No one I knew in either pre-k through high school OR college had been skipped to my knowledge. In our neck of the woods, grade-skips were as rare as hen's teeth. In fact, despite an active gifted support/enrichment group that my mom created from scratch--so I knew pretty much every GT kid in our large town/small city!--I was the only person I know of who was even subject accelerated out of the regular classroom. Beyond that, GT kids were handled solely through clustering and differentiation.
One other thing that Questions brought up that I think is interesting is the similarity of opinion on this forum. Not always the case, but does happen often enough to make me wonder. For instance, does it occur because of shared experience or because people are drawn to a forum where they see others who share their views?
FWIW, it seems to me to be shared experience. I have been struck by how "weird" my experience with our DS6's schools seems to be in the "real" world, but how absolutely normal we seem here on this forum.
Of course, we forum-users are a self-selecting group, but I think the people here are accepting enough of differing views and experiences that we're not chasing away people who might have a different perspective. Witness ACS and E&CMom...and even me, really, since I came here quite scared of grade-skipping, though fearing that it was something we might *have* to do, whether I wanted DS6 to do it or not. I still have some concerns about it: sports participation (football) being my main one. But I feel like I've gotten a pretty balanced view of skipping from this forum, and I see it as a more viable option now than I did when I came here.
Here's an alternative: perhaps being able to see the joint experiences of a fairly large group of GT kids, certainly much larger than we'd see in the "wild" of our hometowns, has led us all to similar conclusions, rather than indicating that we all started at the same spot?
Just a thought...
Oh, and go get 'em, Mia!
