math class. When you look past 5th grade math in 2nd grade, what happens in 3rd grade? Is he eventually going to have to be doing independent math study during the school day? If so, would it be better just to go there now?
polarbear
